VWannabe

My work life as an IT specialist has always been quite varied.

I spent part of my time installing traditional datacenter infrastructure, some of my time implementing cybersecurity solutions, and bits and pieces here and there, working on projects with a number of different technology vendors.

But over the past 18 months, my main focus has been: migrate customers’ virtualization environments to Nutanix.

The timing lines up with some big shakeups in the tech industry, as well as the continued growth of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). I heard my customers worry that support quality would decline for their existing environments, or that innovation might stall. In reality, what my customers have mostly seen is severe sticker shock on their renewal bills—partly due to inflation that has hit all sectors, but also due to dramatic changes to vendor licensing agreements. 

Some customers have seen 3x, 5x, or even 10x increases in their virtualization costs, practically overnight. These are customers that have been with a vendor for 15 or 20 years, in many cases, and many had come to view their virtualization environments as something of a commodity with a stable pricing structure. But changes to licensing agreements have upended this stability. Before, customers could mostly purchase individual product licenses as needed, but they’re now being funneled into bundled packages with add-on features they don’t want and can’t use.

Some large enterprises are able to absorb these new costs. But for others—especially small and medium-sized companies—the impact to their business is comparable to tripling their rent, or adding a zero to their monthly utility bills. These smaller customers also find themselves in a poor negotiating position with tech giants. 

For example, we recently worked with Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia to migrate to Nutanix. The district was facing an eye-popping 680% cost increase if it stayed with its previous provider, but a five-year licensing agreement saved it approximately $2 million.

For customers like Norfolk Public School, the numbers of the new virtualization landscape simply don’t add up. And for the first time, many of these organizations are willing to seriously consider a change.

Even non-technical people can understand the anxiety that comes with switching technology platforms. (Think of how rarely people change to a phone with a different operating system.) Most of my customers never even considered switching from their existing virtualization provider until recently. After all, virtualization is a foundational technology that supports their entire business. Many system administrators have built their careers and expertise around the environment they know, developed their own workflows around its interface and capabilities, and integrated their entire application environment with that platform.

Most importantly, businesses have come to rely on the stability of their virtualization environments to keep their mission-critical systems up and running. So, it’s understandable why many approach a change with a degree of trepidation. They want to know whether their applications will work the same way, how much downtime to expect, and whether their teams will need extensive retraining.

However, once customers make the move, they tend to find that Nutanix infrastructure provides everything they need—and often in a more intuitive way, at what essentially amounts to what they were paying before the market shifts of the past couple off years. During the pre-sales process, I sit with customers to walk them through the Nutanix interface. We spend much of this time exploring the equivalent functionality between the platforms, which is often mostly a matter of learning new terminology for familiar features.

At Norfolk Public Schools, we conducted site assessments, installed and configured new hardware, configured the Nutanix platform, and migrated more than 400 virtual machines—all in just over a month. The cutover to the new operating environment was seamless, and the district saw immediate improvements in performance and reliability.

For most organizations, the migration is just as painless. Some clients prefer to migrate in small batches of just a few virtual machines, while others are ready to move hundreds of virtual machines over a single weekend. The actual cutover process for each virtual machine takes only about five to ten minutes—comparable to the standard maintenance window for most security patches. Post-migration, customers typically notice improved performance (mostly due to new hardware). In addition to the cost savings, many also cite Nutanix’s simplified disaster recovery capabilities as a major benefit of the move.

After we start the migration, I can see the anxiety on my customers’ faces melt away, replaced by relief. Recently, one even started laughing. “This is so amazing!” he kept repeating. “This is so easy!”