Acurio Restaurantes Modernizes Global Restaurant Operations by Migrating From VMware to Nutanix

Peruvian restaurant chain replaces aging infrastructure with Nutanix to power operations across America, Europe, and Asia.

Overview

Acurio Restaurantes is a Peruvian restaurant chain with a presence that extends well beyond its home country. The company operates more than 25 restaurants in Peru and over 40 restaurants internationally, with locations in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Dubai, Madrid, and the United States, among other countries. The chain operates through a mix of company-owned restaurants and licensing agreements, all managed from Peru.

The company's mission is to surprise diners with memorable gastronomic experiences inspired by Peruvian culture, promoting sustainability and positively impacting society. With around 1,500 employees and a presence across major Peruvian cities, including Lima, Arequipa, and Cusco, Acurio Restaurantes has built its reputation on a people-focused culture, serving both the diners who experience its restaurants and the employees who serve them. The brand is recognized not only for the Gastón Acurio name but also for the team of professionals behind every dish and every guest experience.

Behind the scenes, a wide range of departments, from food safety and legal to accounting, finance, and IT, work together to deliver that experience. The IT team consists of a Head of Technology, managers for technology projects and technology services, infrastructure and security specialists, technical support, and assistants.

When the company's existing virtualization infrastructure reached the 10-year mark, with hosts that had lost warranty and support, Acurio Restaurantes set out to find a modern platform that could carry the business not just through today's transactional operations but also through the AI and analytics projects on the horizon.

Challenge

Acurio Restaurantes had been running on traditional on-premises infrastructure that was more than 10 years old. The two host servers running the environment had aged out of warranty and support, and finding vendors willing to maintain the equipment had become a problem in its own right.

"We had some outages that, consequently, led to interruptions in our services," said Martín Mesías, who oversees the company's technological infrastructure and security. "It was very difficult to find vendors because, once they knew that our traditional converged infrastructure was old, with parts that were very difficult to obtain nowadays, that caused vendors not to want to take on the service."

With unsupported hardware, the team also faced increasing exposure to patching and security risks. And the stakes for downtime were significant: a system failure would force restaurants into manual order-taking, slow table turnover, and rework as staff re-entered every transaction once systems came back online. Beyond the restaurant floor, the same infrastructure carried integrations with SAP S4HANA, electronic invoicing compliance with SUNAT, and hourly sales reporting from points of sale across Peru, Spain, and the United States.

"We didn't want to renew the current traditional infrastructure," said Jimmy Rodríguez, IT Service Manager at Acurio Restaurantes. "We were looking for alternatives that would help us not only stay at the forefront, but also project ourselves 10 years into the future, because we knew the projects coming ahead would be much more challenging due to the introduction of AI and the internal projects being developed within the company."

Solution

Acurio Restaurantes evaluated several hyperconverged options before selecting Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. The team began evaluating Nutanix in October 2025, closed the deal in December, and started implementation in February 2026, with the equipment's arrival.

"What convinced us was the experience they already had in the international market, that maturity of the platform, that centralized management we were looking for so much, and the other characteristics of the platform itself: resilience, scalability, and the support and guidance," said Mesías.

After meeting with several partners, Acurio selected Zentury to lead the implementation.

"We chose Zentury because we were not only looking for a partner that would help us implement a solution," said Rodríguez. "By providing a consulting-type service and also the support we were going to have, giving us that confidence."

Diana Pérez, General Manager at Zentury, described the engagement in similar terms. "This was not only about carrying out a migration, but also consulting, accompanying the client throughout the entire process, in a way helping structure the project, because Nutanix was also a new technology for them."

The deployment includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Prism Central for centralized management, and Veeam Backup for data protection. The original plan called for using Nutanix Move to migrate workloads from VMware.

"We had a virtualization platform with VMware vCenter, and unfortunately, it was so old, so obsolete, that it did not allow communication with Nutanix Move," said Mesías. With Zentury's support, the team used Veeam Backup to restore virtual machines to the new Nutanix environment instead. The migrations were performed during early-morning non-operational hours, with Zentury providing hands-on support throughout.

Customer Outcomes

Zero outages and a transparent migration
"Since we implemented the Nutanix solution: zero outages, zero incidents," said Mesías. The migration itself was equally smooth from the user's perspective. "They did not feel any type of interruption during the migration of virtual machines from our converged platform to the Nutanix platform."

Noticeably better performance for end users
"The fact that the users who work within the infrastructure and use the platforms running on that infrastructure can feel the performance is a huge added value within the implementation," said Rodríguez. "The fact that they felt that difference between where the solutions used to run and how they run now."

Centralized management through Prism Central
"Now, with Prism Central, I can have a general overview of all the virtual machines, the health status of the Veeam Backup nodes, data protection, and whether those scheduled backup tasks are being carried out," said Mesías.

Reduced infrastructure costs and freed up engineering time
Rodríguez and his team built a five-year business case comparing the cost of maintaining their existing infrastructure, moving to the cloud, and adopting Nutanix. Nutanix came out ahead on both performance and economics. 

“Thanks to the implementation, our budget allocated to IT infrastructure has been reduced by 40%, minimizing additional expenses, because now we have the guarantee and reliability that the solution runs successfully," said Rodríguez. Freeing Mesías from constant firefighting on aging hardware has also allowed him to focus on more strategic work. "By having a mature, stable solution with high availability, he could focus on more strategic projects within the organization," said Rodríguez.

Next Steps

With the Peruvian operations stabilized, Acurio Restaurantes is now setting its sights on expanding the platform's international reach. The company has already begun centralizing information from its operations in Spain and the United States, and plans to bring its other international locations into the same management model over time. The team is also preparing the foundation for AI projects, including predictive modeling for sales trends and inventory replenishment.

"We are not only thinking about projects within Peru, but we are also aligning an international strategy," said Rodríguez. "All those connections and all that information storage need to run on a solid, reliable infrastructure that gives us the guarantee of high availability, like Nutanix."

For Zentury, the project reinforced a broader lesson about what these engagements really require. "The learning experience was understanding that this was not basically a matter of changing one technology for another, but rather understanding the client's situation and what we could do together with them to give them the confidence that this change was going to be successful," said Pérez.

About Zentury

Zentury designs and implements cybersecurity and IT infrastructure solutions that enable organizations to operate with greater security, efficiency, and resilience. Their expertise in technology integration helps modernize critical environments, protect information, and ensure business continuity.

More information: zenturysec.com

06/2026