Versent shifts Golding Contractors from VMware Cloud to Nutanix NC2

Telstra-owned Versent has helped Golding Contractors modernise its IT environment by migrating from VMware Cloud (VMC) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Nutanix Cloud (NC2).

Golding Contractors is headquartered in Milton, Brisbane and operates across Queensland and NSW, specialising in civil infrastructure, urban development and mining contract services to deliver projects in urban, regional and remote locations.

Golding IT manager Dom Johnston said that in the six years he has held his role, the company’s infrastructure operations and support businesses have seen users increase by 400 per cent.

This led to challenges with managing its data. As a contracting company, Golding needs to be able adapt to whatever it is thrown into next, whether that’s an acquisition, new project or new requirements at an existing project.

However, its existing VMC on AWS platform, although hosted on public cloud, wasn’t flexible.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we couldn’t do there. For example, certainly in the early stages, we couldn’t bring in EBS [elastic block store] storage natively into that environment,” he said.

Even though it was running on AWS, the infrastructure and software stack was managed by VMware, explained Johnston.

The choice of shifting to NC2 meant Golding has “a lot more flexibility” on how it runs and manages its IT workloads.

Johnston said this allows the company to use NC2 and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platforms to run applications or services, whichever suits its needs best.

“The big key challenge for us is that we always need to be able to respond to whatever the requirements are,” he said. “The new platform that we have with NC2 provides takes [flexibility to] a whole other level, because we’re adjacent to that AWS environment now.

“That then means that when we have a requirement to spin up new workloads, we’ve got much better flexibility to be able to do the stuff that we need there.”

Disturbingly simple

The shift from VMC to NC2 was “disturbingly simple”, noted Johnston, adding it was one of the most seamless projects that he has been involved in from a migration perspective.

Johnston even planned a two-week holiday in Japan during the migration in January this year.

“We were doing a big bang migration so I was quite nervous about going away,” he said. “I have a very, very strong internal team and we’re working with a person who brought some really great capability to the table as well.

“I came back from leave and basically was just told, ‘There’s nothing that you need to do’.”

Normally on similar projects, Johnston would have stepped in and pulled different people together for status reports.

“I stayed essentially completely hands-off,” he said. “The Nutanix professional services guys and the person team set us up so that we ran that migration, essentially as a DR [disaster recovery] cutover.”

Although Johnston describes it as simplistic, he explained that there was a lot of pre-work that occurred prior to the live date.

His team took the workloads so that were backing up into NC2 and shut down the VMC cluster. Those workloads were then brought up as a disaster recovery event into the NC2 environment.

Johnston said there were “a couple of hiccups here and there”, but a 36-hour outage was planned with the business.

“I think we handed it back to them after 24 hours, so we gave them back 12 hours over that weekend,” he said. “We leaned very heavily on Nutanix professional services and Versent as a key partner,” he said.

“Realistically, I wanted us to focus on evaluating.”

Working with Versent

According to Johnston, he worked very closely with Versent business development manager Helena Hawes and had worked with her prior to Golding.

“[Helena’s] always been able to bring the right capability [including] if she brings the wrong person to a meeting,” he said. “I’ll let her know about it and she’ll reorient for next time.

“She’s got a fairly good understanding of what how I want to work.”

For example, during past projects, one of the biggest issues he faced was managing his internal team’s time to allow the external team to deliver what was needed.

Lilia Guan travelled to Nutanix .Next 2025 conference as a guest of Nutanix.