GS Energy and GS Global Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Innovation with Nutanix

INDUSTRY

Professional Services 

BENEFITS

• Improved infrastructure performance by 40% and management efficiency by 85% 
• Reduced IT expenditure by 45% and infrastructure complexity by 60% 
• Simplified infrastructure enabled IT staff focus on delivering superior services
• Ensured service continuity and reduced unplanned downtime through unified management 
• Experienced nearly 50% performance improvement of SAP S/4 HANA 
  

SOLUTIONS

• Nutanix AHV
• Nutanix Prism Pro
• Nutanix Flow
• Nutanix Files 

APPLICATIONS

• SAP ECC 6.0
• SAP S/4 HANA
• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Microsoft SQL Server with Cluster Service
• ManTech MCCS
• Oracle 12c
• Web: IIS, Apache, Nginx
• WEB APPLICATION SERVER(WAS): Tomcat, Weblogic, Resin, Jeus, JBoss
• Additional Databases: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL
• VMware ESXi (VDI) software 

BUSINESS BENEFITS

GS ITM is an IT partner that builds on its deep professional and technical expertise to deliver optimized IT services. Serving companies in a variety of industries, including energy, retail, e-commerce, and universities, the firm delivers new, effective services that help organizations operate IT efficiently and keep ahead of their competition. To enable its private cloud transformation for external and internal customers, GS ITM partnered with Nutanix. Nutanix enabled GS affiliates to redesign their business by securing service-continuity, improving efficiency, performance and cost-effectiveness of IT infrastructure. Building on a Nutanix-based private cloud environment, GS ITM is seeking to provide integrated hybrid cloud service, a combination of on-premise, public and private cloud aligned to its customers’ business applications and requirements. 

CHALLENGE

Providing a superior experience is key for GS ITM, and the firm needed an infrastructure environment that was flexible and efficient to deliver optimized services to the GS Group as well as external customers. 

For example, GS Energy, Korea’s leading company in the energy industry, was stuck with a system that was difficult to manage and plagued with performance issues. Expensive hypervisor licensing fees compounded the problem. Instead of performing as a business enabler, the legacy infrastructure became a hurdle for the company, which found itself devoting more and more of its human resources to infrastructure management. 

Another affiliate, GS Global, faced serious IT challenges as well. Service continuity is essential for this trading company to support its global export, import, and triangular trading of steel, petroleum, machinery, and other resources. However, managing its siloed IT system was challenging, making recovery time slow when a system failed, as well as impacting service uptime. 

As it migrated its systems from Unix to Linux, GS ITM faced significant challenges in transitioning its existing applications such as data communication services for socket communication. It needed a solution to unify its disparate IT systems under a common cloud-based architecture. 

GS ITM opted for a hybrid cloud transformation strategy to expand the range of services to its customers. The organization wanted to stay in line with the domestic IT trends, and keep pace with increasing demands from a variety of infrastructure components and workloads including operation and management, IT expenditure and security. 

SOLUTION

After considering several options, GS ITM selected Nutanix as the best partner to support its IaaS initiative for private cloud transformation projects. Nutanix provided a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), as well as complementary products and roadmaps that aligned perfectly with the GS ITM’s hybrid cloud transformation strategy. 

Deploying the next-generation Nutanix infrastructure enabled GS Energy to dramatically simplify its IT operations and management. Now its IT staff is free to spend more time focusing on delivering quality services for the organization. The IT team has also received positive feedback from business stakeholders about the speed and performance of its critical business systems. 

“We particularly liked the cost-effectiveness of the built-in AHV Nutanix hypervisor,” said Kim Gee-Jong, Senior Manager, Professional Engineer Information Management at GS Energy. “GS Energy continues to improve the efficiency and productivity of its infrastructure after the successful establishment of our next generation infrastructure. “ 

Nutanix also enabled GS Global to unify its infrastructure management. The company substantially reduced unplanned downtime and ensured non-stop service continuity through the Nutanix architecture and Prism management interface. The Nutanix solution supports one-click management of the company’s hypervisor, virtual network, VMs, and storage as well as simple, efficient infrastructure monitoring. 

“Nutanix Prism allowed us to improve the efficiency and predictability of infrastructure operations and cope with the demands of our global operations which are increasingly fast paced and complex,” said Kim Young, Deputy General Manager of IT Planning Team at GS Global. 

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

By improving infrastructure performance by 40% while reducing IT expenditure by 45% utilizing the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform, GS ITM is now able to deliver IT services to customers with better stability, while reducing costs. 

The solution also enabled GS ITM to increase management efficiency by 85%, while decreasing infrastructure complexity by 60%, freeing IT to focus more on front line value-added tasks, instead of infrastructure maintenance. 

In addition, GS affiliates are experiencing the benefit of innovation when running core enterprise applications on Nutanix. Running SAP S/4 HANA on Nutanix, has enabled GS ITM to realize a performance improvement of nearly 50% compared to a traditional legacy infrastructure. 

In addition to SAP, GS ITM is also running its Groupware, Exchange Server and other applications on Nutanix. “We feel that our service performance has improved by more than 30% compared to using the traditional legacy infrastructure. We can seamlessly scale up and down as needed when encountering any resource issues. It enabled flexible resource management and improved system operations,” said Jeong Geon-Woong, Senior Associate, Infrastructure Center at GS ITM. 

NEXT STEPS

Other GS affiliates, including GS EPS, the first independent power producer in Korea, have either adopted Nutanix or are considering installing the solution to help stay ahead in an increasingly competitive business landscape. 

GS ITM also plans to launch its own cloud service model U.STRA CLOUD to provide PaaS and SaaS services optimized for the customer’s IT environment, augmented by its professional expertise and industry experience. 

Ultimately, GS ITM aims to provide integrated hybrid cloud services, both private and public cloud, to GS Group affiliates and external customers. Combining its own technology and business capabilities together with the Nutanix cloud solution will enable this innovative IT leader to provide diverse, differentiated cloud services in the years ahead.