Foster’s Supermarket is the largest food retailer in the Cayman Islands. The supermarket was founded over 42 years ago and is the primary business of the Foster Group of companies, which also includes Progressive Distributors Ltd, Car City Ltd, Home Gas Ltd, and several other smaller family-owned enterprises, all representing a significant stake in the island. Progressive Distributors Ltd is the largest food wholesaler on the island, primarily supplying to restaurants, hotels, etc. Similarly, Home Gas is the largest supplier of propane on the island. Collectively the group employs ~1000 people. The organization set about a journey of digital transformation and innovation, and Nutanix has been an integral part of the success of this project.
| Improved operational efficiency | Ease of scalability | 30-40% cost savings | Reduction of downtime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provides the infrastructure needed for the organization’s journey to digital transformation. | Immense flexibility that offers the opportunity to add additional nodes as needed seamlessly and to scale to ‘cloud’ as workflows dictate. | Substantial savings in costs and time through improving operational efficiency and consolidation. | Decreased downtime for applying patches to the infrastructure and regularly scheduled updates. |
Quite frankly, the comfort that Nutanix gives the business knowing that should we have a crisis event, fire, hurricane, whatever, we have at all times the business resiliency to remain operational and meet the needs of the population. Nutanix gives us the technology and workflows to have resilience across the entire spectrum of the group businesses, especially during a time that otherwise would be treated with much more crisis reaction. It's very seamless.
Foster’s Supermarket and its group companies had a siloed IT infrastructure and large legacy estate that was ready for a significant refresh. Leon Schvartz, Foster’s Information Technology Executive Manager, was hired in November 2020 to build a new in-house IT team and consolidate the IT infrastructure to provide technology and related support services to all the Foster Group businesses. Leon currently leads an in-house team that has been built from the ground up, comprising 20 IT professionals hired, trained, and equipped to provide high-quality internal services for the entire organization.
Foster’s faces several challenges by being on an island. As a group of businesses providing products and services in the Cayman Islands, it was prudent to focus on infrastructure that could be on-prem and physically reachable while still affording the benefits of cloud, where applicable. “We were challenged not to get caught up in the hoopla of all-cloud and look at a solution that did what Nutanix did, which was provide, in essence, a hybrid private cloud infrastructure, with the ability to scale. Choosing a hyper-converged platform around Nutanix made sense for us,” explains Leon.
Leon emphasized the need for a robust and ease-of-use infrastructure because, for them, downtime is unacceptable. They don’t have the time to deal with slow updates and broad maintenance windows. They have customers who, for the most part, are making instant purchases and performing immediate commercial transactions. Foster’s isn’t an environment where the average customer could be told to return tomorrow. If customers leave without being fulfilled, they'll likely find products elsewhere.
“Like all retail businesses, it's about being ready at the register. People are expected to show up at 6 a.m. and close at 11 p.m. There's an 18-hour shift of uptime that's required. And even when the stores close, it's time for the warehouses to get going and the deliveries to come in. So we have about one hour per day where we were allowed to make changes to the infrastructure and about three hours over the weekend,” Leon explains. “We needed something that could be robust, fault-tolerant and easily updated. That could allow us to be up 99.9% of the time.”
Due to location and climate, hurricanes are a significant threat to the organization. Because of all the essential services the Foster Group provides, it is vital that they are up and running before and immediately after such threats or occurrences. “Before going to Nutanix, there was no data center-based disaster recovery option,” Leon states.
When Foster’s began onboarding the other very important and very successful businesses onto the Nutanix platform via private circuits, it was a total revamp of the network that included storage and computing platforms. The dependability on the Nutanix platform was high because this transition had to be done expeditiously since they were running out of time and life on the existing storage and compute platforms.
“We implemented Foster’s supermarket first and the remaining companies were all watching, seeing how successfully we transitioned from legacy infrastructure, be it hardware, operating systems, or database infrastructures. We upgraded everything. I would add that there were also tremendous cost savings to that initiative, in that we were able to consolidate not just IT infrastructure but also support services, away from externals,” explains Leon.
“We were able to reduce the number of IT silos that existed. A consolidated approach to servers, storage, applications, data management, networking and security, totally revolutionized the IT model. So consolidating that and providing a robust solution with the added benefit of disaster recovery took the whole business up a notch. Now we have resiliency that previously did not exist and an internal support team that understands the business workflow. So it was a very holistic approach,” details Leon.
