The European leader in professional equipment chose Nutanix to transform its IT infrastructure, achieving significant cost savings while adopting a modern, feature-rich environment that opens up new opportunities for growth.
A European specialist in workplace equipment for all professionals, the Bruneau Group was founded in 1955. Initially a mail-order organization, the company turned to e-commerce to meet changing market expectations. With over 100,000 carefully selected products, the company operates in France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain, under several brands including Maxiburo. The group has around 900 employees, including 600 in France, and handles more than 67 million parcels per year. In 2023, Bruneau reached €500 million in revenue. Its steady growth is powered by a solid, centralized IT infrastructure, managed by Bruneau France's IT department, which also serves the needs of its subsidiaries.
Key Benefits
Ease of administration
Optimized costs
Enhanced stability and performance
Streamlined scalability
Agility of development teams
Thanks to the ease of administration, numerous automated features, and the rich Nutanix ecosystem—not to mention highly responsive and knowledgeable support—our teams can focus on delivering value to our business and customers, while achieving substantial cost savings
Like most e-commerce operations, the Bruneau Group knows no rest. Its IT system runs 24/7, and the slightest incident can have dire consequences, as André Etchemendy, Chief Information and Organization Officer (CIOO) of the group, emphasizes: “A day of downtime due to technical issues means a loss of two million euros in revenue. And no matter the nature of the issue, it will have business consequences that will sooner or later impact the customer experience. In other words, we need reliability, stability, security, and scalability to support market developments."
Taking a pragmatic approach, Bruneau opted for a pick-and-choose strategy: most of its applications are hosted in its own data centers, but the company does not rule out using cloud solutions and services whenever it makes sense from a technical or financial standpoint. In 2021, as its internal infrastructure was reaching the end of its lifecycle, the Group immediately turned to hyperconvergence to renew its existing systems.
"Hyperconverged infrastructure was a no-brainer," explains André Etchemendy. "Adding a node to increase processing capacity is much simpler with hyperconverged infrastructure than with a traditional three-tier architecture. We were seeking simplification, time-saving administration, and, of course, stability and security."
After comparing severalmoptions, the Group opted for the Nutanix platform for three main reasons: the user-friendly interfaces and numerous built-in automations that simplify operational workflows; the rich ecosystem, particularly in the areas of containerization and object storage; and finally, the ease of implementing a business continuity plan (BCP) using the LEAP module.
We were also impressed by how easy it was to migrate from a competing hypervisor to AHV using Move
"The tool is powerful and allowed us to securely migrate our entire IT system—about 400 VMs—without any service interruptions, in less than three months." Due to its 24/7 operational requirements, Bruneau had limited migration windows. The teams mostly worked on weekends, operating in stages: first migrating to test environments, then to pre-production, and finally production environments, in order to eliminate any malfunction risk for their clients.
Equipped with a reliable, high-performance, and modern environment, Bruneau began to bring part of its outsourced storage back in-house. "With Nutanix Objects, it's even simpler as it is S3-compatible, which allows us to adopt a hybrid approach optimized for cost. We came to the conclusion that storing data on our Nutanix infrastructure is less expensive than in the public cloud," says André Etchemendy.
Bruneau also has strong ambitions in containerization, and its teams fully intend to leverage NKE (Nutanix Kubernetes Engine) and Self-Service as part of a new strategic initiative. "Nutanix Kubernetes Engine provides a fully integrated and user-friendly environment, while Self-Service streamlines application deployment, enabling us to respond to business needs in a more agile and rapid manner,” explains Pierre-Yves Lesage. "It is all the more important as we don't have unlimited human resources. Thanks to the ease of administration, numerous automated features, and rich Nutanix ecosystem—not to mention highly responsive and knowledgeable support—we can focus on delivering value to our business and customers, while achieving substantial cost savings," concluded the CIOO of Bruneau.
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