Cable Manufacturer Powers to Virtual Success with Nutanix

Business Needs

Immediate consolidation of business-critical workloads plus long-term digital transformation based on cloud technology

Solution

• Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
• Nutanix AHV
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Custom applications

Benefits

• 45% ROI in first year
• 70% increase in application performance
• 98% reduction in time spent on infrastructure management and monitoring
• Virtualization related cost avoidance
• 60% reduction in power, space and cooling
  

Challenge

One of India’s fastest growing companies, cable manufacturer Polycab Wires was finding plans for future growth hindered by the limitations of its existing IT infrastructure. Comprising a mix of Cisco UCS servers and NetApp storage, lack of performance and scalability were real concerns along with management and support issues inherent to the 3-tier datacenter infrastructure approach, as CIO of Polycab Wires, Udit Pahwa, explains.

“We used to employ specialists and custom tools to manage each part of the infrastructure, even then, it took a long time to provision new IT resources when we needed them. Having to deal with multiple vendors added further to the workload, putting the onus on us to decide whether we had a server or storage issue when things went wrong.

”Pahwa was keen to upgrade the existing hardware to virtualize and con-solidate workloads but, at the same time, realised a whole new approach was required to underpin the planned digital transformation of Polycab’s datacenter. In addition to a more scalable and easy to manage platform for existing applications, the company wanted to start building the foundation of an Enterprise Cloud to, ultimately, deliver scalable on-demand IT services to users across the business.

Solution

The Polycab team decided that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) would best meet both its immediate and longer term requirements and started to evaluate products from leading vendors. Nutanix quickly rose to the top of the list due to the completeness of its Enterprise Cloud Platform. In particular the team was impressed by the Nutanix AHV, enabling virtual machines to be deployed and managed from the same Prism management console as physical compute and storage resources.

“The fact that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform came with its own hypervisor was a real plus,” explains Pahwa. “Having Nutanix AHV integrated as part of the platform allows us to manage all of our physical and virtual resources together as well as saving money which would otherwise have gone on hypervisor licensing.”

Initial installation took just four hours, following which Pahwa and his team were able to virtualise five physical hosts running critical SQL Server data-bases and associated applications, consolidating them together on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform with minimal disruption. All of the business critical applications using these servers were also migrated to the Nutanix platform as part of the process including Cable Builder, a key business tool used to produce custom 2D/3D cable designs to customer specifications.

Results

Post migration, Polycab has halved its SQL Server licensing overhead and experienced an immediate 70% boost in database performance. This greater efficiency is particularly evident when running the Cable Builder application which now completes the design process in under three minutes compared to over 15 minutes using the legacy infrastructure, significantly enhancing engineering productivity.

By consolidating five servers and associated NetApp storage arrays the company has also saved considerably on datacenter space. This has led to a reduction in power and cooling, slashing the use and associated cost of these resources by an estimated 60 percent.

Beyond these performance and resource saving benefits, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform has also driven greater efficiency amongst the internal IT team, empowering staff to focus on the applications that power the business rather than time-consuming maintenance and management. According to Deputy IT manager, Hasan Ali, the time required to manage the IT infrastructure has been slashed by a massive 98 percent.

“Being able to minimise the solution to a single management interface from one vendor instantly made our systems easier to manage,” explains Ali. “in addition the Nutanix Enterpise Cloud Platform performs intelligent selfmonitoring; identifying and fixing problems itself without any downtime or user intervention."

Add all this up and Polycab has already seen a 45% return on its investment in the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, with Pahwa confident of 100% ROI in only the second year of deployment.

Next Steps

Having experienced first-hand the performance, scalability and management advantages of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Polycab is keen to migrate other key workloads to the new infrastructure. Among these is the company’s hybrid Exchange and Open Source email platform plus its Citrix-based VDI solution, currently outsourced to a third party, which Pahwa and Ali both agree would benefit enormously from being brought back in-house and hosted on the Nutanix platform.

Looking further forward the company also has big plans to build a user portal and here, too, sees the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as the ideal platform for that project, especially using the rich management functionality available today and in the future. Developers and business users alike love the public cloud for its ability to provision applications and virtual machines as and when they like; Nutanix is designed to bring this simplicity to enterprise clouds, empowering users to deploy applications themselves based on policies set and managed by IT.

“We’re really excited by what the cloud has to offer,” comments Pahwa. “And with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, integrated Nutanix AHV and cloud-like capabilities we can get all of the benefits without the drawbacks and limitations of public cloud alternatives.”