Dangote Group, a Nigerian business conglomerate is renowned for its diverse portfolio of business practices. Hear how Nutanix Professional Services are helping them achieve their goals, with the support of their iTAM they are more agile and have zero downtime.
Dangote Group is a pan African industrial conglomerate based in Lagos, Nigeria. After struggling with scalability they turned to Nutanix. Hear about the benefits they’ve achieved through running their business critical SAP HANA application on Nutanix and how our Xpert Services team have been instrumental in helping them achieve their company goals.
Dangote Group Harnesses Nutanix's Solutions for Operational Efficiency and Business Continuity
Introduction/Overview
Dangote Group, a Nigerian business conglomerate founded by Aliko Dangote, is renowned for its diverse portfolio of business practices. Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, the group has a strong reputation for quality products and is widely considered a pillar of the Nigerian and Sub-Saharan African economies.
Today the group is a market leader in numerous industries, including cement manufacturing (its primary business), sugar milling and refining, flour milling, manufacturing of pasta (spaghetti & macaroni), operation of cement terminals, port operations, noodles manufacturing, packaging material production, and salt refining. Additionally, the company operates a fleet of over 7000 trucks to support these businesses.
Our diverse operations made it critical to streamline and optimise our legacy IT infrastructure. We needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate with our existing systems and provide scalability for future growth. The solution needed to support our digital transformation objectives, our ERP environment and handle the inherent complexity of managing operations across diverse industry sectors and geographies while also streamlining workflows and ensuring business continuity.
Challenges
Dangote's SAP HANA environment is central to its IT infrastructure and essential for data management and business processes. However, difficulties in maintaining high performance and managing latency in the SAP HANA environment emerged as a significant problem due to an outdated tech environment comprising an ageing three-tier solution. Adding to this was the need to leverage a multi-cloud environment to ensure resilience and flexibility and the necessity to ensure continual uptime and business continuity. Dangote specifically required a robust solution to manage workloads seamlessly across its on-premises Nutanix infrastructure and Microsoft Azure cloud.
"The necessity for reliable and consistent IT performance is a business imperative. I cannot stress the importance of ensuring the system's uptime, minimising disruptions, and maintaining business continuity. The old environment was fraught with challenges,” said Dolapo Ajayi, Lead IT Infrastructure and Operations at Dangote Industries.
Ultimately, Dangote faced three major challenges. The first was optimising the SAP HANA environment to ensure a smooth, high-performing IT infrastructure. The second was managing its multi-cloud environment effectively, which would allow for a seamless interchange between Nutanix and Azure. The third was ensuring business continuity and 100% uptime across all sites.
"Maintaining high performance in our SAP HANA environment and efficiently managing workloads in our multi-cloud environment was a constant challenge," confessed Burri. “Our legacy systems could not fulfil these requirements, leading to inefficiencies, high latency, and a lack of scalability. This reality posed a significant obstacle to our ambitious expansion plans and highlighted the urgent need for a more comprehensive, scalable, and efficient solution.”
Solutions
To overcome these challenges, Dangote Industries enlisted the support of Nutanix and its portfolio of innovative solutions. After initially working with the out-of-the-box services offered by Nutanix, the team enlisted the help of Nutanix's Expert Services to help facilitate a seamless and efficient transition, and who later played a crucial role in successfully integrating the Nutanix solutions into the Dangote IT environment.
The performance issues with SAP HANA were addressed by deploying Nutanix's HCI platform. According to Burri, the HCI solution has tremendously improved the performance of the SAP HANA environment, and as a result, data-driven decision-making processes are now becoming faster, more efficient, and more reliable.
Furthermore, Dangote took advantage of Nutanix solutions to optimise its multicloud environment, simplifying the management of workloads across Nutanix and Azure. This Nutanix to Nutanix and Nutanix to Azure transition and integration have helped streamline operations, greatly reducing the workload on Dangote’s IT teams.
Nutanix also provided a robust Disaster Recovery (DR) solution to address Dangote's business continuity needs. Alongside these solutions, Nutanix Pulse for proactive health monitoring, Nutanix Calm for application automation and orchestration, and Nutanix Beam for multi-cloud cost optimisation were introduced into the IT environment.
"These tools have allowed us to proactively monitor and manage our infrastructure, automate applications, and optimise costs. Our operations have seen a significant transformation, becoming more efficient and responsive. I can now sleep with both eyes closed, and I can fall back on the support of Nutanix when I need to. It has given me incredible peace of mind," said Ajayi.
Customer Outcomes
Implementing Nutanix's solution brought about sweeping changes in Dangote's operational efficiency and IT infrastructure. According to the team, its SAP HANA performance improved dramatically, and managing workloads across its multi-cloud environment has never been easier.
The benefits were not just limited to improved performance and efficiency. With Nutanix, Dangote experienced significant enhancements in business continuity, a critical area of concern.
"Nutanix's solution has given us greater confidence in our business continuity plans. We've seen a drastic reduction in downtime during system failures, and our recovery times have improved significantly. Before Nutanix, system recovery could take days to recover 300-500GBs of data. After implementation, we recovered 3TBs of data with about 1.5TB of memory in less than three minutes. I know because I took a stopwatch and timed it from the start of recovery to finally assigning the IP address – it’s incredible,” says Ajayi.
Moreover, the robustness of the Nutanix platform has also led to fewer disruptions, even in the face of potential failures. The team notes that the overall resilience of its IT infrastructure has been dramatically enhanced, directly impacting operational efficiency and service delivery. The seamless integration of Nutanix into our SAP HANA and multi-cloud environments has created a safety net for its business operations.
Moreover, the robustness of the Nutanix platform has also led to fewer disruptions, even in the face of potential failures. The team notes that the overall resilience of its IT infrastructure has been dramatically enhanced, directly impacting operational efficiency and service delivery. The seamless integration of Nutanix into our SAP HANA and multi-cloud environments has created a safety net for its business operations.
The benefits also extended to the seamless management of workloads across Nutanix and Azure, a critical aspect of its multi-cloud strategy. With these significant improvements in business continuity and IT resilience, Dangote has bolstered its ability to ensure smooth operations, even during system disruptions. This not only means better service delivery and customer satisfaction, but it also translates to tangible cost savings from reduced downtime.
In short, the collaboration with Nutanix has allowed Dangote Industries to create a comprehensive and resilient IT environment and better focus on its core business goals.
Next Steps
Moving forward, Dangote intends to deepen its relationship with Nutanix and hopes to further integrate additional solutions into the Dangote tech stack and use Nutanix in deploying its new data centre.
Plans are in the pipeline to further optimise its SAP HANA environment and broaden its multi-cloud strategy. Dangote also plans to explore additional Nutanix technologies to support operational efficiency, data management,security and future business growth.
"Maintaining our stringent security requirements is paramount as we expand and innovate. Nutanix has been a reliable partner, and we look forward to seeing how we can strengthen our security posture further with them. As Dangote continues to innovate and expand, we see Nutanix as an instrumental partner in that journey, providing a scalable, secure, and efficient platform enabling us to achieve our business objectives," said Burri.
Learn more at www.nutanix.com