A family-owned business established in the 1960s, Manutan is now a leading European B2B e-commerce company specializing in providing equipment and supplies to businesses and local authorities. With a workforce of 2,200, the company operates in more than 17 countries through 27 branches, all of which are supported by a common IT department. The company grew through a series of acquisitions, but was faced with an increasingly heterogeneous IT system and growing obsolescence. While IT projects were becoming more and more cumbersome for the IT department, a ransomware attack in February 2021 put the final nail in the coffin and triggered the hyperconverged reengineering of Manutan's IT.
In the wake of a ransomware attack, we decided to start afresh with a major project, the purpose of which was to set up a private, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure. That’s why we turned to Nutanix.
Manutan’s centralized IT department had to deal with an increasingly complex infrastructure. The many acquisitions the company had made in order to expand led to an increasingly heterogeneous IT system that lacked scalability.
“We had been involved in a Microsoft AX migration project for 10 years and had come to understand that it would cost millions to upgrade our infrastructure. In short, it was obsolete, unmanageable, and no longer met our needs,” said Sylvain Coquio, CIO of Manutan. Although the plan to change the infrastructure was on everyone’s mind, the process accelerated dramatically in February 2021, when a ransomware attack brought all 1,200 of the company’s servers to a standstill. “We decided to start afresh with Project Horizon. The purpose was to set up a private, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure. That’s why we turned to Nutanix ,” said Sylvain Coquio.
Security was a key consideration when Manutan rebuilt their infrastructure. “During the attack we suffered, the hackers destroyed everything horizontally, which is why the choice of Flow, the microsegmentation solution from Nutanix, was the obvious one. With the same in mind, we chose to invest in Nutanix Database Service, an automated database management solution that offers the data protection and masking features we needed,” explained the CIO. As part of their simplification strategy, Manutan also chose the Prism platform to manage their new infrastructure, and Nutanix Calm, which enables them to automate the creation of servers.
In an effort to consolidate their IT resources, Manutan decided to move their file storage infrastructure to Nutanix. As a result, the company replaced all its NAS with Nutanix Files. “The idea was that we wanted to build an infrastructure that combined the power and scalability of the public cloud with the data and cost control of the private cloud. That’s what we’re doing today with Nutanix,” said Coquio.
Manutan is currently in the final stages of setting up the new infrastructure. “Tests have shown us that once the infrastructure is ready, we will have no problem migrating our legacy infrastructure to the new one. We will then go through an optimization phase,” detailed the CIO. Once this is done, the company intends to move forward with the rollout of its hybrid cloud strategy. “That’s also why we chose Nutanix. The ability to easily move workloads across the public and private clouds will provide us with greater scalability and flexibility,” Coquio said.
“This implementation case is a textbook example of IT transformation and streamlining. With Nutanix, Manutan was able to effectively meet its needs at a critical time. Faced with a ransomware attack, the company hit reset by choosing a private, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure.”
Alban Allouche, Sales Engineer, S-CUBE