“One of the real joys of the Nutanix platform is the ability to take frequent snapshots of the data within the application stores, on the servers,” Leon states. “There have been times when we've had to roll back quickly. But it's an instantaneous rollback, because it's at the snapshot level. We don't have to wait for things like traditional restores or backups to happen, which in our environment can take hours because of the sheer size of it. But the ability to flip between the Nutanix snapshots in seconds or minutes, has proven its weight in gold.”
Currently, Foster’s has all companies under an automated disaster recovery plan that is tested twice a year. “Our last test was in May. We failed over the entire business to our secondary data center, performed testing and returned to the primary, without issue, within 6 hours. This includes hundreds of virtual servers and related networking and telephony that support all businesses. As a matter of fact, last year, in the summer of 2022, we had a hurricane come by and we switched to our secondary data center within three hours, on our Nutanix infrastructure. We ran from the disaster recovery site for eight days continuously (we used the opportunity for a prolonged test activity) and then failed back overnight on a weekend. And that had been unheard of previously.” shares Leon.
“For the first time, we could also deploy an entire dev environment for all applications and data within our environment. We now have six people in our dev-ops team who are dedicated to application and data use transformation, including producing brand-new applications. We're rolling out at the moment at least one application a month based on business requirements. And all of those are running on Nutanix and live in the cluster managed by Nutanix Database Services,” explains Leon.
“The greatest advantage from a technical point of view has been the ability to manage our entire Nutanix platform via Prism. In a very proactive manner, the metrics we get from the Nutanix dashboards help us greatly in predicting where we're headed in the runways that it shows in terms of where our CPU or RAM or storage is quickly alerting us to, any hung processes, servers that are overprovisioned or under provisioned,” says Leon.
Improved efficiency
“The legacy infrastructure that Nutanix replaced was problematic, and a robust platform needed to be put in place. We've upgraded our networking infrastructure, our wireless / wired, and our power infrastructure. So it all came together. But at the core of it is certainly the storage and computing functioning that Nutanix offers; it just runs. That's what I keep telling people who ask me about Nutanix. I tell them it just runs,” Leon shares.
High availability
In 2022, after the Nutanix implementation, they recorded only 3 hours of Core IT downtime based on their metrics for the entire year. Downtime can affect the entire estate. Now with Nutanix, it’s stopped completely. “Disaster Recovery, for me, from a business value, is probably the biggest win. I think the high availability and fault tolerance of the Nutanix platform helps us sleep better at night. It's that simple, you know?” shares Leon.
Simplified management
When comparing Nutanix to other platforms, Leon evaluated all his options for their operations and found that Nutanix offered the best solution and pricing. “We did demos of HP, Cisco, Dell, and Nutanix. When I looked at Nutanix, having never worked with it before, I felt as if I was looking at the future of computing. I felt it was easy. The management, dashboards, functionality, scalability, and the fact that everything was basically in one pane of glass, so to speak. I'm a big fan of that. And I couldn't help but feel this was a fresh take on storage and compute platforms. The price was right, and the technology was right, and we bit the bullet. I think we were one of the first installs of Nutanix on the island.”
Lower operating costs
“When I did my calculations over three years, from a dollar point of view, I was going to be able to save about 30% on my budget, even by going max out on Nutanix with ultimate support licensing, I was still able to save 30% above the other solutions I looked at. Even when compared with some locally based cloud offerings, we determined we would still save about 40% by staying on the Nutanix platform because I could scale Nutanix much more cost-effectively than I could by adding CPU and RAM to a cloud solution based on their pricing. So those are huge savings for the business,” explains Leon.
Foster’s Supermarket and the entire Foster Group now have a modern network infrastructure to support their already successful businesses in the Cayman Islands. The disaster recovery solutions being put in place and being supported by Nutanix give peace of mind to the entire IT team. They now know that when a hurricane or another crisis event occurs, they can have their systems up and running promptly to offer essential services to the people on the island.
Next, Leon and his team will start to explore Nutanix Cloud. “In 2024/25, the plan is to take workloads that are not well established on-prem, lifting and shifting those to the Nutanix Cloud and testing the use-case and cloud experience. Seeing what production workloads we could lift and shift, including virtual desktop infrastructure to the cloud, giving us that hybrid option. But Nutanix makes it very easy to lift and shift on-prem to the cloud. If it doesn't work, you just bring it back. It's not as though you need to migrate to the cloud. Nutanix, in its journey, will continue to make advancements in how they do those types of things, and we're very excited to be part of it. We committed to Nutanix and likewise, they've committed to us,” concluded Leon.