Download PDF
Scalability and Security Enhancement for UK Payment Services Provider with Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Technology
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
- Networks & Connectivity - NFC
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Vehicle-to-Infrastructure
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Pay360 by Capita, a major payment services provider, was facing challenges with its outsourced legacy infrastructure. The company's ability to deliver responsive, rapidly scalable, and highly available services was compromised due to the limitations of its existing IT infrastructure. The legacy 3-tier IT infrastructure was slow to scale, unreliable, and difficult to manage, which was affecting the company's ability to handle growing workloads, attract new customers, and exploit new cloud technologies. The situation was further complicated by the company's reliance on third parties to manage both the physical and virtual infrastructure, which hampered the technical team's ability to resolve availability problems quickly and identify bottlenecks. The company also experienced a major outage in 2017, which took them offline for over a day. A complete re-think of the Pay360 IT infrastructure was required, with a focus on scalability, performance, and ease of management, while also meeting the stringent security requirements of PCI compliance.
The Customer
Pay360
About The Customer
Pay360 by Capita is a Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant provider offering a full range of telephone, online, and mobile payment services. Its customers include central/local government organizations and private businesses including Transport for London, TV Licensing, and numerous local authorities, schools, and colleges. The company was facing challenges with its legacy 3-tier IT infrastructure, which was slow to scale, unreliable, and difficult to manage. This was affecting the company's ability to handle growing workloads, attract new customers, and exploit new cloud technologies.
The Solution
Pay360 decided to deploy HPE ProLiant servers with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software. The Nutanix HCI provided cloud-like on-demand scalability and single pane of management, which was ideal for the company's customer-facing business. One server was used for PCI-compliant customer applications and secure primary data, while another was used to handle less critical applications and secondary storage. A further cluster was specified for data backup and disaster recovery, which was logically separated from the primary systems using the network microsegmentation capabilities of Nutanix Flow. The company also switched from VMware to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, enabling the entire solution – physical and virtual - to be managed from the same Nutanix Prism GUI. The final piece of the solution was HYCU Data protection for Nutanix, a purpose-built backup and disaster recovery application, tightly integrated with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
System 800xA at Indian Cement Plants
Chettinad Cement recognized that further efficiencies could be achieved in its cement manufacturing process. It looked to investing in comprehensive operational and control technologies to manage and derive productivity and energy efficiency gains from the assets on Line 2, their second plant in India.
Case Study
IoT System for Tunnel Construction
The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
Case Study
Splunk Partnership Ties Together Big Data & IoT Services
Splunk was faced with the need to meet emerging customer demands for interfacing IoT projects to its suite of services. The company required an IoT partner that would be able to easily and quickly integrate with its Splunk Enterprise platform, rather than allocating development resources and time to building out an IoT interface and application platform.
Case Study
Bridge monitoring in Hamburg Port
Kattwyk Bridge is used for both rail and road transport, and it has played an important role in the Port of Hamburg since 1973. However, the increasing pressure from traffic requires a monitoring solution. The goal of the project is to assess in real-time the bridge's status and dynamic responses to traffic and lift processes.
Case Study
Bellas Landscaping
Leading landscaping firm serving central Illinois streamlines operations with Samsara’s real-time fleet tracking solution: • 30+ vehicle fleet includes International Terrastar dump trucks and flatbeds, medium- and light-duty pickups from Ford and Chevrolet. Winter fleet includes of snow plows and salters.