When Scania Southern Africa started experiencing problems with its IT infrastructure the company looked to Nutanix to help it deliver on its service mandate.
The company’s slowed legacy systems were hindering its ability to deliver value added services such as proactive monitoring of customer trucks from its systems.
“We had started experiencing problems in our environment and the IT team was doing a lot of firefighting to keep the lights on. Something needed to change quickly, so we set out to see what was in the market to help us,” says Theven Naicker, area IT manager at Scania Southern Africa. “We turned to our partner Aptronics to help us with a proof of concept (POC), where we jointly selected Nutanix.”
“The POC highlighted that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software was able to deliver more than just an acceptable service. The results were fantastic and we immediately saw that this would provide us with a solution that could improve the end-user experience as well as support our compute requirements in the back-end. Admittedly, bandwidth has always been a problem for us, however by using Nutanix on Dell EMC XC Series, and changing the stack to a hyperconverged environment we immediately experienced a reduction in the need for additional bandwidth,” says Naicker.
According to Naicker, a key challenge was that the Nutanix software needed to be able to support its Citrix VDI environment. But since installation, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software fully supports Scania’s Citrix Cloud desktop environment (XenDesktop and XenApp), and ensures that the company can deliver quality services and continuity of its Citrix VDI environment, throughout South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique.
Accordingly, the business has been able to increase its productivity and better service its clients as a result of a more stable IT environment. The results were immediate and users, at random, began to ask what IT was doing differently as their experience of the system was now dramatically improved.
Some tangible results experienced by the client included a significant 80% reduction in support tickets from 70-80 tickets a day, right down to 15, and the tickets themselves are no longer critical. Furthermore, performance was dramatically improved and the boot time of the VDI environment went down from 90 seconds to just 18 seconds.
The team also opted to test its ERP environment, and in particular its SQL database, on the Nutanix solution. After testing it saw huge improvements on speed of query times against the system. Scania users also need to stream media for clients, this was a huge problem as much of the media simply wouldn’t load, after implementation the media streaming kicked in and delivery times are significantly better. With the Acropolis distributed data fabric, Scania is also seeing an increase in availability of its storage capabilities.
“At Scania, we look for systems that work for us and not against us. There are systems out there that people spend a lot of time trying to fix. The less interaction, the fewer people we need to manage it, the more self-sufficient the system, and the better for us. Nutanix ticked all these boxes for us. It was also just so simple to deploy and manage. We spend very little time on operational support now, which gives us more time to spend on enhancements to our business,” he adds.
“Scania is an excellent example of a client that has made Nutanix work for them. They had a specific software and hardware need for the business and the platform they selected had to support this and just work, without complicated or lengthy integration. As a customer they represent exactly what we hope to achieve at Nutanix – a software solution that supports the customer need,” says Paul Ruinaard, country manager: sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix.
Looking ahead, Naicker says the company is currently architecting a wall-to-wall Nutanix environment for when it undertakes its IT infrastructure refresh cycle.