Time Savings Provisioning Databases

Evidence and data. A common challenge across the interviewees’ organizations was that provisioning new databases was a manual and slow process. New requests often had to be reviewed by several teams (e.g., data architecture, platform, networking, storage, security) before a DBA could act on the request. This created wait times of two to six weeks for developers initiating the requests, which hampered development processes. Interviewees explained that NDB transformed database provisioning from this lengthy process that touched many roles into a fully automated, self-service workflow that could be completed in minutes or hours. This improved developer productivity and enabled faster time to market with much lower operational burdens.

• Interviewees said that with NDB, DBAs gained the ability to create templates that automate different configurations for databases, so they are effectively removed from the individual provisioning steps. These templates remove any potential errors from the provisioning process and ensure all new databases adhere to organizational standards. The senior database consultant at a banking organization stated: “Security and compliance became easy because it was just one time we had to create the template. Now I’m 100% sure all clusters are compliant because they come from that template.”

• More than one interviewee said their organization automated the provisioning process through self-service portals or automated development pipelines so developers could provision databases directly when needed. This enabled developers to more rapidly test and deploy new code, which is a key requirement in agile development. The manager, database engineering, at an investments organization remarked: “[We go] from idea to deployment in an hour. That’s the agility we needed.” Several interviewees also commented that the number of databases provisioned by developers increased over time because of these efficiencies.

• The combination of standardized templates and automated processes resulted in massive time reductions for database provisioning. Most interviewees said their organization reduced wait times from several weeks to only a few hours. In addition, they explained that for open-source database engines, NDB automated the provisioning of all third-party components needed to provide a highly available setup.

• Interviewees said that NDB’s profiles standardized the provisioning of their organization’s database server and entire cluster. These profiles define the allowable operating system and database versions, the amount of CPU and RAM to allocate, and networking — among other parameters. They explained that when NDB creates a database, it starts with the build out of the database cluster and, once the cluster is created, NDB then creates and attaches storage for the planned databases on each VM in the cluster. The end result is that customers can standardize their database server builds and automate the entire provisioning flow with NDB.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite’s development teams provision 120 databases each month. This number grows by 10% each year.

• Each provisioning request saves 10 hours of task time with elimination of multiple teams having to review the request and a DBA processing it.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an IT role is $77.

• Approximately two weeks of wait time is eliminated for developers per request.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for a developer is $107.

• A recapture rate of 50% is applied to these time savings. This assumes that about half of all recaptured time is used productively.

Risks. The amount of time savings and productivity improvement may vary based on:

• The number of provisioning requests from developer teams.

• The number of roles involved in database provision requests, which may vary based on the size of the IT department and the sophistication of the IT protocols.

• Average salaries and benefits for various IT roles.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.4 million.

Savings In Database Licensing Costs

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations reduced their legacy database and virtualization licensing costs via several means with NDB. The annual savings among these organizations ranged from approximately $100,000 to $1 million.

• The manager, database engineering, in the investment industry said their company is in process of migrating a large portion of its structured data to open-source databases and that it will reap substantial savings once completed. They commented, “We were able to sunset some of our database licenses by moving simulation workloads to PostgreSQL on NDB.”

• An interviewee from the hospitality company said their organization saved $380,000 per year by reducing the number of cores used for compute and storage as part of the NDB migration. Other interviewees said that with Nutanix, their organizations created smaller dedicated clusters for their licensed databases, reducing the number of physical cores that needed to be licensed. At time of deployment, a customer can choose cluster architecture where there are dedicated servers that run databases (which require NDB licensing) and dedicated servers that provide storage processing (which are licensed at a lower cost). 

• Interviewees from organizations using NDB’s cloning capabilities said they were able to save license costs associated with database cores previously licensed for testing and backup purposes. The manager, database engineering, at an investment company stated, “We don’t need to license additional environments for testing anymore, we just clone what we need.”

• The senior database consultant at a bank said their institution eliminated its [virtualization license] costs by migrating its database workloads to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and NDB.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the composite organization reduces the number of cores licensed for proprietary database software by about 10%, which equates to $500,000 per year.

Risks. Savings in database licensing costs may vary based on:

• The number of cores licensed for database compute and storage.

• The number of licenses for nonproduction environments.

• The degree to which the organizations plans to migrate database workloads to open-source packages.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.1 million.

Time Savings From Automated Cloning And Refresh

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations used cloning to automatically provision new environments for testing and development and to create backups for rapid disaster recovery (DR). They saved hours of DBA time because they didn’t need to use traditional backup scripts. Clones are created from standardized templates, and interviewees said they are created more quickly than traditional backups while consuming much less storage.

