Sala Group Goes Hybrid Cloud to Gain Agility to Meet Business Needs

CHALLENGES

The Sala Group, whose core business is the supply of city gas mainly in Aichi and Shizuoka prefectures, has been in business for more than 110 years. SALA is a word coined from the initial letters of “Space,” “Art,” “Living,” and “Amenity,” and it expresses the Group’s desire to “make living spaces more beautiful and comfortable. The group consists of 46 lifestyle-related companies, including energy supply companies, and is engaged in a wide range of businesses that support people’s daily lives and businesses.

Group IT subsidiary Sala Business Solutions Inc. is responsible for system development and operation, network infrastructure construction, and security measures for Group companies.

In 2019, the company began to explore the possibility of creating a flexible structure that would allow the company to respond quickly to changes in the environment and work more closely with user departments to deliver new products and services. Then the company decided to leverage the public cloud as part of the System of Engagement (SoE) advocated by Gartner.

In 2020, when replacing the on-premise virtual infrastructure, the initial plan was to use the public cloud. As a result, the company decided to adopt Nutanix Cloud Platform as the on-premise environment due to its hybrid cloud abilities, and migrate their on-premise virtual environment to a public cloud in stages.

SOLUTION

The company has been providing services for the Sala Group in a virtualized environment consisting of servers, switches, and storage in a three-tier configuration at the Mitaka site in Tokyo and the Toyohashi site in Aichi Prefecture. The IT team faced challenges such as operation complexity due to managing equipment from different vendors, backup issues, outsourcing of fault isolation and long response time, as well as the high cost and time required for configuration changes. As such, the company decided to revamp the system before the expiration of the five-year maintenance contract. The new on-premise environment consists of a simple configuration of HPE ProLiant DX with Nutanix Cloud Platform software and switches only, and a Nutanix AHV as the hypervisor for the virtualization environment. The DR functionality built into Nutanix allowed them to create a DR environment between the two sites.

Junji Watanabe, IT Infrastructure Team, Platform Group, Sala Business Solutions, explains why they chose Nutanix: “Nutanix’s high affinity with public clouds and its concept of creating a cloud-like environment even on local premise fits our policy. The company was able to meet the needs of its end-users and those of its customers. The company decided to use Nutanix and HPE products because they provide a simple, integrated environment that solves the problems of conventional on-premise systems.”

The company was concerned about the ability to properly copy data and run the virtual machines when migrating from the legacy virtualized environment to the Nutanix environment, but Nutanix Move made it easy. From our current experience. “We can now migrate our virtualized environment much more easily and smoother than expected,” said Watanabe.

CUSTOMER OUTCOMES

Achieve hybrid cloud to seamlessly connect between private cloud and AWS

Sala Group uses AWS as its public cloud. Systems whose IP addresses cannot be changed or if there are linkages to other on-premises servers are operated on Nutanix, while new systems to be built are migrated to AWS. They used Nutanix Move not only to migrate from their existing environment to the Nutanix environment, but also to create a hybrid cloud with AWS. “Nutanix Move has made it easy for us to move our virtual servers to AWS and back onto the Nutanix environment,” said Watanabe.

In-house operation and management of cloud-like environment

With Nutanix, the company can regularly and seamlessly upgrade software versions to ensure that we are using the latest environment. “The company is now able to handle important tasks such as version upgrades in-house, rather than having to outsource to an external vendor,” said Watanabe.

Simplified operation and speedy response

Watanabe said, “The simplicity of Nutanix’s UX facilitates operation, and the Nutanix Prism management console provides a centralized view of resources. No special skills or knowledge are required, and anyone can easily manage operations. When the company runs out of resources, the company can add nodes from Nutanix and expand easily and rapidly.”

NEXT STEPS

Regarding the future outlook for the Sala Group, which is aiming for business agility with cloud, Watanabe said, "The needs of user departments will change with the times. The company will consider a multi-cloud environment in the future, but the company expects to be able to handle it simply by adding the functions and services provided by the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The company is still developing internal systems in the traditional way, building virtual servers and running them on Nutanix or AWS, but the company will also contribute to the Sala Group's DX by shifting to new system development methods such as containers and agile development, and by focusing on IT human resource development."