LA Fitness trims off infrastructure

Inspired by Google-like datacentres, LA Fitness was searching for a scalable platform that would enable the company to achieve the internal mandate that “simpler is better.” After rapidly growing its headcount to 30,000 across more than 600 locations in the U.S. and Canada, LA Fitness was experiencing challenges to keep pace with the company’s growing compute and storage requirements. The existing SAN-based infrastructure was struggling to keep up with performance requirements for over 100 virtualised applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, as well as an important VDI initiative. LA Fitness sought not only to eliminate the underlying performance issues of legacy storage architectures, but also to select a vendor that could scale and grow with the company over the next several years. Nutanix was selected over traditional incumbents due to its simple manageability and predictable scale – both from an economic and performance perspective.

Kevin Derenard, Director of IT Infrastructure, LA Fitness commented: “When evaluating vendors, achieving the highest possible performance for our applications was paramount, but we also wanted a technology that we could count on to power our infrastructure for years to come. Since implementing Nutanix, LA Fitness has seen dramatic improvements in application performance and accelerated time to production for new virtual machines. With Nutanix we have achieved 7x faster storage, 3x more SQL transactions per section, and 12x more web pages delivered per second.”
LA Fitness is currently deploying more than 100 virtualised enterprise workloads on Nutanix, with an eventual goal of standardising all applications to run on the Virtual Computing Platform. The company also plans to expand its VDI project to multiple groups and departments, which would present scalability and budget challenges using traditional server and storage products.

"Technologies such as cloud and virtualisation have dramatically accelerated the pace at which organisations must evolve their IT departments,” said Matthew Soroka, Director of Server/Storage at CDW. “We work closely with clients such as LA Fitness to not only to help solve their current technology challenges, but to provide them with solutions that also enable their future objectives. We were pleased to introduce Nutanix to LA Fitness. Nutanix has proven technology that is rapidly making an impact on the datacentre landscape."

“LA Fitness is shifting its IT strategy to bring converged infrastructure to the forefront,” said Parmeet Chaddha, VP Global Services and Customer Success, Nutanix. “Nutanix’s unique, software-driven approach to converged infrastructure has made it possible for LA Fitness to blow previous performance records out of the water and set the company up for continued success as it strives to virtualise all of its workloads on Nutanix.”