Taiwan’s department store retailer lowers TCO by 20%
Retail
Founded in 1969, Farglory Group is one of the top 50 enterprises in Taiwan and entered into the retail business as of 2014. The IT team from Farglory Retail were facing high demand for digital services and needed flexible architecture. Today, the team has replaced their legacy infrastructure with hyperconvergence infrastructures (HCI), and consolidated all workloads from public clouds onto their private cloud. With Nutanix, the IT team has successfully eliminated complexities from daily management as well as lowered TCO by at least 20%.
Nutanix has removed all complexities in the daily management of our datacenter. It’s so easy to use, it’s like we’re on autopilot mode. This efficiency coupled with high availability makes Nutanix the first choice for all enterprises looking to refresh their datacenter.
The “iFG Farglory Square” created by Farglory is currently the largest lifestyle and leisure shopping area in New Taipei City. “We were using traditional legacy architecture to support very basic workloads, but our demand quickly outstripped capacity. We found it difficult to expand our initial system and had to look to public cloud hosting, which was quite costly,” said James Lin, IT manager of Farglory Retail.
In addition, the IT team found traditional architecture to “require intensive resources on both cost and manpower, and at the end of it, you may not find the expenditure worthwhile because the performance is lackluster and the entire management process burdensome.”
“I’ve had a fantastic experience with Nutanix while working for other Farglory’s business subsidiaries. The performance of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) amazed me and left a good impression,” explained Lin. This was the reason Lin immediately proposed Nutanix to replace the current legacy infrastructure when he started working with Farglory.
With simplicity by design, Farglory was able to go to market and deploy faster than expected with Nutanix AOS and Nutanix Prism, which provides the team with a single dashboard view of all health statistics of their clusters. Farglory was also able to move digital services previously hosted on public cloud back to their own private cloud. These services include website, customer-facing applications and other value-added digital services.
Better than expected storage efficiencies, lower TCO by at least 20% with immediate ROI
Farglory deployed 3 nodes in a single cluster which was initially sized to perfectly suit their current workload. Lin instead found a pleasant surprise when the overall platform was just standing at half the capacity after full migration of workloads were conducted, leaving them plenty of room to support future business growth.
This saving and Nutanix’s pay per node flexibility provides the Farglory team with higher agility to expand whenever needed. With this deployment, the team has lowered TCO by at least 20%; and could see immediate ROI after cancelling public cloud services.
Significant improvement in go to market
“Legacy infrastructures would take us more than 2 weeks to deploy but now we’re done in less than a day!” Lin exclaimed. Nutanix’s one-click simplicity is well loved by the team especially during upgrading processes. “You have to close each component one by one in a traditional architecture setup. With Nutanix, everything is automated in one-click. You do not have to meddle with any settings. I did that once and ended with unsatisfactory results, so just believe in Nutanix,” Lin said.
IT is in “autopilot” mode due to simplicity and ease of management
Nutanix’s simplicity and ease of use were the crucial winning point for Lin and his team. “Nutanix has removed all complexities in the daily management of our datacenter. It’s so easy to use, it’s like we’re on autopilot mode,” said Lin.
“With Nutanix Prism, we can have a comprehensive single pane view of all performance metrics and health statistics. We don’t have to watch it every day and if there’s a problem, it’ll alert you. With the alert, you can judge how severe the issue is and decide if it warrants an immediate action or it can be scheduled later. We’re definitely not going back to the days of traditional architecture after trying Nutanix.”
The Farglory team is now looking to trial other solutions from Nutanix with an aim to build out their private cloud and bring even more benefits and possibilities to their business operations. “The introduction of Nutanix has benefited our team and organization in so many ways. We will strongly recommend Nutanix to other business groups within the Farglory conglomerate,” said Lin.