• Interviewees said that prior to investing in NDB, their organizations used a variety of backup software tools or database scripts to create database copies used by developers. This required DBA effort and sometimes consumed full storage allocation on database appliances. But they said with NDB, developers gained the ability to clone production data for testing without DBA intervention, which accelerated application delivery. The engineering manager, database platform services, at a retail organization explained: “Self-service cloning means developers no longer wait for DBAs. It’s a huge boost for agility.”

• One interviewee said their organization used NDB Time Machine for development and DR testing. It created clones on its DR site with no additional storage consumption, avoiding the need for full-size copies. Time Machine rapidly snapshots, recovers, and clones databases.  

• Traditional backup methods create a full physical copy of the source database, while database cloning in NDB doesn’t duplicate the data blocks. Instead, it creates a new set of metadata pointers that refer to the original data blocks of the source database’s snapshot so the initial clone consumes just a small amount of additional storage for the metadata. When new data is written to the clone, only the changed blocks are written to a new location on the storage, and the metadata pointers are updated for the clone. Interviewees noted this ensures that only the unique data is stored for each clone, rather than multiple full copies.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• With NDB’s storage capabilities, the composite saves $125,000 each year.

• Developers initiate an average of five cloning events per month via automated routines. Each event saves 40 hours of wait time and five hours of DBA administrative time.

• The composite has an estimated one refresh event per month.

• Each refresh event saves 40 hours of developer wait time.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for a developer is $107.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for a DBA is $65.

• A recapture rate of 50% is applied to this time savings.

Risks. The amount of time savings and productivity improvement may vary based on:

• The organization’s backup policies and types of storage.

• The extent to which the organization transitions from traditional backup routines and applications to use NDB cloning/refresh.

• The number of cloning and restore requests from developer teams.

• The average salaries and benefits for various IT roles.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $366,000.

Time Savings From Automated Patching

Evidence and data. Interviewees said production database patching was typically a quarterly event and required coordination across several IT teams (e.g., database administration, security, platform, architecture). Each patch cycle involved service requests, approvals, and scheduling, which often took between hours and days. The process was disconnected for organizations with multiple database platforms.

• Interviewees explained that prior to using NDB, production patching required anywhere from 45 minutes to six hours per database and that multinode, on-premises proprietary databases consumed the most time. These cycles had to be scheduled at off-peak times (i.e., nights and weekends), and DBAs had to actively monitor the process. But interviewees said NDB’s automated and bulk patching virtually eliminated DBA overtime. The manager, systems administration, at a hospitality organization said: “We’ve automated patching. It used to take hours and burn out the team.”

• For dev and test databases, patching was more ad hoc as part of development workflows. Developers were still required to coordinate patching with DBA teams. But interviewees said with NDB, developers gained the ability to self-schedule and trigger patches via an NDB portal. DBAs are no longer involved, which helped avoid disruption during active development cycles. Coordination time was eliminated because patching now takes less than an hour per database. The engineering manager, database platform services, at a retail organization said: “Patch coordination used to take days. Now developers do it themselves.”

• Two interviewees said their organization previously relied on outside support for their proprietary databases. The head of automation at the government organization explained that this limited the frequency of patching cycles: “We had to pay consultants to do patching because, [it took] 15 days just to patch one system. So we could not afford to do patching more than annually. Now we patch [this database] in three hours instead of 15 days.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite has 250 databases, and 40 are in production.

• The organization patches production databases on a quarterly cycle, and it patches the remainder an average of four times per year.

• The composite patches 5% of databases manually outside of NDB.

• Previously, DBAs spent an average of 1.5 hours patching each database and developers spent 2.5 hours per database waiting on patching routines. With NDB, patching consumes five minutes per database.

• The fully burdened hourly salary for a database administrator is $65.

• The fully burdened hourly salary for a developer is $107.

• A recapture rate of 50% is applied to time savings for both DBAs and developers.

Risks. The time savings and productivity improvement may vary based on:

• The number and variety of databases in the organization’s estate, which would impact the portion that can be patched via NDB automation.

• The average salaries and benefits for database administrators.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $343,000.

Storage And Time Savings In Backup/Restore

Evidence and data. Interviewees said database teams saved time during daily backup and restore tasks. Even with use of database management scripts, NDB enabled their organizations to reduce the time and effort required for backups and restores.

• Interviewees explained that with NDB snapshots, database teams gained the ability to execute backup routines and use less storage resources. They also restore databases much more quickly from these snapshots rather than full backups. These times were reduced by 60% to 80%. The manager, database engineering, at an investment company said: “A 10 TB PostgreSQL database restoration would have taken close to six hours prior to NDB. Now we can get that database restored within a little over six minutes.” 

