South Korea’s biggest theme park is also riding the VM migration roller coaster
Western Union has commenced a migration from VMware to Nutanix after deciding it didn’t want to do business with Broadcom.
The company’s vice president and head of technology services Brandon Shaw on Wednesday told the audience at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference that Western Union is six months into a migration of 900 to 1,200 applications that run across a 3,900-core server fleet.
The decision to move came during a period of re-invention at Western Union, a 175-year-old company that is currently working to become more customer-focused and therefore is open to new suppliers to help reach that goal, Shaw explained.
He said Western Union had “decent lines of communication” with Broadcom and used some of its non-VMware software products, but also had “challenges partnering with them.”
Broadcom’s software licensing strategy for VMware was another issue for Western Union, as it all but requires customers to acquire its Cloud Foundation private cloud suite, which is powerful but almost always considerably more expensive than what users previously paid for Virtzilla’s wares.
Shaw described Western Union’s relationship with Nutanix as “symbiotic.”
Western Union did consider the possibility of Nutanix being acquired as a risk, but Shaw said during sales negotiations, Nutanix’s lawyers included continuity assurances. “That made us feel comfortable with the longevity of the deal,” he said.
Western Union also felt Nutanix offered technical advantages, including greater flexibility for workload placement. That matters because Western Union operates in over 200 countries, and some workloads must run in-country. Shaw said he feels confident Nutanix will make it possible to deploy those apps to whatever infrastructure is appropriate wherever Western Union operates.
The migration is in its early stages, he said, and hitting the kind of obstacles he expected when trying to move older software. “It is more about figuring out how to get it done,” he said, and sometimes that can mean refactoring software or even deciding it’s no longer needed.
Nutanix also revealed another new migrant to its platform: South Korea’s largest theme park Everland.
IT infrastructure engineer Jinyoung Woo told The Register the business used VMware Cloud on AWS to power its theme park, but struggled with product quality and could not afford Broadcom’s revised software licenses.
The company considered a move to native cloud VMs but had just three months to make a move and felt a jump to Nutanix would be easier and less likely to be disruptive. In the end, Everland moved within its deadline, with zero problems for customers.
Nutanix made Western Union and Everland available to the press for questions. The Register understands other case studies at .NEXT included larger entities that have moved over 100,000 cores from VMware to Nutanix.
CEO Rajiv Ramaswami expects to be able to tell many more such stories, telling The Register that Nutanix thinks it is an option for 165,000 of VMware’s current customers. He expects they’ll arrive in waves as VMware products go end-of-life, or customers approach license renewal deadlines. And he pointed out that Nutanix is winning 500 to 1,000 new customers each quarter, many of them former VMware users who want a new supplier relationship.
That’s a steady flow of competitive wins, but not enough to stop Broadcom from predicting nine percent growth in its software business and suggesting VMware’s memory tiering technology is the perfect antidote to high memory prices. ®