Consolidating Tech: How Al Dahra Improved App Efficiency with Nutanix

Nutanix, a recognized leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has successfully enabled Al Dahra, a global agribusiness giant, to transform its IT operations by migrating its infrastructure to Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This strategic shift has led to a tenfold increase in the performance of Al Dahra’s business-critical applications while achieving a significant 60% reduction in cloud costs. The migration marks a significant milestone in Al Dahra’s journey towards greater efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in its operations.

Al Dahra is a multinational leader in agribusiness with a vast footprint across 20 countries, managing over 400,000 acres of farmland in regions such as Egypt, Romania, Serbia, and the USA. The company specializes in the cultivation, production, and trading of up to three million tons each of essential food commodities and animal feed annually. However, Al Dahra’s IT infrastructure faced critical challenges due to its complexity and fragmentation, resulting from years of expansion and acquisitions. The system consisted of three distinct environments—Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), VMware, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). These siloed environments led to performance bottlenecks, increased costs, and administrative inefficiencies. Adding urgency to the situation was a tight four-week deadline to exit its UAE-based data center.

Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT Manager at Al Dahra, emphasized the critical nature of the migration. He explained how the company’s ERP system and other mission-critical applications were hindered by inadequate performance in all existing environments. Further analysis revealed that the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) levels were insufficient, and upgrading hardware would have been prohibitively expensive. Faced with these challenges and a looming deadline, Al Dahra needed a swift and effective solution.

In response, Al Dahra decided to consolidate its IT operations into a unified, cloud-based infrastructure, ultimately selecting Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS. This decision was driven by Nutanix’s consistent performance across existing environments and the company’s well-established partnership with AWS. The migration process, which included evaluation, procurement, deployment, and application transition, was completed within just four weeks. Nutanix’s seamless integration capabilities, coupled with the AWS Marketplace’s streamlined procurement process, played a crucial role in this rapid transformation. The use of Nutanix Move, a migration tool provided at no additional cost, further simplified the transition.

The impact of this migration was immediately felt across the organization. Employees worldwide reported significant performance improvements, with many unaware that a migration had even occurred. Applications critical to business operations, such as the ERP system, began functioning at optimal levels, drastically reducing the time required for data processing and decision-making.

This transformation has delivered numerous benefits for Al Dahra. The migration has enhanced application performance, enabling tasks like report generation to be completed in minutes instead of hours. This improvement has significantly accelerated decision-making processes across the organization, making them faster and more accurate. Cost efficiencies have also been realized, with a transition to an Instance Savings Plan leading to a substantial reduction in monthly cloud expenditures. Furthermore, IT administrative productivity has improved, as the integration of monitoring and backup solutions into a unified platform has freed up time for system administrators, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities.

The new IT infrastructure has also bolstered application resilience and scalability. Al Dahra now has the capability to scale rapidly to meet business demands, ensuring high availability for its critical applications. Plans are already underway to deploy additional NC2 nodes to enable active-active operations, further enhancing the robustness of the IT environment.

This migration has not only addressed Al Dahra’s immediate IT challenges but has also laid the groundwork for future innovation and growth. Nutanix’s multi-cloud architecture provides Al Dahra with the flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in while leveraging the cost and performance advantages of AWS. With a future-ready IT infrastructure in place, the company’s IT team is now focusing on further enhancing disaster recovery capabilities and achieving more stringent recovery-point and recovery-time objectives.

Reflecting on the journey, Hoda highlighted the significance of this achievement, describing it as a testament to the power of collaboration and technological innovation. He noted that the success of this migration has given Al Dahra the confidence to pursue ambitious goals as it continues its digital transformation journey. This case exemplifies how strategic partnerships and advanced cloud technologies can drive operational excellence, cost efficiency, and resilience in a competitive global marketplace.