Sligro Food Group builds software defined data centre with Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure

Founded in 1935, Sligro Food Group is a Netherlands-based wholesaler, and retailer of food and beverage products, leading the Dutch foodservice market with turnover in excess of 2.6 Billion Euros and employing in excess of 5800 staff.

Sligro took the decision to invest in a major IT upgrade programme to replace its ageing network of desktop computers and associated server based applications. With around 1200 users distributed across two datacentres, it made sense to standardise on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) approach, reducing the management, support and capital investment expense associated with traditional desktop deployments. Furthermore, the realisation that the new infrastructure would need to handle other workloads beyond the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, coupled with a lack of in-house skills needed to support traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, convinced Sligro that Nutanix’s Web-scale solution would be an ideal option for the migration project.

“Initially we trialled Nutanix’s solution to prove the concept, ensure its resilience and evaluate its ease of management,” said Maurice van Veghel, CIO and IT Director, Sligro Food Group, “and we weren’t disappointed. We have found that adding extra nodes is incredibly easy, enabling us to scale performance and capacity in just a few minutes. The distributed file system is transformational, with the automated migration of ‘hot data’ a major advantage of this innovative solution. It assures data integrity and maximises storage performance with none of the technical or management overheads associated with a traditional SAN.”

Sligro has since gone on to install Nutanix appliances across both of its national datacentres, migrating not only its desktop user base to the new VDI infrastructure, but in addition other critical line of business applications running on VMWare, including the replacement of 42 conventional server hosts and a traditional IBM storage network. The company will also virtualise its Microsoft Exchange and SQL to complete what has since grown into a comprehensive and very successful datacentre migration project.

Patrick van de Werken, Regional Director for Northern Europe at Nutanix, commented: “Nutanix is the ideal solution to provide on-demand scalability in the datacentre, and Sligro has found Nutanix’s Web-scale architecture, its close integration with VMWare and the ability to quickly and easily scale capacity and performance a compelling approach. It will be only be a matter of time until the migration towards Web-scale infrastructure and the vision of the software-defined datacentre will become the de-facto approach for enterprise IT deployments”.