UK Firstnet Offering Hybrid Cloud Services

Nutanix, Inc. and Leeds, UK-based MSP Firstnet Solutions Ltd signed an agreement to offer a choice of flexible hybrid cloud services based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

A provider of managed services in the North of England, Firstnet Solutions recently formed a new entity, Firstnet Data Centres, which opened its first datacentre in Leeds. Aspiring to be the first dedicated tiers 3 datacentre in its region, it gives customers a choice of traditional co-location facilities alongside a new mix of managed hosting, virtual desktop and cloud services.

These services will be based entirely on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, chosen after research and competitive analysis.

“We spent months looking at both traditional 3-tier and hyperconverged infrastructure alternatives,” explains Paul Straton, head of enterprise technologies, Firstnet. “None of which matched the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, which simply r-writes all the rules. It is less complicated and much easier to manage than anything else on the market, featuring a self-healing architecture. It is also hugely scalable and able to deliver the services customers need to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure.“

Key differentiators were the single Nutanix Prism management pane for both compute and storage resources, plus the hypervisor neutral virtualisation capabilities of the Nutanix platform. Together, these will enable Firstnet to offer customers immediate managed hosting, followed by VDI services using the built-in virtualisation solution, Nutanix AHV, which is included at no additional cost with every Nutanix deployment. In VDI environments where the costs per desktop are very important, the ability to use a robust and certified hypervisor with zero license costs is a benefit.

As a Nutanix partner, Firstnet will provide customers with an end-to-end hybrid cloud solution based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. Customers using Nutanix for their on-premise infrastructure can leverage the built-in replication, backup, and DR functions by connecting to the Nutanix clusters hosted by Firstnet.

“We are delighted to have Firstnet Solutions as both a customer and a partner,” commented Mark Lewis, senior director of EMEA marketing, Nutanix, “demonstrating the ability to build scale-out infrastructures delivering the advantages of the public cloud but using the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform on-premise and in a service provider’s datacentre.“

Since the opening of the datacentre in April, a number of existing customers have already signed up to migrate to the Nutanix environment. The company also has plans to offer Nutanix-powered backup and recovery services from a dedicated DR suite with offsite office facilities, similarly, sited within the new Leeds datacentre.