Zutari, an infrastructure engineering and advisory practice, has modernised the server environment at its main data centre in Ashlea Gardens, Pretoria, to support rising performance demands and improve operational resilience.
The project, delivered by Datacentrix, a hybrid ICT systems integrator and digital transformation partner, also included the expansion of storage capacity at Zutari’s Cape Town data centre, to enable seamless virtual machine replication between its two sites.
Aging infrastructure reaches end-of-life
By mid-2025, Zutari’s primary server environment had reached end-of-life and end-of-support status, and upcoming platform shifts created additional urgency.
“We were moving to VMware vSphere 9.0 and the legacy CPUs weren’t supported,” explains Stephan Botha, IT Operations Lead at Zutari. “Our existing servers had performed well, but we had reached a point where replacement was essential.”
Datacentrix, a long-standing infrastructure partner to Zutari for more than seven years, was engaged to evaluate workloads, model future requirements and guide technology selection.
“Datacentrix supported us from start to finish,” he adds. “They provided options and recommendations, including the comparisons we needed to make an informed decision.”
A modern, high-performance platform for the future
After a full assessment, Datacentrix recommended x86-based servers for the Ashlea Gardens data centre, delivering higher performance gains, improved energy efficiency and stability, cost benefits, and better alignment with Zutari’s SQL-heavy workloads.
To meet disaster recovery needs, Datacentrix expanded production storage at Zutari’s Cape Town site. This enables the seamless replication of critical virtual machines from Ashlea Gardens to Cape Town.
As part of the solution, Zutari renewed its VMware licensing, moving to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and implementing VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to automate and orchestrate cross-site replication.
“Zutari needed a platform that could support future workloads,” says Kristoff Kasch, senior architect at Datacentrix. “The combination of the new servers, storage platform and the automated disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity solution gives them a modern, scalable foundation with built-in resilience.”
A step change in performance and efficiency
The modernisation project has delivered immediate value to Zutari.
“We were able to consolidate from 12 production servers to just seven, which made a significant difference to our cooling and power consumption,” Botha comments. “While we don’t measure usage granularly, we are definitely seeing the positive impact on our utility bill.
“We’ve also observed noteworthy performance gains – performance has tripled, if not more – and the difference has been clear across our workloads.”
Furthermore, Zutari’s disaster recovery posture has been strengthened. With expanded production storage capacity, Zutari can now fully replicate its 20 most critical virtual machines to Cape Town.
The project also forms a key part of Zutari’s journey towards ISO 27001 certification, which requires all infrastructure to be fully supported, maintained and under warranty.
“This was step one of multiple office upgrades that we need to complete,” Botha discloses.
“Datacentrix has guided and supported us across multiple environments and even helped with the seamless move of our data centre to our new head office building in Ashlea Gardens several years ago. From maintaining our infrastructure to supporting offices across Africa, they’ve been a one-stop shop. We couldn’t ask for a better partner.”
Kasch echoes this sentiment from the Datacentrix side. “Trust is earned over time. Zutari knows we’ll bring the right expertise, deploy correctly and continue to optimise the environment so that they enjoy maximum business impact and return on investment.”
