Virtualization leader cuts IT delivery costs by 20 percent with Cisco HyperFlex Case Study
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Founded in Montréal, Canada, in 2006, Malicis is a boutique consulting firm specializing in desktop and systems virtualization. With a team
of 30 specialists, Malicis serves more than 150 clients and has completed more than 500 mandates in Canada, Europe, and
the United States. For more information, visit malicis.com.
Size
30 employees
Industry
IT Services
Location
Montréal, Canada
● Simplify data center operations
● Improve the performance and stability of IT services
● Integrate service offerings with third party solutions
● Cisco HyperFlex™ system
● Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS)
● NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPU and Tesla M10 GPU
● Reduced the cost of hardware, licensing, and service delivery
● Increased resource flexibility and infrastructure scalability
● Opened sales pipeline to onboard new customers
Challenge: Reduce service delivery limitations
In the past, Marc-André Lapierre, founder and CEO of Malicis, had to be judicious with prospective customers and selective about their workloads. While his firm’s virtual desktop and disaster recovery services have always been in high demand, they used to come with limitations.
“We had to choose our customers very carefully and make sure their workload would fit our environment,” says Lapierre, recalling the inflexibility of Malicis’ former data center infrastructure.
With increasing demand for its DaaS and DRaaS offerings, Lapierre needed to simplify and supercharge the firm’s technology underpinnings. He chose the combination of Cisco HyperFlex and the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco UCS.
“We needed something that is more resilient and easier to manage,” says Lapierre, noting the shortage of senior IT professionals and the need for operational efficiency and speed. “HyperFlex and UCS give us a ton of processing power and resource flexibility. And it’s easy to deploy new servers and client environments.”
The platform also works seamlessly with third-party solutions like NVIDIA GPU, Veeam Availability Suite, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, and VMware vSphere, which Malicis resells as part of its service offerings.
“Everything is tightly integrated, and it all works great,” Lapierre says. “There is less complexity to manage, the synchronization between our two data centers is very fast, and the performance, stability, and security of our DaaS and DRaaS offerings are far better.”
Better performance, lower cost
The adoption of Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco UCS has opened up new business possibilities for Malicis and its customers.
A large architectural firm, for example, had invested heavily in another vendor’s hyperconverged servers to support its 75 virtual workstations and graphics-intensive workloads. Unhappy with the performance of the virtual workstations, the firm asked Malicis to give a demonstration of its newly improved DaaS offering.
“Our demo, which was delivered over the internet using Cisco HyperFlex and NVIDIA GPUs, was four times faster than the customer’s onsite servers,” boasts Lapierre. “The customer got rid of their servers, adopted our virtual desktops, and has been very happy ever since.”
Lapierre is even using the versatility of Cisco HyperFlex and power of NVIDIA GPUs to help individuals who aren’t a part of the Malicis customer base. During the evenings when client systems are mostly dormant, he allows a university student conducting AI research and a prominent artist producing 3D digital portraits to run their workloads on Malicis Virtual Machines (VMs).
“Both of them need a ton of processing power, and it’s nice to help out,” Lapierre says. “It takes the research student 15 minutes to process one second of video on the university’s server—our VMs can process that load in a single second.”
In addition to delivering significant performance improvements, the new infrastructure has reduced the cost of service delivery by 20 percent.
“From hardware to licensing to human resources, the overall cost of HyperFlex and UCS is better for us and we can pass those savings on to our customers,” Lapierre says. “We can show that this solution is less expensive and higher performing than the alternatives. Our business is booming as a result.”
Malicis will soon deploy Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco UCS in its secondary data center and link the two sites for additional resource flexibility and management efficiency. Furthermore, it can easily add more compute and storage capacity as its client base and service offerings grow.
Today, the firm is no longer selective about the workloads it brings into its environment. Resource flexibility and seamless scalability have transformed the limitations of the past into opportunities for the present and future.
“Our HyperFlex and UCS infrastructure can handle anything,” says Lapierre. “We’ve opened up the sales pipeline and are now onboarding an average of one new customer every week."
