Hero shapes up with Nutanix

International food company Hero has selected Nutanix to bring the Citrix-based VDI infrastructure located in its Netherlands data centre into the new world of Web-scale IT.

Founded 125 years ago, in 1866 in Lenzburg, Switzerland, Hero is an international food company, passionate about naturally good food and committed to making high quality products easily accessible to consumers throughout the world. It has over 4,300 employees in nineteen countries, including the Netherlands where its existing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), based on legacy infrastructure, was coming to the end of its lease and required replacement.

Negotiated through the customer’s preferred systems integration partner - Citrix and VMware specialist INISI - the contract was won in the face of both competition and the customer’s initial reluctance to abandon proven legacy technology. Thanks to the existing relationship with INISI and a successful proof of concept trial, Hero management were soon convinced of the value of hyper-convergence and have now gone live with the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, which is working well and delivering performance rewards well beyond the original brief.

“The existing infrastructure had served its purpose, but in a highly virtualised world, was becoming increasingly difficult to manage,” commented Paul Weijland, ICT Manager for Hero in the Netherlands. “INISI introduced us to Nutanix and explained the advantages of Web-scale IT and its unified approach to compute and storage management, but we needed to experience it for ourselves before committing to the adoption of such a relatively new technology.”

As well as explaining in detail the benefits of hyper-convergence and arranging a live demonstration of a Citrix VDI implementation, INISI worked with Nutanix to deliver a proof of concept trial to enable Hero staff to see for themselves not only how easy the Nutanix infrastructure was to manage, one of the company’s key evaluation criteria, but also its potential to deliver greater performance.

“Although not the main reason for upgrading,” explains Weijland, “performance was definitely enhanced with SQL database jobs - for example, finishing in two thirds of the time normally taken by the legacy infrastructure, plus an overall decrease of CPU utilisation across the board.”

The speed of the initial migration also impressed, with the proof of concept installed and hosting production workloads in less than 90 minutes. But it wasn’t all about the technology - the relationship with Nutanix partner INISI, with its knowledge of the Hero network and applications, further helped to convince Weijland and the company of the merits of upgrading to the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform.

“Not only does INISI have specialist knowledge and skills which we need, its staff share the same values as us,” says Weijland. ”We know them individually and can trust them to take responsibility for what they do, freeing me and my staff up to concentrate on plans for the future.”

Dirk Marichal, Vice President EMEA & India at Nutanix, is confident that Hero’s future plans will include further adoption of Web-scale IT, as the international food company reaps the rewards of its decision to migrate to a hyper-scale converged infrastructure using the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. “The benefits of this technology migration towards web-scale infrastructure – scaling easily to the demand curve of both compute and storage, simplifying manageability and driving down ownership costs of the data centre – means that Web-scale IT solutions and applications, and the vision of the software-defined data centre, are already becoming pervasive in the marketplace across a wide range of industries.”