Industry
Manufacturing
Challenges
Every day, hundreds of Valmet engineers use engineering applications in a shared virtualized desktop environment to develop unique offerings for the pulp, paper and energy industries. These users access the applications from Valmet offices around the world, partner offices, and from home – with remote working increasing sharply in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the underlying hardware approaching end-of-life, the company searched for a solution in the market to give the best performance today and easy scalability for the future, capable of supporting its ambitious expansion goals.
Solutions
- Nutanix HCI
- Nutanix Files
- Nutanix Prism Central
Business benefit
By deploying a Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) cluster to support engineering workloads and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Valmet removed barriers to expansion. The organization can now add capacity non-disruptively, helping it to capitalize fast on growth opportunities. Thanks to Nutanix technology, Valmet's engineers enjoy higher availability and performance for application software, boosting productivity.
So far, our experience with Nutanix technology has been very positive. It's designed for simple scalability, which is a big advantage for us when facing an increased need or a new use case. With Nutanix, we can maximize returns on our investments by ensuring high resource utilization.
—Kuisma Holstikko, Service Manager, Common IT Services, Valmet Technologies, Inc.
Challenge
Valmet is the foremost global developer and supplier of process technologies, automation and services for the pulp, paper and energy industries. The organization has expanded steadily in recent years through a combination of organic growth and acquisition.
Valmet IT, the Valmet Group's shared services function, was tasked with scaling up the organization's IT systems to cope with rising demand. There was aging hardware that needed to be replaced, and the team also identified bottlenecks in the current architecture supporting its engineering and Citrix VDI software.
"We were on the verge of issues with this part of our IT environment," said Kuisma Holstikko, Service Manager, Common IT Services, Valmet Technologies, Inc. "Specifically, the disk arrays were becoming complicated to scale and manage. With users in Japan, Brazil and everywhere in between, we wanted to select a solution that can grow without those bottlenecks."
At peak times, hundreds of users access Valmet's engineering environment at once. Valmet Technologies set out to find an alternative platform that could enable it to scale with ease.
Solution
Valmet looked to long-term partner Sofor Oy for advice on a new platform. For four years, Sofor Oy has provided Citrix management services to the Valmet Group.
"Sofor have proved themselves a trustworthy, reliable partner," commented Kuisma Holstikko. "They provide tailored customer service that's centered on our needs rather than theirs. Through them, we first encountered Nutanix technology."
The concept of Nutanix HCI appealed to Valmet, since it eliminated the complexity of scaling up separate server, storage and networking systems. Attracted by the promise of easy management and bottleneck-free performance, Valmet commissioned Sofor to implement a 21-node HCI cluster featuring 105 NVIDIA GPUs and provide ongoing management services for the platform.
"Sofor offered a turnkey solution, featuring the best of Nutanix technology to boost performance and scalability for our engineering platform," said Kuisma Holstikko. "The implementation went smoothly, with our engineers able to keep working throughout without disruption."
Customer Outcome
With help from Sofor, Valmet sized the Nutanix solution precisely to meet current requirements. The Valmet Technologies team is confident that it can scale the platform as and when it needs to quickly and easily.
"We're pleased to see that the system load matches up with what we were expecting," explained Kuisma Holstikko. "So far, our experience with Nutanix technology has been very positive. It's designed for simple scalability, which is a big advantage for us when facing an increased need or a new use case. With Nutanix, we can maximize returns on our investments by ensuring high resource utilization."
Using Nutanix technology, Valmet increased the resilience of its engineering software environment significantly. Sofor use Nutanix Prism management tools to optimize the infrastructure on an ongoing basis.
"Thanks to Nutanix and Sofor, we now have a high-availability engineering platform with built-in redundancy," added Kuisma Holstikko. "Our engineers working around the world can reliably access the tools they need to work productively, even as we expand our operations. Nutanix management tools provide a single, easy-to-use point of control for the environment."
Next steps
Valmet is now in the process of moving its user profiles to Nutanix Files, which it expects to enable additional performance improvements. The Valmet Technologies and Sofor teams are also exploring how they can use Nutanix technology to increase efficiency through automation.
"We’re testing Nutanix Files for our user profiles right now, and plan to roll out within a month," concluded Kuisma Holstikko. "We anticipate that will drive up performance for engineers even more. With Nutanix, you get the benefit of a cloud-like environment on-premises, which we expect will yield further benefits for Valmet as we look to increase our technology leadership over our competitors."