• Organizations also saved money on their storage costs due to NDB’s compression algorithms and other storage efficiencies. The senior database consultant at the banking institution said their company cut its annual on-premises storage expense by more than 50%.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Using NDB’s storage capabilities save the composite $125,000 annually.

• DBAs conduct production backup routines on a daily basis. These routines are compressed by one hour from automated script initiation and reduced backup monitoring.

• There is one restore event per month.

• With NDB, DBAs save two hours of effort during restore events.

• The fully burdened hourly salary for a database administrator is $65.

• A recapture rate of 75% is applied to the time savings.

Risks. The amount of time savings and productivity improvement may vary based on:

• The number and variety of databases backed up daily and the number of restores required, which impacts the amount of time needed for these tasks.

• Average salaries and benefits for database administrators.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $322,000.

Reduction In Database Monitoring

Evidence and data. Database teams realized cost and time savings from routine, daily maintenance tasks. Interviewees said this enabled their organizations to reduce reliance and spending on external consultants or database vendor support and transition DBAs into more challenging database engineering work.

• Two interviewees said their organization eliminated spending on external consultants, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Two other interviewees said their organization freed as much as 50% of DBA time to focus on more database engineering activities in support of application development.

• Interviewees explained the NDB management console provides centralized visibility of all databases. They said monitoring that previously took hours per day was automated and can be completed in half the time it previously took DBAs. The manager, database engineering, at an investment organization stated: “Monitoring used to be a manual checklist. Now it’s just a dashboard we glance at.”

• NDB provides alerting and notifications about the success or failure of automated database lifecycle operations and warns users if any of these activities are not working as expected. For Time Machine backups, NDB provides the organizations with health monitoring on the state of backups. Interviewees noted NDB provides flexibility to integrate with third-party database monitoring solutions in lieu of natively providing database-level health monitoring.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Prior to using NDB, eight DBAs each spent about 30 minutes per day monitoring their respective databases and performing maintenance tasks.

• With NDB, one DBA spends about 60 minutes per day doing the same work.

• The fully burdened hourly salary for a database administrator is $65.

• A recapture rate of 75% is applied to the time savings.

Risks. The amount of time savings and productivity improvement may vary based on:

• The number and variety of databases in the estate, which would impact the amount of manual monitoring before NDB.

• Average salaries and benefits for database administrators.  

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $85,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improvements in database security and compliance. Each interviewee emphasized that NDB enabled template-based deployments while ensuring consistent configurations and better compliance with internal and external audits. Interviewees mentioned that auditors typically focus on standardized database creation and maintenance processes. The senior database consultant at the bank elaborated: “NDB made it very easy because we have to create a template just one time, and then I am 100% sure it’s compliant. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare for us to make sure that everything is done correctly on [15] clusters.” Other features like encryption at rest, patch automation, and integrated monitoring further strengthen data protection and resilience against threats while providing processes that make compliance verification faster and more reliable.

• Increased satisfaction for the DBA team. Interviewees explained that before using NDB, DBAs spent significant time on manual provisioning, patching, and refresh cycles — often during nights or weekends, leading to fatigue. But they said NDB’s automation and self-service capabilities allow these tasks to be completed in minutes instead of hours, which frees DBAs to focus on performance tuning, building automation pipelines, and future-proofing processes. Several interviewees noted this has made their teams much happier and allowed DBAs to learn additional skills. The manager, database engineering, at the investment organization said: “My DBA team has historically been very ops-focused. Now I have the opportunity to involve them in engineering efforts.” This change not only boosts morale but also enhances career growth by enabling DBAs to work on higher-value projects.

• Having Nutanix as a strategic partner. Interviewees said they see Nutanix as a strategic partner that drives modernization and agility. The government interviewee cited collaborating with Nutanix for MongoDB sharding and native database DR via Oracle Cascaded Data Guard with multiple standbys.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Nutanix NDB and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Expanding NDB to encompass multiple database types, including open source. Interviewees said their organizations plan to expand their use of NDB to include modern database types (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB) to further increase efficiencies and reduce costs. They explained that this would bring more databases under the standardized procedures that increase compliance. The head of automation at the government organization stated, “[NDB’s] ability to support multiple engines means we can consolidate different database types under one governance model.”

• Operating in a hybrid environment. NDB abstracts the underlying environment layer, giving customers the option to run across on-premises, co-locations, and the public cloud, even in the same deployment. The manager, systems administration, at a hospitality organization stated: “We might look at moving the Nutanix NDB cluster to the cloud using NC2. [It’s the] same interface and same features, just without paying for hardware.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).