Building Products Leader Gunnersen Picks Nutanix to Support Its ERP
Announcement posted by Nutanix 06 Nov 2013
“ERP is absolutely critical for us. Without it we couldn’t survive. If the system goes down for a day, we cannot provide the requisite levels of service to customers, suppliers and staff; and obviously we just can’t let that happen. That’s why we thought long and hard about the infrastructure that was going to support our needs and ultimately chose Nutanix,” said Steve Watson, IS Manager for Gunnersen.
But Watson initially believed his options were limited, so he turned to Frank Angotti of Gunnersen’s trusted partner, Advantage IT, for guidance. Angotti knew that Watson needed the right kind of hardware and software to run Gunnersen’s virtualised environment, but was reluctant to buy more SAN because, among other drawbacks, it would not be quick enough to handle the massive data flows generated by the business nor be easily scalable to accommodate the significant growth Gunnersen anticipated.
“Nutanix protected the investment in our VMware environment. Not only that, but Frank showed us that without a doubt the performance advantages of Nutanix were powerful. While there was a price differential with Nutanix, it wasn’t price that sold us, but the stability and the speed,” Watson said. “As soon as you put discs out on a network you rapidly increase environmental risk and latency issues, but you don’t have those issues with Nutanix. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are so fast it is not funny when it comes to data caching and since it is highly probable that most of our database will be permanently cached, you are talking about extremely fast data turnaround, all of it centralised in a box.”
“We are very happy to have Gunnersen join the Nutanix family, not least because it is more evidence of how the dependability and power of our converged compute and storage platform can support massive organisational needs around order processing, resource planning, disaster recovery and market analysis,” said Wayne Neich, Nutanix Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand.
Watson echoed Neich’s observation, outlining his company’s wide-ranging computing needs which require that Gunnersen is able to conduct both fast, real-time analysis of worldwide supplies and heavy analysis of past ordering behavior to determine future ordering. In addition, Gunnersen’s systems need to support a wide-range of customers, administrative processes and real-world distribution and delivery through its own fleet of trucks and independent contractors.
“Again, we chose Nutanix because it promised to support all of these activities and do so with two to three times the capacity of our legacy solution. What used to be 16 rack units (RUs) prior to Nutanix is now just two,” Watson said. “Nutanix is so small, it’s almost scary. In fact, I’ve told our management that they might be disappointed if they come down to see the implementation in person, because it takes up so little space in our data centre for an investment in something so vitally important to our business.”
Watson noted that this reduction in RUs was likely to generate energy efficiencies, and hopes to be able to report such findings in the coming months.
About Nutanix
Nutanix provides data centre infrastructure solutions that are hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple. The award-winning Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform has disrupted the market by seamlessly and natively converging compute and storage in a single appliance. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices and authorised solution providers throughout the world, Nutanix is privately held and backed by top-tier VC firms. For more information, visitwww.nutanix.com.
About Gunnersen
For further information, please visit: www.gunnersen.com.au