Morska Agencja Gdynia Delivers Its Services Every Time with Nutanix

CHALLENGE

Morska Agencja Gdynia (MAG) has built its reputation on reliably meeting the expectations [HG1] of its customers. Each year, the company helps to transport thousands of containers by sea and rail, arranges thousands of contracts for seafarers, and rents out offices to multiple businesses in Gdynia, Poland. MAG’s employees are experts in executing the most demanding logistics tasks—and because its logistics networks run on data, it is vital that employees can access information quickly and reliably around the clock.

Marcin Ćwiek, IT Manager at MAG, explained, “Every day, our employees coordinate their operations with exporters and importers across the world, shipping lines, customs officials, port authorities, insurance companies, banks and more. Because our shipments cross multiple time zones, it’s essential for our employees to track and manage them at all hours of the day. For that reason, our IT systems must be available 24/7.”

MAG was approaching the limits of its existing IT infrastructure in terms of performance, capacity and support. Before the legacy systems affected operations, the company’s IT team began looking for options for modernization.

“With our maintenance costs rising and storage capacity fast running out, we saw an opportunity to take a different approach,” said Marcin Ćwiek. “We see that data-driven logistics services will be an important part of our offering in the future. We aimed to deploy an IT infrastructure with the performance, scalability and availability to support today’s requirements and tomorrow’s innovations. Since we only have an IT team of five people to support our hundreds of business users, it was also important to find a platform that was simple to manage.”

SOLUTION

To step up performance and reliability, MAG selected hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from Nutanix. The powerful, software-defined HCI natively integrates servers, storage and networking. Using Nutanix Prism, the company’s IT team can manage the environment from a single point of control. Marcin Ćwiek commented, “Nutanix HCI offers simple management, reliability and efficiency in a single package, which is exactly what we need.”

Working with its long-term partner Monolit, MAG took part in a proof of concept to try out Nutanix technology. The results were compelling.

“Monolit migrated our entire SQL database to a test environment on Nutanix HCI,” recalled Marcin Ćwiek. “We were immediately impressed by the performance improvement. The test phase also convinced us that the improved visibility and control of a single management interface are powerful benefits from the IT management perspective.”

MAG engaged Monolit to implement a three-node cluster and to provide ongoing support. Following a five-day Nutanix training course, the MAG IT team were using the solution to its full potential.

“Monolit helped us complete the installation quickly and smoothly,” said Marcin Ćwiek. “The Monolit team was on hand to help us overcome any minor road bumps. The Nutanix website was also very helpful: it includes clear information that’s easy to find. It should be a model for other companies!”

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

MAG is now delivering consistently faster application response times with significantly improved availability, helping its employees to provide high-quality services to customers round-the-clock. The MAG team even received calls from business users commenting on how much faster the systems run.

Marcin Ćwiek explained, “Migrating applications to Nutanix technology has increased performance by as much as 100 percent. The Nutanix solution shortened our backup times from 16 hours to two hours, and cut the time it takes us to generate important SQL reports from two hours to just ten minutes. We couldn’t believe the impact that deploying Nutanix solutions had on our IT environment – we thought our backups had failed, when they had actually just completed extremely quickly!”

By enabling MAG’s employees to work more effectively, the Nutanix platform is helping them rise to the demands of complex logistics projects.

“We estimate that faster-running Nutanix technology has enhanced employee productivity by as much as 15 percent,” said Marcin Ćwiek. “The Nutanix platform provides rapid access to data 24/7, which translates into faster responses to customers and partners.”

NEXT STEPS

With a future-ready, easy-to-manage platform in place, MAG can turn its attention to service innovation. The company’s IT team is reinvesting the time saved on infrastructure management to focus on innovation, helping to lay the foundation for next-generation services.

Marcin Ćwiek concluded, “The productivity advantages and IT management efficiencies of the Nutanix platform mean it’s only a matter of time before we achieve ROI. Our partnerships with Nutanix and Monolit puts MAG in a solid long-term position, as we have the performance, availability and scalability to build new data-driven services for the business.”