Leading Heavy Machinery Dealer Streamlines Management and Extends to the Cloud
INDUSTRY
Industrial Equipment
CHALLENGES
- Migrate separate storage and compute environments to a single hyperconverged infrastructure for better performance and efficiency.
- Deploy integrated disaster recovery (DR) to ensure availability of critical systems and processes.
- Enable centralized dashboard management to free IT to focus on higher-level priorities.
SOLUTION
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
- Nutanix Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Applications
- Microsoft SQL Servers
- Microsoft Exchange Servers
- Microsoft SharePoint
- CRM applications
- Equipment rental applications
- Warehouse applications
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Cashman Equipment depends on its network infrastructure to power sales and rentals of industrial equipment, but its compute and storage environments were nearing end of life. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform lets Cashman migrate its devices and workloads to a single hyperconverged environment that’s easier to manage and scale, while saving equipment rack space. “The way we were able to reduce our environment down to a less complex infrastructure was fantastic,” said Shad Van De Vanter, Systems Engineer at Cashman Equipment. “I don’t have to worry about switches, blades, fabric interconnects, and other issues. Nutanix helps us significantly reduce the complexity of our data center.”
Sometimes the best solution is not only about price, but about value add. Nutanix delivers a more relevant, compelling value add than competitive solutions could offer.
Don Erlanger, IT Manager, Cashman Equipment
CHALLENGE
Cashman Equipment is a top dealer of Cat equipment, with multiple locations throughout Nevada and the Eastern Sierras. It serves customers in construction, landscaping, mining, waste handling, paving, and other industries. Cashman’s network is the engine that drives its business, and the firm depends on it to keep operations running smoothly. “Our network supports literally all of our production systems,” said Don Erlanger, IT Manager at Cashman Equipment. “We are running a Microsoft Exchange server on premises, as well as SharePoint, document management servers, and a broad spectrum of business applications like CRM, rental, and warehousing.”
SOLUTION
As elements of its legacy infrastructure approached end of life, Cashman saw an excellent opportunity to migrate to a fully hyperconverged infrastructure that could be scaled for future needs. “We are experiencing steady growth, and we have significantly increased our storage capacity needs year over year,” said Erlanger. “Our technology partner, Summit Partners, recommended the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, which provided much more functionality than competitive solutions, at less cost.”
Cashman migrated approximately 100 VMs to the new solution, and deployment went smoothly. “Summit Partners was really knowledgeable about setting up Nutanix from scratch. It took us only about two hours to get the platform up and running,” said Van De Vanter. To help ensure business continuity, Cashman also deployed Nutanix Data Protection and Disaster Recovery, a flexible, integrated solution that provides protection in the event of unplanned disasters.
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Consolidating its diverse infrastructure components onto a single hyperconverged platform lets Cashman’s small IT team monitor and control all of its compute and storage infrastructure from a single dashboard, improving efficiency and freeing up resources. “Nutanix saves me a whole lot of time,” said Van De Vanter. “I can focus on actually doing administrative work, instead of worrying about monitoring the hardware all the time.”
The new solution also helps Cashman minimize equipment space to unlock power and cooling savings. “We reduced the size of our environment from 32 RU down to just four,” said Van De Vanter. “It was a huge benefit in terms of saving space and reducing costs in our data center.”
With fully integrated Data Protection and Disaster Recovery, Nutanix also helps Cashman protect its virtualized applications with just a few clicks. “If I want to turn on DR, I can do a one click failover,” said Van De Vanter. “I don’t have to change all the IPs on all the servers, DNS settings, and other configurations. We can also test without impacting production to verify that everything will work, which is a capability that I’ve never had before.”
NEXT STEPS
Just a few months after deploying Nutanix, Cashman is already exploring how it can expand the solution’s capabilities. For example, the IT team is evaluating Nutanix AHV to reduce licensing costs on its hypervisor. “We are currently running a legacy hypervisor because of the way we are exporting data, but I’m considering implementing AHV for future cost savings,” said Van De Vanter. Cashman is also looking at migrating its DR solution to Nutanix Xi Leap, to take advantage of cloud-based disaster recovery.