Migros Lucerne: Ready For The Future With Nutanix

INDUSTRY

Retail & Consumer

BENEFITS

• Improved performance -performance booster
• High availability 99.9%
• Improved user experience for multimedia applications
• Reduced complexity and lower OpEx
• One Click Updates
• Deployment of Office365

SOLUTION

• Nutanix Files for FSLogix Profile
• Nutanix Acropolis as hypervisor

CHALLENGE

The Migros Lucerne Cooperative is one of ten Migros cooperatives in Switzerland. It employs around 5,000 people and celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2021. In 2020, they welcomed 32.18 million customers and generated annual sales of 1.52 billion CHF. The company is owned by 200,000 cooperative members from the six Central Swiss cantons of Lucerne, Zug, Ob-/Nidwalden, Uri, and Schwyz. With a total of 119 locations, Migros Lucerne offers a diverse range of products and services through its supermarket and specialist stores as well as in the gastronomy sector.

The IT and Infrastructure department is responsible for the cooperative’s regional system landscape. For lifecycle reasons, to reduce complexity and its operational overhead, to increase performance, and to enable multimedia applications and Office365, the existing Citrix infrastructure solution, based on Windows HPE servers, has to be replaced.

“The old infrastructure was at its limit. It would not have been possible to run Office365 on it. In addition, videos in the stores could not be consumed with the desired user experience,” explains Patrick Rastedter, Head of IT Infrastructure, Migros Lucerne Cooperative. He continues: “We needed a new solution that would, on the one hand, satisfy our users again - around 1,000 employees spread throughout central Switzerland - but on the other hand, would be ready for the future of Migros Lucerne.” The “Next Generation Infrastructure” project was launched.

THE SOLUTION

The direction was clear: away from the terminal server approach and towards a VDI Windows 10 desktop with dedicated graphics card power per user. These requirements were mandatory and developed accordingly by Nutanix, together with users, in a proof-of-concept (PoC). Patrick Rastedter says: “The PoC confirmed our expectation and the users were also taken into consideration. We want the VDI as close to the profile as possible - and that’s what we got. Nutanix, as the vendor with the longest and most experience in HCI, was the best fit for our scenario. “

CUSTOMER BENEFITS

After setting up the pilot in a six-month period, the rollout was successfully completed in half a year - all schedules were met. Patrick Rastedter particularly emphasizes the “uncomplicated and cooperative collaboration at a high professional level. Nutanix, especially the system engineer Alex Rechsteiner, our partner Axacom AG and we all pulled together to make the project successful.”

As an additional benefit, Rastedter highlights scalability and sustainability for the future: “If we need more power, we can just add a node, we can grow.” Thanks to the new firmware, live migrations of VDI hosts are also now possible without the user noticing anything.

Patrick Rastedter draws a conclusion: “The solution as a complete package is a milestone for us.”

NEXT STEPS

As a vision, the Migros Lucerne Cooperative is considering strategic plans to completely replace its HPE Server ESX infrastructure with Nutanix HCI.