Virtualization Leader Cuts IT Delivery Costs by 20% with HyperFlex

IT is at the center of rapid innovation in today’s world where data is everywhere. To keep up with the data, companies worldwide are looking for the simplicity of hyperconvergence from core to edge and multicloud. One such company faced with data center challenges was Malicis. A boutique consulting firm specializing in desktop and systems virtualization, Montréal, Canada-based Malicis was tackling issues such as: simplifying data center operations, improving the performance and stability of IT services, and integrating service offering with third-party solutions.

With challenges of the pace of modernization at hand, founder and CEO Marc-André Lapierre had to be judicious with prospective customers and make sure their workload would fit the company’s environment. While his firm’s virtual desktop and disaster recovery services have always been in high demand, they used to come with limitations.

Faced with increasing demand for its DaaS and DRaaS offerings, Lapierre needed to simplify and supercharge the firm’s technology underpinnings. To do this, he made the choice to modernize his IT environment with Cisco HyperFlex, built on the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco UCS.

“We required something that was more resilient and easier to manage,” said 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 virtual 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 said. “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.

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.”

Looking Ahead

Malicis will soon deploy Cisco HyperFlex in its secondary data center and link the two sites for additional resource flexibility and management efficiency. 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.

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Headed to the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) March 23-26, 2020 in San Jose, CA? Stop by Booth 813 to see firsthand how Cisco and NVIDIA virtual workstations can help you innovate and succeed with speed and ease in a rapidly changing world.