Nutanix delivers big cloud payout for global online gaming developer CodeForté

Rowen Grierson, Sales Director at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in private, hybrid and multicloud computing, announced today that CodeForté, a Cape Town-based online software solutions company, has modernised its local private cloud environment with Nutanix. This has equipped the business with a robust infrastructure capable of scaling globally and delivering solutions for customers as far afield as Canada and New Zealand. 

CodeForté is the software division of an international group of companies in the online gaming business operating several online casinos worldwide. The company builds games, websites, back-office tools, gaming engines, APIs and everything required to run and operate an online gaming business. Working in such a distributed environment meant the company could not always manage the hardware at the onsite data centres itself. CodeForté often had to rely on personnel stationed at the data centre to do it on their behalf. This limited the company’s ability to scale and meet growing customer demand.

Barend Mare, IT manager at CodeForté, identified the cloud as the best way to get the consistency needed across all its sites. Following an extensive investigation into how best to modernise its ageing virtualisation solution running on the 10 servers at its Cape Town head office, CodeForté decided on the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform.

“Because of the nature of our business, we manage data centres across multiple locations such as Guernsey, Curaçao. After working with the local Nutanix team, we defined what we were looking for and it was full steam ahead. The entire environment arrived here in one box with just four nodes, and the set-up was effortless. It was easier than anything I had worked on in the past. My VSAN environment would take a week to configure, whereas this was completely seamless and I have been happy from the start,” said Mare.

Such has its success been that the Nutanix environment has become central to the private cloud environment of CodeForté. It is here where the company houses the database-dependent web servers of its clients' online gaming environment and its day-to-day servers, front-facing web servers, e-mail servers and game servers, to name a few. Predominantly a mirrored image of its live environments, the local data centre also contains its active directory servers and hosts its Kubernetes microservices stack – currently managed through the Kubernetes management platform Rancher.

CodeForté now runs four Nutanix NX 3060-G7 nodes coupled with its native AHV virtualisation software and has plans to extend its use of the Prism management software in the future.

"The level of service I received from Nutanix was simply amazing. From the sales discussions with the team to its systems engineers giving me access to their private labs to test and play with the solution before buying, it was incredible."

Mare said the CodeForté team got the Nutanix environment up in seconds, something that would not have been possible if it had merely upgraded its ageing VMware environment. The overall performance is as good as any of its global data centres for a much lower cost.

"One of the biggest benefits to us has been how easy it is for anyone else in the technical team to learn how to use it. Personally, its ease of use is the best thing about Nutanix. This includes updating the environment and its overall manageability. If we were to update our VMware stack, it would take almost four days to pull it over and work on it. It was a very manual process. With Nutanix, it is all automated. It is a click of a button and it does it all itself," said Mare.

Based on the success of the deployment and the cost savings of the investments made into Nutanix, Mare and his team are currently working on migrating its private cloud in Guernsey to a complete Nutanix environment.

“Ultimately, managing environments takes time, which we do not always have. So, the less time we must spend fixing, building or managing something, the better. My entire team faced these issues daily. This is a problem I no longer face thanks to Nutanix,” said Mare.

Rowen Grierson, Sales Director at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa, said: "With Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform, we are furthering our vision of delivering an enterprise cloud platform through a full-stack cloud service that includes compute, storage, virtualisation, networking and end-to-end data centre management and operations. The work done at CodeForté reflects how important it is to reduce IT complexity and equip our customers with innovative solutions that help them further their business goals.”

CodeForté used long-time partner Pinnacle, its partner Softcat and the Nutanix team in Cape Town to assist with the implementation.