Nutanix Helps Saudi Port Operator Future-Proof Operations and Prepare for Increase in Container Volumes

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced that the Gulf Stevedoring Contracting Company (GSCCO), a port operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is leveraging Nutanix software to increase IT capacity to support growing operations across Saudi port facilities while also reducing IT management overhead. This includes successfully accommodating a 50% spike in container volumes with no impact on operational efficiency.

As the organisation responsible for the management of three major port container and bulk terminals in Saudi Arabia, GSCCO is fully committed to supporting the government’s Saudi Vision 2030 agenda for economic diversification. Scalable, reliable and easy to manage IT systems are recognised as key to delivering this agenda. This has meant the company both virtualizing existing workloads and replacing its end-of-life physical infrastructure with a more flexible and scalable hyperconverged software solution to cope with predicted increases in customer demand.

“We wanted a solution that would deliver linear scalability to handle rapid growth in container traffic,” explains Hossam El-Masry, Information Technology Manager at GSCCO. “We were also looking for greater resiliency and the ability to upgrade and manage the infrastructure without any downtime or impact in any way on the level of service provided to staff and customers at the ports we manage.”

Following a comprehensive evaluation of hyperconverged solutions from a number of vendors, the team at GSCCO decided on Nutanix, whose solution enables the company to reach a milestone of 50 percent growth in container traffic well ahead of schedule while significantly lowering operational overhead.

“The Nutanix software delivered fully on its promise of cloud-like scalability, enabling us to add additional nodes in hours rather than days or even weeks with the old hardware and software, and with no downtime. We now also have a much more resilient infrastructure allowing us to keep the ports running at all times with no disruption in service during maintenance and rapid failover to our recovery site to enable us to keep the ports working should we suffer a power outage or other problem,” said El-Masry.

Migration to Nutanix HCI software has led to a significant increase in performance and greater capacity, saving in rack space and a significant reduction in associated datacenter power and cooling overhead. The implementation success has freed up time for the support team to manage all physical and virtual resources across two sites with just one Nutanix management console, thus enabling them to spend more time supporting users and planning for further developments.

“Not only have we saved on capital IT spending, we have also achieved a saving of around 15 percent in terms of OpEx,” commented El-Masry.

Looking to the future, the company is evaluating the possible use of public cloud services, process automation and support for the Internet of Things (IoT), doing so confident in the knowledge that the Nutanix solution is uniquely equipped to enable them to take advantage of these and other new technologies and do so at minimal risk and expense.

“With zero downtime even during major capacity upgrades, migration to Nutanix has revolutionised our IT infrastructure, making it quicker, more reliable and much easier to both scale and manage. We simply couldn’t have handled the recent massive growth in container traffic without Nutanix software,” concluded El-Masry.

Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix commented: “GCSSO has proved that it is a forward-thinking organization by embracing the latest data center and cloud technologies in order to streamline its operations and prepare for future expansion. We are very happy that through GCSSO's deployment of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Solution, Nutanix is able to clearly demonstrate the benefits of an efficient, reliable and modern cloud infrastructure.”