[Video] MailUp Group & Nutanix

For MailUp Group, ensuring that the performance and reliability of our systems get better every day is a cornerstone of the corporate DNA and of our way of doing business.

In 2018, we kicked off a partner selection process to introduce a hyper-converged system in our infrastructure. The goal was to improve service continuity, minimize downtimes for customers and reduce the costs of troubleshooting operations.

We identified Nutanix as the best partner for this service – a leader in the hyper-convergence sector, it has developed and provides customers with a full suite of “solutions as a service” already integrated in the management software.

In this video interview, recorded in Copenhagen during the last edition of the Nutanix .NEXT conference, three people closely involved in the process of selecting and implementing the Nutanix technology – Michele Cappellini (MailUp Group CIO), Marco Aroldi and Matteo Anselmi (Infrastructure Engineers) – tell us all about their experience.

For more details on what the Nutanix events – both in Europe and the US – taught MailUp Group both in terms of partner knowledge and mindset, you can refer to this interview to Michele Cappellini and Marco Aroldi recently published on our Tech Blog.

MailUp Group’s needs

While selecting our partner, the determining feature in the choice of Nutanix was its support of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, which allowed MailUp Group to embark on the path toward a hyper-converged infrastructure, with great benefits in terms of agility, efficiency and cost management.

The main problem found within the company was the difficulty in keeping our services always-on, which caused complaints from customers and high operational costs. In the event of infrastructural problems, we had to intervene frequently and interrupt our work to troubleshoot the problems.

Why Nutanix

“Our goal was to support MailUp Group’s transformation processes with care and expertise, by providing the right tools to boost performances and increase system reliability. With our solutions we helped MailUp Group to solve their issues and achieve high performance levels”, says Alberto Filisetti, Country Manager at Nutanix Italia. “MailUp Group represents a success case and will keep creating new advanced features based on our solutions”.

As already mentioned, Nutanix was selected in the first place for its support to Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. However, a new infrastructure also brought along other benefits.

Greater ease of management

A “one-click-everything” philosophy underlies the Nutanix system, and it aims to simplify all processes, from virtual machine creation to component update.

Increased performances

The critical workload is made up of databases and SQL servers. MailUp Group has deployed two NX3060 G6 models, each consisting of three nodes. The service dedicated to virtual machines is crossed between two clusters. We improved our SQL provisioning time from two days to about one hour.

Storage does not use RAID and provides virtual machines with “data locality”, i.e. the use of the node where the virtual machine is running. Everything is optimized and natively deduplicated by the software.

Customer support

We had an excellent experience with the Nutanix support. From the very beginning, thanks to the professionalism and thoroughness of the Nutanix team, we were been able not only to solve any issues that arose during deployment, but also to further stabilize the Nutanix product, reaching 110% product performance.

Next steps

The next steps in the evolution of the MailUp Group hyper-converged infrastructure is to move on to the Acropolis virtualization system, in order to use advanced features that Nutanix provides, such as Karbon or hybrid clouds (public and private).