Friday, January 23, 2026

Nutanix NDB - Game Changer!

Last year I started looking into Nutanix NDB platform and I was very impressed at what it offered but my DBA's saw it as a threat - they took it as a platform that would make them redundant.  That was not how I viewed it - I saw opportunity to make our DBA's operational life a lot easier..... help automate their daily tasks, a platform to help them reduce all the operational firefighting, shifting from being operational focused to strategically focused.

After a few months I soon won the battle and had the business onside and budgets approved to proceed with introducing a dedicate Nutanix NDB cluster for one of our most business-critical database which was over 5TB in size.  When this database regularly went offline it cost the business millions as it meant hundreds of specialised technical engineers were unable to work and make strategic decisions.  Therefore, the business was keen to get this database onto a more stable and reliable platform where some of these disruptions could be prevented.

I engaged with Nutanix PS – as I wanted to get the install of NDB right from the get go, my reputation was at stake and I needed NDB impress.  After a week on engagement and building out the platform to my specified design, OS templates created, DB templates created and all IT security auditing complete the environment was ready to spin up the first SQL DB server…..

26 minutes is what it took to created a new Windows 2019 server, joined to the domain, in the correct OU, to corporate standards with all the management tool and IT security agents installed and SQL server 2019 installed ready for creating the first DB AND this was all by one DBA.  Speed, efficiency all come to mind!

We’ve had NDB in for nearly a year and I was asked by my IT manager how has our investment into NDB helped.

They say ‘a picture paints a thousand word’ so put it into a diagram…………


What a typical application upgrade looked like.

 

Now with NDB

How we upgrade SQL platforms…..

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