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Australian Franchise Group Foodco Standardises on Nutanix

A Single Appliance Will Replace Entire Infrastructure and Support 280 Australian Stores

Sydney, Australia, November 20, 2013 – Foodco, the Australian franchise group behind the Jamaicablue and Muffin Break retail coffee and food stores, is migrating its entire IT system onto Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple data centre infrastructure solutions.

The implementation will see Foodco’s diverse and critical IT operation migrate to the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform appliance with just three nodes. The appliance will provide all of the compute and storage required to run all backend operations in Foodco’s headquarters and satellite locations. The IT systems of the company’s 280 stores and Point-of-Sale (POS) loyalty program, which serves close to one million Foodco customers, will be included in the project.

“Our business relies on deep trust and real-time responsiveness between Foodco, its many franchisees and their customers. It is a dynamic relationship that is dependent on systems that deliver credible data and the kind of rock-solid stability that will keep our critical loyalty program up and running,” said James Buhagiar, Foodco’s developer and database manager.

Buhagiar said that when the time came to upgrade its previous compute and storage infrastructure, Foodco had initially considered the commonplace solution of SANs paired with blades or multiple small Rack Unit (RU) servers, but with guidance from reseller BEarena, he took a closer look at Nutanix.

“When I was first introduced to Nutanix, frankly, I was very skeptical – after all, I have been in IT for more than 15 years and it’s my job and my nature to take a hard look behind the promises, and Nutanix promises to do genuinely amazing things,” said Buhagiar. “I had spoken with a number of my IT peers and few had even considered anything other than the SAN and servers solution – Nutanix was obviously not even on their radars yet. Then I attended an in-depth technical briefing and I was convinced on a granular level that not only could Nutanix deliver on its promises, it basically makes SANs obsolete. It has an innovative technology that is highly scalable, modular and redundant and intelligently handles and stores data to take full advantage of its tiered flash and disk storage.”

The simplicity and redundancy of the system was a major driver in the purchase decision.

“With Nutanix, we have achieved full hardware redundancy replacing our old hardware with equipment occupying less than a quarter of its original rack space,” Buhagiar said. “Since the head office tracks its globally positioned stores’ figures around the clock to help foster improvement and fix problems on the ground, these figures must always be fast, accurate and reliable. Making sure the customer loyalty plan, which requires real-time POS updating, never falls down was also critical. I will be sleeping much better knowing there is now no failure that will cause the UK to want to call me at three in the morning.”

Foodco’s subsequent rollout of Nutanix has convinced him that Nutanix can comfortably handle Foodco’s end-to-end IT needs. Additionally, he sees a major human resource benefit made possible by Nutanix’s simplicity and the single pane management system of both storage and compute that delivers performance tracking and failure alerts in one easy-to-monitor application.

“We have a relatively small IT team. These guys handle everything from desktop support to all the IT for the stores, including database management to website to the servers that control the POS machines. In a very real way the move to Nutanix and its inherent simplicity means in one fell swoop we are freeing my team’s talents and capacity. Nutanix basically runs itself so they can focus on things like the POS network,” said Buhagiar. “Nutanix is simplicity. We haven’t had to plan a solution built from numerous vendors. We have a single scalable platform, with single point of management and a single point of contact. We had a rack filled with different equipment, each a potential point of failure, now it’s nothing but Nutanix and we are extremely well protected from failure by the inherent redundancy of this equipment.”

Wayne Neich, Nutanix Managing Director Australia and New Zealand, noted the organisation-wide IT scope of the Foodco implementation and sees a similar trend in other businesses which have adopted Nutanix.

“We welcome Foodco into our portfolio of aggressive and innovative companies which have sought technology to create a competitive edge, speedier deployments, ease of management and significant cost reductions. This deployment of Nutanix reveals how revolutionary and robust our compute and storage solution is in the real-world. The platform simultaneously solves an array of IT challenges, including internal infrastructure complexities, and delivers partner-facing and customer-facing ease-of-use and performance. It also underscores the capacity for Nutanix far beyond VDI as we can meet Foodco’s needs across other IT pain points on the same Nutanix platform. Beware anyone trafficking in SAN and other legacy approaches to the data and compute model. The past is a risky and costly place to get trapped,” said Neich.

About Foodco
Foodco is one of Australasia’s leading food and coffee franchise business retailers. Over the past two decades Foodco has become a truly innovative franchise group dedicated to creating growth and support for all of its franchisees. Managing Director Serge Infanti leads a highly experienced management team committed to strategic development across every business. Foodco has over 350 franchise retail outlets across the globe, primarily composed of its successful Jamaicablue and Muffin Break brands. For further information, please visit: www.foodco.com.au

About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

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