Gambling cloud provider bets on Nutanix and cools on VMware

Cloud provider Continent 8 has shifted its virtualisation environment to Nutanix from VMware, in a move partly driven by changes to VMware licensing, but also in an infrastructure shift to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and because of influence gained in its ongoing partnership with Nutanix.

The move has seen Continent 8 shift the bulk of its infrastructure from VMware to Nutanix HCI with Acropolis Hypervisor for internal IT and customer cloud services. It had largely depended on Cisco UCS converged stacks until these reached end-of-life.

Continent 8 provides managed regulated cloud environments for online gaming and betting customers that include Bet365, 888 and PokerStars. It currently manages 106 datacentres globally, with cloud services run from 35 of them.

Continent 8’s migration to Nutanix as a dominant environment started in the second half of 2023, but it can be traced back to 2017 when it commenced its relationship with Nutanix. The period since then has seen it consolidate from “eight to 10” technology partners “down to two or three”, said chief technology officer Edward O’Connor.

Nutanix is now dominant in Continent 8’s datacentres, with between 1,500 and 3,500 Nutanix virtual machines (VMs) running at any one time for internal services and “in the tens of thousands” for customers.

Nutanix makes so-called hyper-converged infrastructure, which combines compute, networking and storage into a single physical appliance. In so doing, it potentially eliminates costly and time-consuming deployments that involve coordinating compute servers, networking and storage. 

In addition, Nutanix offers its own virtualisation hypervisor, Acropolis.

According to O’Connor, changes to VMware licensing were not a big factor in the company’s migration – although it has had benefits for customers that have made the switch – because Continent 8 is still a VMware partner, customers still use VMware and, as a managed service provider (MSP), it supports them in doing so.

“What has been important is the relationship with Nutanix,” said O’Connor. “We have a big focus on engineering and development and Nutanix is easy to get along with. Our influence on the Nutanix roadmap has been important in, for example, expanding MSP capabilities and multi-tenant environments.

“We didn’t get that influence to the same extent with VMware. The VMware product was very mature and better. Now we like Nutanix more because of the product roadmap and partnership.”

O’Connor added that the ability to develop for the enterprise and cloud-native markets is important to Continent 8 and that Nutanix enables the company to do that with its support for Kubernetes, for example.

The VMware product was very mature and better. Now we like Nutanix more because of the product roadmap and partnership

Migration from VMware to Nutanix at Continent 8 started with internal reviews across teams that included IT, development, security, and so on, and an assessment of the applications, tools and environments that could be virtualised.

Internal applications were the first to be worked on, with greenfield sites built in Dublin and Montreal to move to and extensive VM migration testing and proofs of concept carried out.

Migration itself was a question of deciding which systems to migrate, in what order and at what pace, with consideration of downtime duration and timing vital for online products that produce tens of millions of dollars of business per hour.

Key benefits of the migration to Nutanix for Continent 8 are the speed at which it can roll out new services, said O’Connor. “We can build infrastructure quickly,” he said. “We can do it at breakneck speed and we can understand the cost of a build.”

O’Connor also said customers “have halved licence costs” as they moved from VMware, where they had perpetual licences but were forced to change to a subscription model. For customers, that was like “night and day”, he said.

Continent 8 also provides Nutanix infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Licences are transferable, so we can build in a private datacentre and move over to the public cloud using Nutanix,” said O’Connor.