Nutanix a leader in private, hybrid and multicloud computing, has announced that Serbian energy giant NIS (Naftna Industrija Srbije) has chosen Nutanix to meet the IT demands of the fast-paced, often volatile, energy markets. Additionally, they have implemented Nutanix to simplify IT management and provide a more scalable and agile platform for future developments.

Nutanix Cloud Deployment Delivers Agility, Scalability, and Simplified Operations

Like many energy companies across the globe, NIS is involved in a diverse range of activities, from oil and gas exploration, refining and distribution to, more recently, the development of electrical and thermal energy from a mix of traditional and renewable sources. However, progressing and managing those businesses in an era of rapid change was putting increasing strains on its legacy infrastructure. These strains limited the company’s ability to cope with day-to-day demand and prevented it from moving the business forward to stay ahead of the competition.

“Rather than an asset, our legacy IT infrastructure was becoming a liability, restricting our ability to keep pace with market pressures and take advantage of new opportunities,” said Dimitry Shevchenko, CIO of NIS. “Like others in our sector, we needed to modernize and do so quickly, moving to a more agile software-defined architecture. For us, that meant hyperconverged infrastructure and, with Nutanix as the clear market leader, it was our obvious first choice.”

One of the biggest integrated energy companies in SouthEast Europe, NIS (Naftna Industrija Srbije) Gazprom Neft is a key player in a wide range of fast paced, often volatile, markets. Everything from oil and gas exploration, through to petrochemical refining, distribution and sales, as well as electricity production.

However, supporting and managing those businesses in an era of rapid geopolitical and environmental change, was putting increasing strains on its ageing legacy IT infrastructure. Strains which were limiting both the company’s ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand and move forward to take full advantage of new developments. As CIO of NIS, Gazprom Neft, Dimitry Shevchenko, explains:

“Rather than an asset, our IT infrastructure was fast becoming a liability. Most of the workloads had been virtualised, but these were spread across over a hundred plus servers, from a number of vendors. The end result was not only low levels of performance plus ongoing reliability and availability issues, but a real lack of business flexibility compared to more agile competitors in our core markets.”

Since moving to Nutanix, NIS has seen an approximately 50% performance improvement across its application base and, with Nutanix in its datacenters, they no longer suffer from the constraints imposed by end-of-life servers and network storage. Additionally, the team is able to manage everything from the same Nutanix Prism interface to keep on top of demand, deliver more agile solutions, and trial the latest Nutanix features in support of innovative new projects going forward.  

NIS also selected Nutanix Calm to add application-centric automation tools as well as native application orchestration and lifecycle management to the Nutanix cloud platform. This enables NIS to build self-service portals and automate key business processes, significantly simplifying day-to-day operations for the IT team.

“Simple management is fundamental in everything that Nutanix has to offer,” said Andrew Brinded, VP & GM of EMEA, Nutanix. “From being able to manage physical and virtual IT assets together from the same Prism console integrated into the Nutanix cloud platform to tools, like Nutanix Calm, that allow customers to automate business processes and build more intuitive hands-off IT solutions. These solutions can free up staff to work on projects of real value to the business rather than simply fire fighting to keep the datacenter lights on.”

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the new infrastructure at NIS was installed and commissioned in record time with help from both Nutanix and local partner S&T Serbia. In addition to migrating workloads to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, NIS plans to host new SAP HANA development and adopt the latest cloud native container technologies, which will be made easier using Nutanix Karbon, an enterprise Kubernetes management solution designed to dramatically simplify container provisioning, operation, and lifecycle management.

For more information about the NIS deployment, read the full case study here.