How Virtualization is Used by Nasdaq, Bowmicro, Nilkamal, Isala, University of Pisa, and AeC: Case Studies

Virtualization is a method by which hardware or software resources are divided, allowing for multiple, isolated environments. Most often used for operating systems, virtualization allows for better utilization, agility, and scalability of IT resources, while reducing upfront operating costs.

Review the following six case studies to see how a variety of organizations from different industries are using virtualization to support their IT strategies:

1. Nilkamal

Nilkamal is a leader in the manufacturing industry, with a portfolio of products that include ready furniture, lifestyle home solutions, mattresses, and more. Though Nilkamal has headquarters in Mumbai, they have eight manufacturing plants, 42 depots, 1,100 distributors, 20,000 dealers, and 80 stores.

Ensuring the operations communicate and operate successfully, particularly with the added remote worker stresses introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, led Nilkamal to choose Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for secure and remote access to their business-critical applications and data.

“As a fast-growing company with highly diversified operations, it was imperative to enable our employees with the ability to access SAP from across different locations, including from non-office locations while traveling,” said Karan Doshi, head of IT and strategy for Nilkamal.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops gave immediate, secure, and seamless access to Nilkamal’s mission-critical applications. Built using a zero-trust security model and with the ability to run using low bandwidth, Citrix’s virtualization solution meets Nilkamal’s current requirements with the promise of scaling to meet future demands.

Industry: Manufacturing and retail

Virtualization Solution: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Outcomes:

• Secure access to mission-critical applications is available from anywhere.
• The solution improved employee productivity.
• Business continuity is maintained for remote workforce.

2. Nasdaq

With a solid reputation as a leading provider of trading, clearing, exchange technology, listing, information, and public company services, Nasdaq looked to virtualization when they needed higher performance, more agility, and scalability.

Though the requirements for higher performance, faster provisioning, and ease of management were important to Nasdaq, their decision to look to Nutanix AHV meant not having to compromise on their stringent security needs.

“Nutanix AHV is one of the most solid infrastructure and virtualization technologies I have seen,” explained Jake Yang, senior director of global systems and storage at Nasdaq. “It provides all of the performance and back-end infrastructure management we need, and it’s very cost effective compared to the other virtualized infrastructure solutions.”

Industry: Financial services

Virtualization Solution: Nutanix AHV

Outcomes:

• Less time is required to provision new storage and computing resources.
• There was a 100% improvement in query performance time.
• Index performance was improved by 100% for handling events and 200% in responsiveness.
• There was a 2–3x improvement in search performance.
• The server footprint was reduced by 40%.
• The solution offered a 25% lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

3. Isala

Isala is one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands, serving over 800,000 residents from five campuses located across the Northern interior of the country. While modernizing their IT infrastructure with a new electronic medical records (EMR) system, Isala needed the infrastructure to support the need for 24/7 access to important applications and data.

Building on their existing relationship with HPE, Isala is now using the HPE Synergy environment to support 70% of their virtual desktops. Since migrating to HPE Synergy, Isala has seen their performance problems disappear with outstanding reliability.

“HPE Synergy gives us more flexibility with less hassle to manage,” said Jos Minnema, infrastructure architect at Isala. “The composable architecture will allow us to add resources without downtime. That’s what we need to take us into the future.”

Industry: Health care

Virtualization Solution: HPE Synergy

Outcomes:

• The solution reduced annual support and maintenance costs by 50%.
• Fewer engineering hours are needed to troubleshoot and resolve performance issues.
• Redundancy helps avoid downtime.
• Applications and records are highly available.

4. University of Pisa

Since 1343, the University of Pisa has been an established institution of learning and scientific research. Supporting scientific leadership across 20 academic departments is a responsibility that relies on high-performance computing power and scalable storage capacity.

To improve asset utilization and make infrastructure easier to deploy, manage, and change, the University of Pisa added the VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure environment.

Citing the flexibility of VMware to easily support regular computing as well as high performance computing, the University of Pisa also uses their virtual desktop infrastructure environments to easily migrate workloads and access virtual storage solutions across several data centers.

“From a software quality point of view, the VMware virtualization environment is the best on the market,” asserted Maurizio Davini, chief technology officer for the University of Pisa. “The quality of software is unbelievable. We have done comparisons. If you can afford it, it is the best.”

Industry: Research and education

Virtualization Solution: VMware vSphere Virtualization Software

Outcomes:

• Support is available for remote workstations and workers.
• High-performance computing meets the variable needs of laboratories, administrative offices, radiology labs, and other university departments and units.
• Applications are delivered to end users using a single platform that is easy to control, manage, and protect.

5. Bowmicro

Bowmicro is a leading IT service provider and software company that provides managed data center cloud solutions and professional services in China. Frequently servicing organizations that have budget and resource limitations, Bowmicro turned to Oracle VM to help create an affordable solutions portfolio.

Bowmicro uses Oracle VM to better support their customers by making it easy to grow or reduce capacity and power as needed, while also addressing and resolving technical issues quickly. Regardless of size, all customers get an isolated and dedicated, highly available infrastructure that also ensures data privacy.

“Oracle Linux and Virtualization provide the backbone for our cloud offerings,” said Suping Dong, president and founder of Bowmicro Ltd. “These solutions have optimized our workloads and have minimized operational costs while providing maximum system performance across the stack.”

Industry: IT service provider and IT software development

Virtualization Solution: Oracle VM

Outcomes:

• The solution is a highly secure and available IT architecture.
• There is a lower TCO.

6. AeC

AeC provides contact center services in Brazil to over 25,000 professionals serving industries that include energy suppliers, telecommunications giants, and healthcare providers. When the COVID-19 pandemic required AeC to pivot to supporting a remote workforce, the company decided to adopt Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Azure.

Windows Virtual Desktop assists AeC with hundreds of corporate customers that each require their own virtual machine to ensure high performance, data privacy, and regulatory compliance. After an initial proof-of-concept pilot, AeC went from using 100 virtual machines to requiring over 2,500.

Industry: IT service provider

Virtualization Solution: Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Azure

Outcomes:

• The solution increased the speed to deploy new services for clients.
• There was a significant reduction in operating costs, saving 30% compared to purchasing traditional desktops.
• Employee satisfaction increased.