Industrial Gases Supplier Consolidates IT Control Across 40 Sites

In this video, Marty Martin, director of process control technology, explains how Air Liquide modernized their IT operations and significantly improved performance by using Nutanix software to centralize the management of IT operations across 40 locations.

By Ken Kaplan

By Ken Kaplan November 16, 2023

Air Liquide is a multinational supplier of industrial gases and services used to operate a do-it-yourself (DYI) IT infrastructure. But with sites in 40 locations across the U.S., that was getting tough for the IT team to manage.

In this video, Marty Martin, director of process control technology, explains how Air Liquide modernized their IT operations and significantly improved performance by using Nutanix software to centralize the management of IT operations across 40 locations.

“I have a single platform that can be used across multiple control system vendors,” Martin said.

He now has one solution to manage seven control system vendors.

“This is 30, 40 sites, seven plus different systems, one solution that's a game changer.”

Transcript:

Marty Martin: So Air Liquide is the number one in their industry in industrial gases where we have many plants all over the U.S. Our earlier virtualization solution was the homemade system, and it lacked the complete software integration that we get with Nutanix. Nutanix has absolutely simplified my life. 

The best thing about the Nutanix solution for me in the industrial world is I have a single platform that can be used across multiple control system vendors. I have seven. I have one solution that's unheard of. Nobody does that in the industry unless it's the same vendor at seven sites. This is 30, 40 sites, seven plus different systems, one solution that's a game changer.

On the industrial side, the critical business, critical applications typically are your human-machine interfaces. They might be industrial communication boxes, there'll be engineering stations. There will also be some other edge applications such as advanced control.

The Edge has become increasingly more important for us. 

We try to use best-in-class applications, so now we are free to start adding what makes sense because we have the computational power that we can add very quickly. It just makes sense to be able to set these up, get more data, or do more higher-level control or analysis than to overload a system that couldn't necessarily do it in the past. 

It's unbelievable how many VMs they can run in such a small platform with a reasonable heat load. We're able to show we're a worldwide company and show other entities within Air Liquide that this is a good way to go, and the adoption is picking up in multiple countries now, and that's good for us because it just makes us stronger in our internal support. 

I've had plants say, wow, what did you do? It's so much faster. The call ups faster, everything refreshes faster. That's Nutanix.

Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan.

Sabrina Leung produced this video. She is a customer marketing manager at Nutanix.

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