Mumbai-based Indian pharmaceutical MNC IPCA Laboratories has been leveraging Nutanix’s hybrid multi-cloud for a while now in the production and marketing of drugs, formulations, drug intermediates, and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).
Known for its global presence, IPCA is a leading API exporter from India, recognised for its reliable supply chain and cost competitiveness in the pharmaceutical market.
“We witnessed a significant increase in application speed, approximately60 to 70%, compared to the previous standalone setup,” Ashok Nayak, chief information officer, IPCA, told AIM during Nutanix’s flagship conference .NEXT held in Mumbai last week.
During the infrastructure transition from legacy systems, the primary goal for IPCA was to identify high-performance systems to ensure uninterrupted 24/7 operation, crucial for maintaining data integrity and security, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. The company sought an infrastructure that could scale up rapidly and efficiently to meet demands as applications were frequently added during their digitalisation journey.
“And that is when Nutanix solved our challenges as it provides the necessary functionality to handle large datasets and offered benefits in terms of performance, scalability, and visibility of both centralised and decentralised setups,” Nayak added.
High-performance resources were essential to prevent downtime. Key factors making this happen included low latency, application speed, and the management of extensive databases related to various functions such as manufacturing, supply chain, R&D, events, medical services, and clinical trials.
How Nutanix is Helping Indian Pharma
“Considering the diversity of our customer needs, we ensure assistance regardless of where they choose to deploy their applications,” Andrew Brinded, chief revenue officer at Nutanix told AIM during the event.
Customers have varied preferences for handling data in these deployments, with some choosing local analysis and storage, while others opting for centralising information.
“What we provide is that common experience wherever it is, you have the same management plane, whether you’re moving workloads, the public cloud wherever you keep your on-premise or whether you’re having an edge and then you have the same data plane across everything,” explained Faiz Shakir, VP and managing director – sales, Nutanix India and SAARC.
This approach contrasts with traditional architectures, where managing diverse environments with separate teams for servers, storage, and networking can be complex.
In a traditional setup (presumably not using Nutanix), it would typically require a team of five to ten individuals to manage various aspects of the infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking.
However, with Nutanix’s technology and consolidation approach, the need for personnel significantly decreases. “We have seen that under Nutanix, the same tasks can typically be handled by one or two individuals. This reduction in manpower indicates a streamlined and more efficient management process, contributing to overall operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” Mike Phelan, SVP of global solution sales at Nutanix told AIM.
This consolidation also extends to the data centre, with Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) approach leading to savings in floor space and energy consumption.
Another important feature which has helped IPCA is the data security solutions provided by Nutanix. Its data storage fabric, along with encryption and compression enhances the security of the company’s data.
“In the pharmaceutical industry, traceability of data and proving the source to regulators is crucial, making data security our top priority. Nutanix’s functionality in providing secure data storage has helped us in securing sensitive pharmaceutical data,” said Nayak.
Not just IPCA, Apollo Hospitals also leverages the Nutanix cloud platform. By running hospital information system (HIS), electronic medical records (EMR), and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) applications on Nutanix, Apollo witnessed quick hospital admissions, ensured highly available patient records and diagnostic-quality imaging, and freed up IT resources for strategic projects.
Managing Generative AI Workloads
Back in August, Nutanix came up with Nutanix’s GPT-in-a-Box for its customer base of 25000, offering a unified, scalable AI solution, built on the Nutanix cloud platform that supports GPU-enabled servers for diverse compute, storage, and networking needs.
It aims to simplify the deployment and management of AI workloads with open-source collaborations with the PyTorch and Kubeflow MLOps platform and supports a range of LLMs, including Llama2, Falcon, and MPT. Nutanix also partnered with NVIDIA to enhance enterprise AI so that customers can leverage NVIDIA’s GPUs for scalable, efficient AI workloads in modernised data centres and diverse cloud applications.
“Our early investments in AI, coupled with the integration of ML for capacity planning, provided a dynamic platform capable of auto-size and auto-scaling,” said Phelan.
India as a Market
“We have chosen to make significant investments in the Indian market, with approximately a third of our workforce based here,” said Shakir.
Nutanix is significantly scaling up its operations in India with several key initiatives including opening a large new facility in Pune in 2022, serving as a crucial hub for their global service and support, and providing round-the-clock assistance. Bengaluru serves as the India headquarters for the company.
“India’s market is particularly exciting for us due to its size, economic growth, and the rapid adoption of technology. The enthusiasm for technology in India is substantial, given the country’s strong orientation toward software,” concluded Brinded.
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