MOQdigital deploys Nutanix HCI to auto insurer RACQ

MOQDigital has secured a contract win with auto insurance company RACQ to deploy Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure.

RACQ sought to modernise its ageing IT infrastructure to improve its service capabilities as the company’s offerings grew. The auto insurer was also a bank and financial planner (through its 2017 merger with QT Mutual Bank), in addition to its existing car and pet insurance and roadside and home assistance business.

MOQDigital was approached to explore options to decrease RACQ’s amount of hardware required to run its systems, landing on Nutanix to also reduce its data centre footprint.

RACQ general manager for security and shared ICT services Ben Johnston said the ageing IT infrastructure saw the IT team tied up to “keeping the lights on”.

“One of my teams would spend far too much of their time dealing with hardware updates and firmware fixes – now it’s just not an issue,” he said.

“We’ve achieved an almost three-fold reduction in our hardware count with Nutanix. We’ve gone from four storage arrays to none, from two data centres full of racks to around four racks per site, and the people hours we’ve saved in maintaining the environment have been significant.”

With Nutanix, RACQ said it is forecast to save $500,000 over the next five years, while also accelerating its ability to develop new services. Provisioning new infrastructure now took just one day instead of the previous five-day turnaround.

“Not only have we greatly reduced infrastructure overheads, we’ve also gained private cloud capabilities so we can apply the same management models we use for public cloud infrastructure to on-premise,” Johnston said.

We’re currently developing a common API so we can provision wherever we need to, whether that’s on Nutanix, AWS, Azure, or Google – that simply wasn’t possible for us before.”