Case Study: Richter virtualizes critical Exchange and SQL, cuts datacenter footprint and boosts performance with Nutanix

Richter Financial Services Firm Extends Virtualization to Enterprise Applications

Richter is a Montreal and Toronto–based financial consulting firm (founded 1926, >500 staff) ranked among Canada’s top-ten independent accounting and business advisory firms. Although most production systems were already on VMware vSphere 5.5, the firm could not virtualize its largest Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server environments because legacy storage created severe performance bottlenecks and required costly, piecemeal fixes as the hardware neared end-of-warranty.

Richter ran a Nutanix proof-of-concept and deployed the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform with VMware, which eliminated the storage “funnel” bottleneck, was quick to implement, and scaled by adding fixed‑cost nodes. The move enabled virtualization of large SQL and Exchange workloads, delivered noticeably faster application performance, cut colocation rackspace by 45% and electrical consumption by 33%, reduced IT administration time by over 50%, and provided predictable, lower-cost scalability for ERP and development projects.

Richter

Greg Eamer

Director of Information Technology