Sivantos Chooses Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

COMPANY

Sivantos is one of the world’s top manufacturers of hearing aids, with 6000 employees across 25 countries. Working with both hearing care professionals and end users, Sivantos brands include Siemens, Signia, Audio Service, Rexton, and A&M.

INDUSTRY

Healthcare Equipment and Supplies

BUSINESS NEEDS

Upgrade IT processes in preparation for surges in market demand

SOLUTION

• Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
• Acropolis Software
• Prism management infrastructure
  

BENEFITS

• Obtained 40-50% savings in infrastructure expenditures
• Reduced IT administrative burden
• Doubled application performance
• Reduced system outages, lowering costs involved in troubleshooting problems
• Increased work productivity by at least 50% with reallocation of manpower
• Reduced datacenter space, power, cooling, and storage licensing expenditures

CHALLENGE

With greater focus on healthcare and the increasing prevalence of hearing disorders, the global market for audiology devices is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.5% between 2017 and 2021. In preparation for the expected increase in demand due to market expansion and the new capabilities that they have built, Sivantos sought to move away from its model of fragmented and disparate IT systems that required a large amount of manpower to maintain, reducing the company’s productivity.

In particular, the company was finding it challenging to manage the storage infrastructure and keep up with daily troubleshooting from its multiple operating systems. “Operational efficiency took a hit because we were unable to provide timely support due to the large number of disparate systems involved. We were utilizing a combination of Dell, Fujitsu, EMC, NetApp, and Cisco vBlock systems,” said Geoffrey Lem, Head of Datacenter Services at Sivantos. “The systems were not operating at optimal level and troubleshooting took a lot of time, especially since so many people had to be involved.”

SOLUTION

Sivantos sought to resolve this situation by choosing new infrastructure that would reduce the number of IT systems required and improve business efficiency, which in turn would reduce the amount of resources needed for maintenance. Equally important was the scalability of the chosen product, so that they could easily add and remove storage capacity to meet changing organizational demands.

As a hyperconverged cloud infrastructure provider, Nutanix was the clear winner. Sivantos implemented Nutanix NX-3000 and NX-6000, both flash and hybrid systems, and managed them using Nutanix Prism. Overall, 34 nodes were deployed globally supporting Sivantos’ ERP, manufacturing systems, databases, business intelligence, and CRM tools.

RESULTS

Not only was Nutanix competitively priced, but more importantly, it was easy to set up and simple to manage. As compared to other systems, the full implementation of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud took merely a day, causing minimal disruption to other working applications. Sivantos further appreciated Nutanix’s highly responsive customer support service, which was always on hand to help with any difficulties while setting up the systems. “Some of our existing applications were not configured to harness the strength of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, but the Nutanix team was always helpful in recommending necessary changes and providing suggestions,” Lem added.

The implementation of an Enterprise Cloud powered by Nutanix software greatly benefited Sivantos. Overall, the technology was twice as fast as the previous solution Sivantos had in place. It also reduced system outages as Prism was able to accurately pinpoint potential system faults, allowing Sivantos to resolve issues efficiently with a single Nutanix administrator without impacting other applications.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud also required less space, power, and cooling to run, and offered additional savings on licenses for storage. Improved operational efficiency also meant there were lower costs involved in troubleshooting problems, while the manpower originally assigned to maintain the IT systems was reallocated elsewhere in the business, increasing work productivity by at least 50%.

Finally, as compared to the previous systems which needed to be constantly refreshed and upgraded to meet storage needs, the scalability of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud meant that Sivantos could more accurately budget for future hardware investments without having to worry about paying for additional storage infrastructure when the need arose. This change saved Sivantos 40–50% in capital expenditures and reduced the administrative burden on the company. “We’ve saved a significant amount of man hours too – for example, adding new compute and storage capacity used to take between 2-3 days. Now, we’ve reduced that to within a day,” said Lem.

NEXT STEPS

Overall, Sivantos remains pleased with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and Prism, and actively recommends the solution to others. “We are currently using Nutanix in the USA, Singapore, Germany, and China, and we also have plans to roll it out to other global locations,” Lem mentioned. “Nutanix has definitely been identified as the global standard for the Enterprise Cloud.”