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Interview: How PXP shifted off VMware
When a business begins to see less and less value from an incumbent IT provider, especially as its software becomes more expensive, it might be time to switch. Here’s how one company did just that
Payment platform provider PXP has made several IT architecture changes over the past two decades. It began with an on-premise datacentre of physical servers. It later transitioned to server virtualisation, then to hyperconverged infrastructure, and is now moving off VMware.
Dwaine Thomas recently hit a 20-year milestone at the company, where he is currently CIO, leading its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy internally.
During his long tenure at the payment platform provider, there have been some major shifts in its underlying IT architecture. Looking back two decades, before he joined, PXP had been running its own IT infrastructure and operations out of its head office.
“We had built almost our own mini datacentre, with its own cooling and power redundancy built in our offices,” he says. “It comprised 15 racks of Dell servers running Windows server applications.”
The industry trend at the time was server consolidation, and as Thomas recalls, there was an effort to consolidate the hardware into a three-tier architecture. This, he says, led to the deployment of a storage area network (SAN) and servers running the VMware hypervisor for server virtualisation.
Thanks to server virtualisation with VMware, by the time he joined in 2005, the 12 to 15 racks of physical servers had been moved over to three or four racks. The technology architecture remained pretty stable for the next decade, so there was little need to change anything – it was doing its job of providing the base IT needed to run the PXP payment platform.
But in 2015, Thomas says: “We had a catastrophic failure with one of our SANs, and that was a real eye-opening moment for us.”
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Switching to hyperconverged infrastructure
By then, the SAN had reached end of life, and PXP selected Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure to power the next evolution of its enterprise IT architecture. “We started working with Nutanix in 2015 and built two new collocated datacentres,” he says.
Using Nutanix, PXP managed to consolidate the existing racks of IT equipment into a single rack to run its payment platforms.
While Nutanix does provide its own Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) for server virtualisation, like many Nutanix customers at the time, PXP chose the path of least disruption, which involved moving to a hyperconverged IT infrastructure on which to run VMware.
The company continued to run VMware on top of Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure because, as Thomas recalls, it caused PXP no problems. “It just sort of ran,” he says. “We weren’t really invested in the features and functionality. There were a few things that came out that we made use of, but nothing particularly useful.”
“Once our current perpetual licences reached end of life, there was no route forward and Broadcom would not offer support on those perpetual VMware licences”
Dwaine Thomas, PXP
However, PXP did take the opportunity to start using the Nutanix alternative, AHV.
“We hadn’t quite yet got the confidence to shift the underlying hypervisor,” he says. “But we built our test development environments using Nutanix AHV.”
The development and test environment was considered a good candidate for a testbed to try AHV. “It had very little consequence if we got it wrong,” he adds. “We took a view to go with AHV, and if it went wrong, we could always go back to VMware, whereas moving production systems is always trickier.”
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware
Work on a new generation of PXP payment platform called Unity began in 2023. VMware was also seeing significant changes, so PXP reassessed the full value of its VMware installation.
Thomas says Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware created momentum in the industry such that IT buyers regarded Broadcom’s strategy as a risk with a degree of commercial uncertainty.
As Computer Weekly has previously reported, many businesses were hit with a price hike following Broadcom’s shift from perpetually licensing VMware to a subscription model, where it bundled products into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Thomas recalls the cost to PXP would have doubled, but he adds: “I think the cost implication for us was far less than it would have been for others. I was hearing some crazy numbers, with up to a 10 times increase in cost.”
But in the time PXP was running VMware on a perpetual licence, Thomas says it was not particularly impressed either by the level of innovation or support, despite having made a significant investment in the product. According to Thomas, very little of the innovation being added to VMware was useful to PXP.
Moreover, when PXP faced issues with its VMware setup, Thomas says PXP’s IT team contacted Nutanix for support, rather than VMware. “From our perspective, we had access to VMware experts via Nutanix, which gave us a way to get support that was also deeply coupled with our Nutanix setup.” In effect, PXP had Nutanix experts who were also experts in supporting Nutanix on VMware, which, he says, was something unavailable from VMware support.
However, the Broadcom strategy to shift customers from VMware perpetual licences to a subscription model also meant PXP would be unable to buy newer versions of the hypervisor as a perpetual licence or buy a new support contract, which as Thomas notes, is a risk to the business: “Once our current perpetual licences reached end of life, there was no route forward and Broadcom would not offer support on those perpetual VMware licences.”
The choice was either to continue running the workloads, but with no support, relying instead on the support provided by Nutanix, or move to a subscription, where the innovation being built into VMware was considered not useful enough for PXP to justify the additional expense.
“Whilst Nutanix is fabulous at providing support for us in production environments, it is really dangerous for us [not to have VMware support] if we start hitting issues that require VMware fixes or VMware support,” says Thomas.
A different approach with Unity
As PXP began assessing platform choices for the new Unity payment platform, Thomas says the company had an eye on the future. It was looking at eventually moving to a modern, containerised environment that would use Kubernetes and would be developed using microservices.
When it came to the question of whether PXP should stick with VMware, the answer was that its existing hypervisor platform did not fit in with how the company wanted to evolve its new payment platform.
“Nutanix provides more future-proofing going forward, especially as we have a hybrid cloud architecture,” says Thomas. So the company selected Nutanix AHV as the hypervisor for its payment platform going forward.
Thomas says the Nutanix Move tool did the job of converting VMware virtual machines to AHV. However, some workloads were not natively supported by AHV. One key application was RSA.
“We use RSA to do multifactor authentication. It was one of the workloads with a big red cross on my list of what is achievable.” Given the importance of RSA multifactor authentication, he says: “Nutanix took that problem and solved it in their labs, coming back with a working solution. Nutanix was able to remove any kind of barriers we put in front of AHV.”
IT strategy with flexibility
The conversation with PXP’s CIO demonstrates not only that IT architectures are not fixed, but also, if something works and performs its job reliably for the business, there is no driver to make a change to a more modern approach to IT architecture.
However, as the IT landscape changes, and when assessing IT architecture options for a new project, the existing approach should be reassessed. In the case of PXP, the assessment happened because the company’s IT modernisation for a new payment platform occurred as Broadcom began pushing VCF subscriptions.
Most IT leaders would not anticipate changing a core piece of IT architecture unless it is broken. But what PXP’s migration to Nutanix AHV shows is that changes in the IT industry mean IT leaders should always have a plan “B”, giving them the flexibility to move to alternative IT architectures.
