The Middle East construction sector is booming and as a leading materials supplier to the region’s many iconic projects, ACICO Group runs its manufacturing operations like a well-oiled machine. As is now the case across industries, IT plays a pivotal role in enabling this. So, when the Group’s IT team saw that the complexity of its server, storage and network infrastructure was beginning to place the efficiency of its operations at risk, they got on the front foot and migrated to Nutanix.
Key Results
Improved business performance: Near-zero downtime and enhanced performance have yielded 30% business performance improvement.
Enhanced application performance: Mission-critical applications like Microsoft Dynamics AX and SharePoint have seen 45% performance improvements
Reduced IT OpEx and footprint: Operational costs have been reduced by 35% while the data centre footprint has shrunk by 85%
Challenge
ACICO Group is one of the Middle East’s largest building materials manufacturers for residential, industrial, commercial and institutional projects. In a sector that is notorious for costly project overruns, the Group has established itself as a supplier of choice for bespoke, hassle-free building solutions, delivered in a time-efficient manner.
The core applications that enabled this highly-valued efficiency – Microsoft Dynamics AX, SharePoint and others – all ran on a complex mesh of interconnected solutions that sprawled across the company’s data centre. “We had three critical dependencies – the fibre, the servers and the storage – each of which had an independent technology provider. Troubleshooting was plagued by finger-pointing, and pinpointing any issues arising from the physical devices was highly intimidating,” said Abdul Kadir Kothi, IT Infrastructure Manager, ACICO Group.
Solution
These shortcomings impacted operational efficiency and constrained the Group’s ability to expand and capitalise on the tremendous opportunity that the region’s ongoing construction boom presented. So Kothi and his team began looking for a solution, and from the onset were convinced of the value that Nutanix could deliver.
“Since reducing complexity and manageability challenges were the impetus for this undertaking, we prioritised having a single vendor we could trust implicitly. Being the hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer made Nutanix the clear front-runner,” said Kothi.
Customer Outcome
Power-Packed Package
Following the migration, the reduction in complexity that the ACICO Group was aspiring towards was immediately evident in the physical footprint of the Nutanix solution. Where its legacy infrastructure previously occupied 42U, today this is scaled down to just 6U. “Don’t let the size fool you though. Nutanix has packed incredible power into this small footprint, and we’ve been especially impressed by how incredibly well their AHV hypervisor is tuned to run on this hardware,” said Kothi.
Operational Efficiency Soars
This perfect blend of hardware and software from a single vendor has meant the Group’s troubleshooting issues are a thing of the past. “Instead of a barrage of emails to multiple stakeholders, now we have just a single, reliable point of contact. Simply put, Nutanix is the best thing that’s ever happened to our infrastructure, ensuring peace of mind and restful nights for my team,” said Kothi.
The cost-effectiveness of Nutanix’s solution, combined with the reduced effort for management of the Group’s IT infrastructure has resulted in a 35% reduction in operational costs.
Stellar Support
Offering an example of the ‘exceptional quality’ of Nutanix’s support, Kothi said: “We once had a motherboard failure on a server, an unfortunate incident but something that does happen from time to time. Nutanix had the new box replaced in our rack in under 24 hours. I never imagined this was possible, and it was an outcome that exceeded our wildest expectations. As a result, we didn’t have even a minute of downtime, and this is the kind of confidence that is critical in our labour-intensive 24×7 operations.”
Elaborating on another instance where Nutanix ‘saved the day’ for his IT team, Kothi said: “Just this week we had a disaster with SharePoint. But thanks to Nutanix snapshots – a feature I didn’t see in any of the other solutions we evaluated – we were able to restore all the servers in under 30 minutes.”
Benefits to business performance
Since standardising on Nutanix, the performance of mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Dynamics AX, the Group’s resource-intensive ERP solution, has soared by up to 45%. Kothi estimates that this high performance and ability to ensure non-stop operations has helped improve the Group’s business performance by an impressive 30%.
“Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about – IT in service of the business, and that is precisely what Nutanix empowers us to deliver,” said Kothi.
Next Steps
Kothi’s praise for Nutanix is matched only by the ACICO Group’s ambitions and appetite for growth. “We are in a period of rapid growth and given our complete faith in Nutanix, we are now looking to further our investment with the expansion of our infrastructure,” he said.
“We are confident that their combination of market-leading technologies and world-class support will continue to give us an edge that keeps ACICO Group at the forefront of the region’s construction industry,” Kothi concluded.