SPECIALIST INSIGHT
Challenge
ACICO Group is one of the Middle East ’ s largest building materials manufacturers for residential , industrial , commercial and institutional projects . In a sector that is notorious for costly project overruns , the Group has established itself as a supplier of choice for bespoke , hassle-free building solutions , delivered in a timeefficient manner .
The core applications that enabled this highly-valued efficiency – Microsoft Dynamics AX , SharePoint and others – all ran on a complex mesh of interconnected solutions that sprawled across the company ’ s data centre . “ We had three critical dependencies – the fibre , the servers and the storage – each of which had an independent technology provider . Troubleshooting was plagued by finger-pointing , and pinpointing any issues arising from the physical devices was highly intimidating ,” said Abdul Kadir Kothi , IT Infrastructure Manager , ACICO Group .
Solution
These shortcomings impacted operational efficiency and constrained the Group ’ s ability to expand and capitalise on the tremendous opportunity that the region ’ s ongoing construction boom presented . So Kothi and his team began looking for a solution , and from the onset were convinced of the value that Nutanix could deliver .
“ Since reducing complexity and manageability challenges were the impetus for this undertaking , we prioritised having a single vendor we could trust implicitly . Being the hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer made Nutanix the clear front-runner ,” said Kothi .
Customer outcome
Key results
• Improved business performance : Near-zero downtime and enhanced performance have yielded 30 % business performance improvement .
• Enhanced application performance : Mission-critical applications like Microsoft Dynamics AX and SharePoint have seen 45 % performance improvements
• Reduced IT OpEx and footprint : Operational costs have been reduced by 35 % while the data centre footprint has shrunk by 85 %.
Power-packed package
Following the migration , the reduction in complexity that the ACICO Group was aspiring towards was immediately evident in the physical footprint of the Nutanix solution . Where its legacy infrastructure previously occupied 42U , today this is scaled down to just 6U . “ Don ’ t let the size fool you though . Nutanix has packed incredible power into this small footprint , and we ’ ve been especially impressed by how incredibly well their AHV hypervisor is tuned to run on this hardware ,” said Kothi .
Simply put , Nutanix is the best thing that ’ s ever happened to our infrastructure , ensuring peace of mind and restful nights for my team .
Operational eficiency soars
This perfect blend of hardware and software from a single vendor has meant the Group ’ s troubleshooting issues are a thing of the past . “ Instead of a barrage of emails to multiple stakeholders , now we have just a single , reliable point of contact . Simply put , Nutanix is the best thing that ’ s ever happened to our infrastructure , ensuring peace of mind and restful nights for my team ,” said Kothi .
The cost-effectiveness of Nutanix ’ s solution , combined with the reduced effort for management of the Group ’ s IT infrastructure has resulted in a 35 % reduction in operational costs .
Stellar support
The Middle East construction sector is booming and as a leading materials supplier to the region ’ s many iconic projects , ACICO Group runs its manufacturing operations like a well-oiled machine . As is now the case across industries , IT plays a pivotal role in enabling this . So , when the Group ’ s IT team saw that the complexity of its server , storage and network infrastructure was beginning to place the efficiency of its operations at risk , they got on the front foot and migrated to Nutanix .
Offering an example of the ‘ exceptional quality ’ of Nutanix ’ s support , Kothi said : “ We once had a motherboard failure on a server , an unfortunate incident but something that does happen from time to time . Nutanix had the new box replaced in our rack in under 24 hours . I never imagined this was possible , and it was an outcome that exceeded our wildest expectations . As a result , we didn ’ t have even a minute of downtime , and this is the kind of confidence that is critical in our labour-intensive 24x7 operations .”
Elaborating on another instance where Nutanix ‘ saved the day ’ for his IT team , Kothi said : “ Just this week we had a disaster with SharePoint . But thanks to Nutanix snapshots – a feature I didn ’ t see in any of the other solutions we evaluated – we were able to restore all the servers in under 30 minutes .”
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