2 biggest reasons behind Foodco's IT system overhaul

Switch to a Nutanix system gets go-ahead.

When Foodco was mulling a change to its entire information technology (IT) system, it took some convincing. After all, it would affect how the franchise group serves its roughly one million customers across its Jamaicablue and Muffin Break food brands.

But in the end, Foodco chose to take the leap and adopt the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform appliance because of two convincing factors: Doing so would boost the real-time responsiveness of its system, and it would simplify its IT infrastructure enough to achieve impressive cost and manpower efficiencies.

Real-time responsiveness
 

Foodco said the Nutanix appliance will provide all of the compute and storage required to run all backend operations in Foodco’s headquarters and satellite locations, including IT processes for its stores and worldwide point-of-sale (POS) loyalty program.

Foodco admitted that it could have gone with the usual solution of using SANs paired with blades or multiple small Rack Unit servers, but it was convinced that the Nutanix solution would perform better.

 “When I was first introduced to Nutanix, frankly, I was very skeptical – after all, I have been in IT for more than 15 years and it’s my job and my nature to take a hard look behind the promises, and Nutanix promises to do genuinely amazing things,” said James Buhagiar, Foodco’s developer and database manager.

“Then I attended an in-depth technical briefing and I was convinced on a granular level that not only could Nutanix deliver on its promises, it basically makes SANs obsolete. It has an innovative technology that is highly scalable, modular and redundant and intelligently handles and stores data to take full advantage of its tiered flash and disk storage,” he added.

Buhagiar said the Nutanix appliance aligned best with Foodco’s vision of responsiveness, credibility and stability.

“Our business relies on deep trust and real-time responsiveness between Foodco, its many franchisees and their customers. It is a dynamic relationship that is dependent on systems that deliver credible data and the kind of rock-solid stability that will keep our critical loyalty program up and running.”
Simplicity

Foodco was also enamored by the simplicity and redundancy of the Nutanix system, which would deliver palpable efficiencies to company manpower and customer service.

“With Nutanix, we have achieved full hardware redundancy replacing our old hardware with equipment occupying less than a quarter of its original rack space,” said Buhagiar.

“Since the head office tracks its globally positioned stores’ figures around the clock to help foster improvement and fix problems on the ground, these figures must always be fast, accurate and reliable. Making sure the customer loyalty plan, which requires real-time POS updating, never falls down was also critical.”

Buhagiar explained that Nutanix uses a single pane management system of both storage and compute that delivers performance tracking and failure alerts in one easy-to-monitor application.

“We have a relatively small IT team. These guys handle everything from desktop support to all the IT for the stores, including database management to website to the servers that control the POS machines. In a very real way the move to Nutanix and its inherent simplicity means in one fell swoop we are freeing my team’s talents and capacity. Nutanix basically runs itself so they can focus on things like the POS network,” said Buhagiar.

“Nutanix is simplicity. We haven’t had to plan a solution built from numerous vendors. We have a single scalable platform, with single point of management and a single point of contact. We had a rack filled with different equipment, each a potential point of failure, now it’s nothing but Nutanix and we are extremely well protected from failure by the inherent redundancy of this equipment.”