UAE-based Agribusiness Leader Completes Rapid Migration to Cloud-Hosted Platform, Achieving Major Gains in Performance, Cost Efficiency, and Admin Productivity
Al Dahra, a leading global agribusiness company with operations across 20 countries, has successfully migrated its IT infrastructure to a Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move has resulted in a 10x improvement in the performance of business-critical applications and a 60% reduction in cloud costs, empowering the company to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.
“Analysis revealed that the IOPS in each environment were insufficient, and upgrading hardware would have been too expensive. With a hard four-week deadline to migrate out of our data center, we had to act fast.” Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT Manager at Al Dahra
Al Dahra is a prominent multinational leader in agribusiness, operating over 400 thousand acres of agricultural land in Egypt, Romania, Serbia, USA, and others, specialized in the cultivation, production and trading of up to 3 million tons of essential food commodities and up to 3 million tons of animal feed. They faced a critical deadline to migrate out of its UAE-based data center. The company’s IT infrastructure, built over time through expansions and acquisitions, had become complex and siloed, consisting of three distinct environments: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), VMware, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). These systems created challenges in terms of performance, cost, and administrative overhead.
“Our ERP system and other mission-critical applications were struggling with less than optimal performance, regardless of the environment they were running on,” said Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT Manager at Al Dahra. “Analysis revealed that the IOPS in each environment were insufficient, and upgrading hardware would have been too expensive. With a hard four-week deadline to migrate out of our data center, we had to act fast.”
A Rapid Transformation
Hoda and his team decided to consolidate their environments into a single cloud-based solution, ultimately selecting Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS. “Nutanix consistently performed the best across our environments, and we had a strong partnership with AWS, so the decision was clear,” said Hoda.
The migration, which involved evaluation, procurement, deployment, and application migration, was completed in just four weeks—a remarkable feat, according to Hoda. The simplicity of the procurement process via the AWS Marketplace, along with Nutanix Move (which migrated applications at no additional cost), made the transition seamless.
“The feedback from users around the world was immediate and overwhelmingly positive,” said Hoda. “Users, who were unaware that a migration had even taken place, reported performance boosts of up to 10x.”
Key Benefits
The results of the migration have exceeded expectations, with Al Dahra achieving several key milestones:
- 10x Boost in Performance: Applications like ERP are now running at optimal speed, with reports that once took hours to compile now being generated in just minutes. This has allowed business units to make data-driven decisions up to 98% faster and more accurately.
- 60% Reduction in Monthly Cloud Costs: Through detailed cost analysis, Al Dahra was able to transition from a Compute Savings Plan to an Instance Savings Plan, which reduced its monthly cloud costs by 60%.
- 25% Increase in Admin Productivity: The integration of monitoring and backup solutions into a single, cohesive platform has saved infrastructure administrators, on average, two hours per day, improving overall productivity by 25%.
- Improved Application Resilience: The new infrastructure gives Al Dahra the ability to scale rapidly and ensures high availability for critical applications, with plans to deploy additional NC2 nodes for active-active operations in the near future.
A Future-Ready IT Environment
The transition to Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS has not only delivered significant performance and cost improvements, but it also sets Al Dahra up for future growth and innovation. Hoda explained, “We no longer have to worry about vendor lock-in. Nutanix’s multi-cloud architecture gives us flexibility, and AWS allows us to leverage all of the cost benefits we’re eligible for.”
The IT team, now emboldened by their success, is targeting further advancements in application resilience and disaster recovery. “We’re focused on achieving more aggressive recovery-point and recovery-time objectives, which will be critical as we continue to expand our business,” said Hoda.
Reflecting on the experience, Hoda said, “Our incredible four-week migration and the significant improvements we’ve seen in performance, cost, and admin productivity prove that Nutanix is a true partner. They’ve given us the confidence to dream big and tackle the next phase of our digital transformation with assurance.”
