As a global MSP operating in over 80 locations worldwide, Continent 8 Technologies is no stranger to the challenges faced by customers working in the highly regulated iGaming sector. Particularly those wanting to take advantage of public cloud platforms encountering difficulties due to strict locality, security and oversight requirements of regulatory authorities.
Such difficulties can only be addressed properly by the host provider. With its existing infrastructure requiring a refresh, Continent 8 focused on finding a better alternative rather than a simple like-for-like upgrade. An alternative which would be both more flexible and scalable as well as easy to manage to cope with a wide range of different iGaming workloads across a varied and rapidly growing customer base.
After much research a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was established as the best way of meeting this potentially daunting challenge, with a number of leading HCI vendors and products considered and extensively trialled before opting for the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
The first deployments were in four datacentres located in the Isle of Man, Ireland, Malta and Montreal in Canada. Each was equipped with a suitably sized Nutanix cluster with all-flash storage nodes and a VMware hypervisor to deliver virtual machines on-demand for customers to host and manage their iGaming workloads. Since, five more, similarly configured, deployments have followed, in Taiwan, Gibraltar, Colombia and Toronto, plus the first public cloud platform to be approved by gaming regulators in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In total, Continent 8 now has over 70 Nutanix nodes up and working to deliver its public cloud infrastructure. All of these are managed using Prism Central and all use the redundancy and replication tools built into the Nutanix software to provide the resilience needed to meet regulatory requirements, with Veeam software added to provide further backup and recovery capabilities.
It didn’t take long to get the first datacentres working, and not much longer for them to be approved by the relevant regulatory bodies. At which point it became clear that Continent 8 had made the right decision in choosing Nutanix as the preferred platform for its public cloud iGaming solution.
The Continent 8 iGaming public cloud continues to grow with additional nodes being added across the network and new locations rolled out as customer and workload numbers rise. Beyond servicing that growth, the team is also looking at the use of Nutanix and its AHV hypervisor to enable customers to host their own private clouds in Continent 8 datacentres. Other plans include adding Database as a Service (DaaS) to a growing list of Continent 8 products along with support for containers and other cloud-native technologies using Nutanix software tools and services.
