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As one of the country’s leading hospitality management company and a global top 35 hotel group, Dossen International had a clear marketing strategy targeting the mid-market. In line with its push towards digital transformation, the group made plans to provide a full smart hotel experience linkage for its customers and even partnered with WeChat to launch “Cloud Hotel”, a new O2O (online to offline) marketing and service platform. The hotel group also looks to the developments of emerging technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, IoT, and AI, to include in its roadmap to deliver new possibilities smart hotel experiences for its customers.
We want a brand new infrastructure solution that meets our demands in terms of computation capacity, flexible upgrading, systems stability, disaster backup and cloud transformation in order to enhance operations across the board. We need to make a breakthrough.
Hence, the Dossen group needed to position themselves well in anticipation of the business growth towards these directions. By adopting Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Dossen group now has a highly effective, flexible and a more user-friendly solution than its previous traditional IT infrastructure. This means that the business can be more agile in the face of a fast-paced and dynamic China market as well fuel more creative and innovative strategies.
Mr. Zhang Teng, General Manager of Irigud, a key Nutanix’s partner company and Dossen’s system solutions provider, said: “One of the key competitive priority of China’s hotel industry is rapid expansion. It therefore requires its system to operate with high-levels of security, stability, reliability, and on-line scalability, and Nutanix’s solutions can satisfy these requirements perfectly. The partnership between Nutanix and Dossen provides a valuable case for the cloud development and digital transformation taking place in China’s hotel industry.”
Dossen’s datacenter used to deploy traditional X86 physical servers and shared storage devices, making it difficult for center to maximize the server’s resources. Storage capabilities are also at its limits due to rapid business growth.
Technology is preventing Dossen’s business from staying nimble, a vital quality required to stay ahead in China’s highly competitive landscape. Dossen’s application servers are unable to scale up as the business expands, which makes it impossible for the Group to have effective control of resources and respond quickly to emergency business demands.
Business continuity is affected with frequent hardware failures due to expiration of data devices. In addition, the system is not designed to fully support cloud-based applications – a key strategic direction for Dossen.
Gou Guoxing, Vice President of IT, was worried about supporting the complicated legacy infrastructures and applications used by the hotel group. He could foresee operational headaches and future problems, especially during system integrations, new system launches or upgrades across Dossen’s widely dispersed outlets.
Dossen first became aware of Nutanix due to its high ranking in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report. The hotel group sealed the partnership with Nutanix after seeing its outstanding IO performance against other alternative solutions.
In fact, Nutanix strong overall performance left such a great impression on Dossen’s technical team that they cancelled their initial plans and decided to implement Nutanix AHV virtualization platform as its primary core production system instead. Their previous system would then be used as a secondary disaster recovery platform.
Nutanix’s AHV solution gave Dossen a private enterprise cloud platform which can deliver substantial improvement in cluster performance, and yet stayed within the constraints of physical space within the company’s datacentre. Nutanix Prism was used to streamline and automate common workflows, eliminating the need for multiple management solutions across datacentre operations.
Dossen’s BI big data system, which was running on traditional infrastructures, was very slow in collecting data, reading and reporting. However, after Dossen adopted the Nutanix AHV platform, the overall performance was greatly enhanced, and the speed of data rendering and reading improved substantially. Gou said that the productivity of IT team has increased five-fold and the space saved has been over 60 percent after deploying Nutanix’s solutions.
Nutanix enterprise cloud facilitated Dossen with the capacity to employ linear and online upgrading, which met the massive demands of high concurrency, high IOPS, and high reliability during certain time slots that placed on the hotel industry.
Gou pointed out that the most impressive feature of Nutanix is AHV – its built-in, license-free virtualization feature. When the system is deployed and the power is on, users can start and run the system in minutes.
AHV provides high availability(HA) capability and ensures that a virtual machine can restart on another node of Nutanix HCI cluster preventing any accidental downtime – critical in ensuring business continuity.
The convergence feature of Nutanix’s HCI solution allows Dossen to scale linearly. As new nodes are added, Nutanix’s computation and storage capacity expands linearly, and so does virtualization. In terms of cost efficiency, AHV is almost identical in function when compared to VMware’s virtual servers, and it also charges no loyalty fee, which can reduce 80% cost compared with the traditional virtualization technology, significantly cutting procurement costs for users.
With the adoption of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud solution, Nutanix Prism provides an easy virtual management interface that simplifies workflow from the datacenter by means of advanced data analytics and heuristic methods.
Complications and mistakes have been reduced and Dossen’s IT team cited a much better experience in terms of user interface, daily operations and monitoring experience. The operation and maintenance team’s productivity increased five-fold and labor costs have seen a reduction by 30%.
Dossen has been on a fast-growth track, evolving from being a regional brand to becoming a national brand and now an international brand after its recent partnership with both Marriott and Dusit International. According to its roadmap, Dossen International Group aims to expand to over 5000 hotels and become one of the leading players in China’s hotel industry. Dossen’s in-depth collaboration with Nutanix has laid firm foundations for its future business growth and digital transformation.
As business grows, Dossen plans to expand its deployment of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software solutions on its business operation systems. The company installed 14 nodes in the first phase and increased additional 8 nodes in the second phase.