Southeast Pet is one of the most respected pet supply and food distributors in the nation. Based in Metro Atlanta, Southeast Pet’s 133,000 square-foot distribution center supplies retailers in six southeastern states.
Retail Distribution
Small company with 1-person IT team needed a simpler IT solution to host its ecommerce site and ERP system for 65 internal users
Scott Boatright manages all IT infrastructure and operations for SE Pet’s 65 internal users. Before moving to Nutanix, SE Pet was supporting its Epicore ERP software and ecommerce website using a Hyper-V cluster with mix of iSCSI storage systems. “It was a small, but fairly complicated environment,” noted Scott. “We had two clusters, plus each of the storage systems had their own reporting packages to track performance. It required a lot of effort to keep the disparate infrastructure running.”
Scott first heard about the Xpress offering on the Nutanix YouTube channel. “I had been following Nutanix for about two years, but it was a bit cost prohibitive for our size and needs. So when the Xpress model came out, I asked my local value-added reseller if it was a good fit for SE Pet.”
SE Pet purchased its first Nutanix Xpress system a few months ago. “I’ve worked with a lot of traditional server and storage solutions over the years, but I was really looking for something new and different for SE Pet,” Scott said. “I am very interested in the hyperconverged approach to infrastructure, and Nutanix is the market leader. With Nutanix Xpress, you have just one piece of equipment to monitor for all your infrastructure needs. When the Xpress solution was released, we knew it was the right solution for our ERP and ecommerce site that fit into our budget very well.”
“It was very easy to deploy Nutanix Xpress,” noted Scott. “Hyperconverged is a lot faster to deploy because it’s a single system, as opposed to deploying u multiple front-end storage systems, servers, and complicated network layouts. After completing the system upgrades to get everything current, we started moving all of our workloads over to Xpress.”
“Nutanix Xpress is very easy to work with–there really is no day-to-day management needed at all,” Scott said. “I just watched the Nutanix videos that showed how to manage Xpress and I was ready to go. It’s a very intuitive system. With Xpress, we only need Nutanix Prism to manage the entire environment. It’s great that we don’t have to use multiple management solutions anymore.”
“Upgrades were very time-consuming on the Hyper-V cluster,” Scott said. “With separate servers, storage, and networking infrastructure, each piece of equipment had to be managed while we performed the upgrades. Nutanix Xpress offers rolling upgrades and manages the timing and the migration of VMs behind the scenes. It really is a ‘set it and forget it’ platform.”
“Nutanix Xpress is night-and-day faster than our older systems,” noted Scott. “The previous environment ran on 16 SAS drives in an iSCSI environment with Dell PowerVault storage arrays. I expected to see some improvement by moving to Xpress, but we were surprised to see that it was actually 43% faster than before.”
SE Pet is now using AHV, the integrated Nutanix hypervisor. “Another great benefit of Nutanix Xpress is the built-in hypervisor,” Scott said. “The ability to move away from the expensive Hyper-V licensing models is saving us a lot of money. Nutanix Xpress provides the power of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform and hyperconvergence—at a price point that works very well for small and medium businesses like ours.”
Nutanix Xpress provides the power of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform and hyperconvergence—at a price point that works very well for small and medium businesses like ours.