Shofu streamlines server management and PC provisioning

Nutanix and Lenovo pairs up to help Shofu, Japan’s dental equipment manufacturer, reduce IT burdens, drop overtime hours and eliminate working during holidays.

Overview

Shofu manufactures and sells a wide range of dental materials and equipment for clinics and laboratories throughout Japan – including artificial teeth, grinding and polishing materials, chemical products, dental instruments, machine tools, and orthodontic products.

In recent years, the company’s work has become increasingly digital, with the adoption of advanced CAD/CAM systems and 3D scanners to support the development of custom prosthetics, as well as other core business systems.

The company supports these applications using a traditional three-tier server infrastructure, and they are accessed daily by hundreds of employees. Shofu’s in-house Information System Office (ISO) is responsible for maintaining both the servers and the PCs that employees use to access them. With solutions from Nutanix and Lenovo, Shofu was able to enhance productivity for their staff and cut at least 3 months’ worth of work from IT’s operational burdens.

Key Results

Challenge

With Shofu’s existing infrastructure, regular server management tasks such as creating new virtual machines and performing inspections and maintenance took a lot of time and effort. Server monitoring was also difficult: there was no easy way to detect when a system went offline, and there was a case where the ISO only knew that a server was down when line-of-business users reported the problem. Therefore, the ISO team wanted an environment that could automate monitoring and management and allow them to work remotely.

Setting up and managing hundreds of PCs was also laborious and time-consuming for the ISO team. The annual refresh of around 150 PCs typically occupied two members of the team for three months every year.

“The ISO team is responsible for managing our virtualized server infrastructure and provisioning and maintaining the PCs. We often had to work overtime when performing regular inspections as well as during the annual PC refresh, so we were looking for ways to reduce the burden on our team. We were also looking to assign resources to the business to increase the value of our internal systems,” said Mr Naoki Totani, Head of the Information Systems Office, Shofu Inc.

Solution

Shofu decided to replace its aging servers with a new virtualised platform built on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series appliances and powered by Nutanix Cloud Platform - a hyperconverged infrastructure software. Nutanix’s Intelligent Operations provides a single view dashboard to help optimize resources and automate operations, and Lenovo XClarity Controller provides a new ability to manage and control servers remotely.

Nutanix AHV was also Shofu’s choice of hypervisor, while Nutanix Unified Storage has enabled the company to use a part of their shared storage as a CIFS (SMB)/NFS file system – replicating the exact hierarchical structure of the previous file system to make it easy for users to transition.

Customer Outcome

By moving to the new Nutanix-Lenovo solution, Shofu has significantly reduced server management workload for its ISO team – for example, remote management capabilities mean that there is no need for IT specialists to enter the datacenter to perform inspection and maintenance tasks on weekends or holidays.

Mr. Totani says: “We have achieved most of our initial objectives, such as automating configuration management, and gaining the ability to shut down and reboot servers remotely. Even if a problem occurs, we have a system that immediately alerts us, so we have much greater peace of mind.”

Performance has also improved, with employees reporting that applications respond faster. And the company has also been able to switch from once-per-day tape backups to multiple intra-day snapshots, improving business continuity and reducing the risk of data loss.

Finally, the improved PC provisioning process means that refreshing employee’s machines is faster and simpler both for the ISO team and for the employees themselves. Pre-installed, fully certified PCs can now be delivered to end users in about an hour – a process that took up to two days before.

Partner

Lenovo is a Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, Lenovo is proud to be the world’s largest PC vendor. Lenovo’s portfolio now includes workstations, servers, storage solutions, IT management software, smart TVs, tablets, smartphones, and even apps.