Computershare migrates 24,000 VMs onto Nutanix

Australia’s Computershare has migrated 24,000 virtual machines in less than a year onto Nutanix AHV. 

Nutanix Next

Speaking during a panel session at Nutanix’s Next conference in Barcelona, CTO Kevin O’Connor said he had been content to remain with the company's existing VM vendor until he was informed about an imminent price hike.

“I joined Computershare a year and a half ago,” he said. “I had a look around and found a large Nutanix estate and, running on top of it, was a hypervisor from a well-known competitor – [when] there was even one for free in the [Nutanix] package," O'Connor said.

“I had a look at whether there was a cost-saving opportunity to migrate, but there just wasn’t the inertia to do it.

“I [then] had a phone call and discovered our fee [for the other VM software] was going to increase somewhere between 10 or 15 times in 12 months' time, which spurred us on a bit.

“We had a look and decided we would actually do the migration. It’s about a one-year project. We have 24,000 VMs, so we [came] up with a plan to migrate all 24,000."

O'Connor did not name the maker of the other VM software, however he made the comments in response to a question seeking his views on VMware's acquisition of Broadcom.

He said that Computershare had "come out of this a lot stronger and leaner with a cost-base lower than before".

“We’re actually quite delighted. It spurred us to do what we should have done anyway.”

Based in the UK, O’Connor joined Computershare as its CTO in November 2022 and is responsible for the company’s infrastructure and applications globally.

Speaking on stage, O’Connor said Computershare served 40,000 companies and 75 million individual customers across 21 countries

“We are highly regulated,” he told the audience. “We have very sensitive data and the data we hold belongs to our clients. This really needs to be held on-prem.”

“We also want to give our 75 million customers time-to-market, speed-to-market and quality of experience – both for development and delivery – and public cloud is very attractive.

“We need a combination of public cloud and on-prem, and the idea of having [Nutanix’s] One Platform where we can move workloads between them at different times, from one pane of glass, without managing it is really quite attractive for us.”

Eleanor Dickinson attended Nutanix Next in Barcelona as a guest of Nutanix.