How the Houston Texans Tackled Hybrid Cloud Strategy

In spring 2024, the IT staff kicked off the modernization effort by standardizing on Rubrik to back up data on-premises and in the cloud. Then, in the summer, they replaced traditional servers and storage with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) equipment and software.

Now, in 2025, the IT department plans to expand its Nutanix environment to Microsoft Azure to run some workloads in the cloud, but also to serve as a secondary data center for disaster recovery. If an outage occurs in the data center at NRG Stadium, they can keep operations running in the cloud.

The Houston Texans turned to CDW to assist every step of the way, from pricing vendor solutions to helping design the forthcoming cloud migration, Schmitz says.

“The ability for CDW to be vendor-agnostic and have in-house experts to help us with our evaluations and weigh the pros and cons sets the stage for a successful project,” he says.

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Why the Texans Chose Hybrid Cloud

With its strategy, the Texans are adopting two big trends in enterprise IT: hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure. A couple of years ago, many enterprises wanted to move everything to the cloud, but that’s rare now as organizations see the benefit of a hybrid approach, says Robert Libbert, field CTO for CDW’s Digital Velocity team.

“Most companies have determined that there are times they want their data on-premises, either for regulatory, compliance, or audit or security reasons,” Libbert says.

Matthew Jones, Texans director of IT infrastructure, agrees, saying the hybrid cloud gives the franchise the best of both worlds. The cloud provides scalability and redundancy, and in the future will allow the team to shrink its on-premises IT footprint. The team will always need in-house infrastructure because both business and football operations require fast access to critical applications and data, and an on-premises environment ensures good performance and low latency, he says.

For example, when the football team goes out of town for training camp, the IT infrastructure team takes “travel pods” full of IT equipment. They essentially build a mobile data center at the training facility, so from a tech standpoint, the team gets the comforts of home while out on the road, Jones says.

“We bring an entire data center with us, so coaches and staff can quickly access their file servers,” he says. “They can print and connect to Wi-Fi as if they’re in the stadium.”

Why the Texans Embraced Nutanix HCI

In December 2023, Schmitz hired Jones and entrusted him with upgrading the team’s data center infrastructure. Jones assessed the existing technology, shared his vision and got Schmitz’s buy-in. While the big picture strategy is hybrid cloud, Jones’ first task was to replace the existing data backup solution with a modernized backup solution, including cloud integration, to increase recovery time. He also wanted to add a layer of security with backup vulnerability scanning. With just one data center at NRG Stadium and the backup solution running on a virtualized server, the organization had no redundancy.

With CDW’s help, the IT department last April deployed Rubrik Enterprise Edition, an on-premises data backup and recovery appliance with four nodes for redundancy. From there, the data is backed up a second time to the Rubrik cloud.

With that complete, Jones’ next step was to replace 8-year-old servers and storage with new Nutanix HCI equipment and software. HCI has grown increasingly popular among enterprises because it combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization software into a small-footprint appliance. Compared with the traditional three-tier network architecture that the Texans previously used, HCI systems — managed through a centralized software tool — are simple to deploy and scale.

Jones wanted Nutanix for those reasons, but also because the Nutanix Cloud Platform software would pave the way for the Texans to easily adopt and manage a hybrid cloud environment. By running Nutanix software on-premises and in the cloud, the IT staff can seamlessly migrate local apps and data to the cloud and manage the entire environment through a single software tool.

The organization went live with Nutanix in June 2024, consolidating from 10 blade servers and a storage area network to six Nutanix nodes for the on-premises data center and travel pods.

“When I look at the cost of the hardware of our previous solution, Nutanix gives us more compute and storage and a better level of reliability at a significantly better price,” Jones says.

Jones is a hands-on IT leader and wanted his IT infrastructure staff to learn the technology, so together they installed the equipment with Nutanix engineers onsite. Once Nutanix was operational, the IT staff lifted and shifted applications and data over a six-month period and completed the migration in November, Schmitz says.

CDW assisted with scoping the Nutanix and Rubrik solutions, delivered the equipment and involved the vendors’ engineers. All of it was done through CDW.

In fact, when the Texans pursue any new IT project, they call CDW Advanced Technology Director Brian Huber. The team has relied on CDW for 15 years, so there is a lot of built-in trust. “We act as an extension of the Houston Texans’ IT team,” Huber says.

During the Nutanix project, CDW engineers were available on standby when Jones had questions. “I’ve called CDW late in the evening and said, ‘I’m going to do this. Do you have someone to verify that I’m not going to blow things up?’ CDW is fantastic, and always has someone available to assist when we need it.”

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The Texans’ Plans for Microsoft Azure

The Houston Texans IT department is now preparing for the project’s second phase: adopting Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure. When that is complete, the organization will beef up its disaster recovery posture even more by backing up the NC2 cloud environment with Rubrik in the cloud, Jones says.

The team will standardize on Azure because it already has a small Azure implementation running.

Overall, the organization operates about 150 virtual servers in-house, which includes a document management system and other business apps. Jones plans to keep about 30% of workloads in-house, moving 70% to the Nutanix environment on Azure.

Frequently accessed applications and data, such as file storage for the coaches’ video system and creative media systems, will stay on-premises for better performance, he says.

Jones is collaborating with CDW to design and deploy NC2 in Azure. He hopes to launch the project in early 2025 and complete it by summer.

The Texans are considering adopting a multiregion Azure cloud environment that bolsters business continuity and disaster recovery without much added cost, says CDW’s Libbert. CDW will also design the data storage architecture and ensure data management and protection is consistent on-premises and in the cloud, says Jennifer Borders, a CDW senior business development manager.

“CDW has been a great asset,” Jones says. “Brian Huber and his team will come onsite, and we will go through our design plans and talk through it for hours.”

Overall, the IT modernization effort has made a big impact on the Texans organization. Rubrik provides redundancy and much faster data restoration, while Nutanix is easier to manage and maintain, resulting in improved productivity and time savings for the IT staff, he says.

And once the Nutanix environment on Azure is up and running, the Texans will have a much-needed secondary data center to split workloads between sites and offer scalability.

“The ability to shift to the cloud gives us the resiliency that we’ve been looking for,” Schmitz says.