Servicio Nacional de Calidad y Salud Animal (SENACSA) is a technical institution in Paraguay that controls the whole value chain of livestock production from field production to export of the products. The IT team at SENACSA was struggling with limitations posed by their storage capacity, and began looking for a new technology solution. Through a trusted business partner, they were introduced to Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and found the solution to be the answer to their problems. With Nutanix, SENACSA has benefitted from improved automated processes, increased storage capabilities, and better service offerings for users.
| Improved automated processes | Increased storage capabilities | Better service offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Successfully supports the automation of laboratory processes based on international standards. | Ability to store massive amounts of system information on a large sale. | Capacity to offer stable services to users in different parts of the country with a secure, highly available platform. |
Partnering with Nutanix was essential to strengthening our technological infrastructure and expanding our capacity to allow us to offer more efficient services to our users.
As the Official Veterinary Service of Paraguay, Servicio Nacional de Calidad y Salud Animal (SENACSA) supports the national livestock policy of Paraguay. The organization contributes to an increase in competition, sustainability, and equity levels by promoting the development of productivity through the protection, maintenance, and improvement of animal health and the quality of animal products and animal by-products.
With Paraguayan meat being one of the most visible products in the world, SENACSA has one of the country's largest and most complex communication networks.
Carlos Meza, IT Infrastructure Director at SENACSA, has a team of 25 IT employees as part of SENACSA’s 1,500 employee total. Meza’s team establishes and manages all matters regarding the execution of activities and control policies related to infrastructure and technology operations, including the administration of servers, equipment, and institutional network connections.
Last year, Meza and his team were struggling with high availability and responsiveness issues related to storage due to the large amount of information managed by SENACSA’s systems. The team quickly realized they needed a new technology solution that could tackle those issues, while also offering maximum uptime.
“Downtime could have a negative impact on the continuity of our processes, and it would compromise the image and reliability of SENACSA as an institution,” shares Meza.
As a part of the International Executive Service Corps’ (IESC) Proyecto Sistemas y Tecnología Agrícolas para Facilitar el Comercio (T-Fast) in Paraguay, SENACSA partnered with Nutanix for the technology solution they needed to improve their infrastructure.
IESC explained to the SENACSA team that the Nutanix solution offered the ease of scalability, efficient deployment, and minimal learning curve that Meza and his team were looking for in a hyperconverged infrastructure solution.
“We chose the Nutanix solution to have a reliable technology for future projects, while also differentiating ourselves from other institutions involved in the import and export process,” Meza explains.
The partnership officially began when the Nutanix servers were installed with Citrix at the end of 2021, and training was provided at the beginning of this year in order for the SENACSA team to start configuring the services properly.
Due to SENACSA’s server’s characteristics and capabilities, Nutanix helped implement systems that unify the technical and administrative management of the country's official and private laboratory network. The implementation has had an impact on a national level with all the digitization and information security of all the analyses used for foreign trade.
“Partnering with Nutanix was essential to strengthening our technological infrastructure and expanding our capacity to allow us to offer more efficient services to our users,” shares Meza.
In addition to strengthening the technological structure, the Nutanix solution provides an opportunity to incorporate more technological services and facilitates the management of specific projects. “Those are the benefits of Nutanix we understand thus far, but our work with this technology is new, so we expect to see more benefits as our partnership grows. We also know that Nutanix will help make it easier for us to have the management of several projects on the same server,” says Meza.
Nutanix has also helped strengthen the SENACSA security system by providing optimal security features to the organization. “We want to gradually get the most out of the Nutanix configuration to know that it will be entirely protected, either from replication to backups or high availability in case of any disk failure. It is precisely the issue of tools to control the attacks that you could suddenly have on the server, so we understand that the implementation of the Nutanix server will be very beneficial for us,” explains Meza.
In addition to supporting the internal SENACSA team, the Nutanix solution has also positively affected the organization’s end customers by providing a secure platform with high availability to access their services.
Nutanix has also provided time savings to SENACSA by making it easier for Meza’s IT team to quickly set up the platform for their critical systems. “We were able to quickly implement the system of laboratories currently working on the Nutanix server because we were able to gain a certain margin that we never thought would be possible. We discussed the implementation plan and the server was available practically the same week for our people in charge of development to use,” explains Meza.
SENACSA has also enjoyed the benefits of Nutanix support. “We recently completed the Nutanix training process with the technical support of the local representative. They helped us a lot by collaborating positively with the server setup and configuration,” says Meza.
In the future, SENACSA plans to expand their use of Nutanix solutions by adding other projects to the current platform that are presently in production by performing a server migration of those services. They also have plans to develop new projects on the platform as well.