Rapid growth through acquisition brings with it huge technological as well as business challenges. Challenges met head on by EG Group using the Nutanix Cloud Platform and integrated AHV hypervisor to build an agile private cloud to meet its requirements for infrastructure simplicity, resilience and innovation.
INDUSTRY
Fuel/Retail/Convenience/ Food Service
BENEFITS
- Data centre consolidation from 20 mixed sites to 6 dedicated data centres plus head office
- Lower management overheads through centralised management of all physical and virtual resources from a single interface
- Enhanced agility when on-boarding new acquisitions through on-demand resource scaling
- Enhanced security and resilience with integrated replication between sites and built in disaster recovery capabilities
- Cloud-native and hybrid ready infrastructure to accommodate future business growth and diversification
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
- Prism management plane
- AHV hypervisor
Applications
- Windows infrastructure/productivity services
- SAP
- Oracle
- Citrix Cloud
The Nutanix Cloud Platform ticked all our boxes. It’s simple, scalable and easy to manage, plus inherently resilient and packed with tools to build the secure and always available IT infrastructure needed to cope with the demands of a fast-paced growing business. Beyond that too, Nutanix is famed for its innovation, giving us confidence in our ability to support and continue to grow the business, no matter what direction it takes.
- Graham Billsborough, Group CIO, EG Group
CHALLENGES
Founded in 2001 by the Issa Family, United Kingdom based as EG Group is a leading convenience retailer who has established partnerships with global brands. The business has an established pedigree of delivering a world class fuel, grocery & merchandise and foodservice offer.
EG Group currently employs in excess of 45,000 colleagues working in more than 6,200 sites across Europe, USA and Australia.
Rapid growth, however, comes at a price and, driven mostly through acquisition, the downside here was a mixed inheritance of legacy IT. A mish-mash of hardware and software unfit for purpose in the context of a large, distributed retail business, as Graham Billsborough, CIO of the EG Group explains:
“The formula for success at EG Group is a clear focus on blending fuel, merchandise and foodservice in one ‘destination site’. Delivering and supporting that model requires simple, resilient and scalable IT, and that just couldn’t be delivered using the mixed bag of ageing infrastructure acquired along the way. Especially in the last few years where the business has grown exponentially.”
With the prospect of continued growth, Billsborough was tasked with making the Group’s IT ready for significant upscaling. To both better handle existing workloads and put the business on a firmer footing going forward.
SOLUTION
With extensive prior experience of working with Nutanix products, Billsborough was confident that the best solution would be a distributed private cloud based on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
“We needed a solution that would be agile, scalable, secure and easy to manage and Nutanix does all that,” said Billsborough. “Beyond that, we were looking specifically for three things - simplicity, resilience and, above all, innovative and flexible technology that would keep us on top of our IT no matter the future direction of the business. That, again, pointed us towards Nutanix.”
No half measures
In line with the comprehensive approach taken to all aspects of the business, the decision was taken to dispose of all existing legacy resources and migrate to a more tightly focused network of data centres running the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
“We were struggling along with some 20 IT sites, most relatively small and all running a mix of legacy hardware and software well past its sell-by date,” commented Billsborough. These had to go, so the first move was to build six tier 1 data centres spread across Europe, North America, and Australia. Nutanix clusters would then be installed in each and linked together via high capacity data lines to support both general business traffic and data replication between sites for backup and disaster recovery.”
After that, it was just a matter of migrating workloads from the old infrastructure to the new. And, here again, the team stuck with Nutanix, switching from Microsoft Hyper-V to AHV - the hypervisor integrated into the Nutanix software stack - as part of the migration.
“AHV did everything we wanted and more,” explained Billsborough. “Plus it doesn’t cost extra to run and lets us manage all of our virtual and physical assets together from the same console. And it’s an enabler of lots of other technologies that we’re likely to need.”
CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
To minimise disruption, the migration was staged over several months, but the benefits were felt almost immediately. Not least a very noticeable 50% uplift in legacy application performance.
“The Nutanix infrastructure as a whole feels much more agile and responsive,” commented Group CTO, Kevin Paterson, “VMs that used to take 20 minutes or more to boot now start in seconds. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal but, together with the on-demand scalability and process automation possible with Nutanix, is having a huge impact in terms of the rate at which we can bring new businesses on board.”
Simplicity makes resilience
Complexity has been massively reduced, and reliability of the Group’s IT transformed with no outages since migrating to the Nutanix infrastructure.
The Nutanix infrastructure has also been instrumental in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic by hosting the desktops managed by the group’s Citrix Cloud solution and scaling that provision on demand.
“We were literally able to double the number of remote desktops overnight,” commented Billsborough. “It was virtually seamless, and all made possible by Nutanix and its close integration with the Citrix software.”
Support that follows the sun
Support of such a larger infrastructure was another concern and here, too, the team has nothing but good words for the help available from Nutanix.
“Instead of having to navigate multiple support layers just to raise a support ticket, the person answering the phone can usually resolve the problem directly or take ownership to get it addressed in a timely manner,” commented Paterson.
“That level of support is exceptional,” he continued, “and consistent across all the time zones in which we operate which, for a global business like ours, is a major advantage. It’s like having an extra member of the team – a real partnership.”
NEXT STEPS
With the Nutanix Cloud infrastructure now fully installed and working across the EG Group Billsborough and the team are busy putting it to work supporting yet further expansion.
“Having ticked the simplicity and resilience boxes, we’re all set for a major push on innovation,” said Billsborough. “Innovation that will be based on using the latest technologies to capture, understand and utilise customer data as part of our ongoing digital transformation process.
Will Nutanix be part of that push? Absolutely, it’s key.
Will we be moving beyond a private into hybrid cloud? Yes, we’ve already started and see it as inevitable in order to stay ahead of the competition and deliver continued business success.”
About EG Group
Founded in 2001 by the Issa Family, United Kingdom based as EG Group is a leading convenience retailer who has established partnerships with global brands. The business has an established pedigree of delivering a world class fuel, grocery & merchandise and foodservice offer.
EG Group currently employs in excess of 45,000 colleagues working in more than 6,200 sites across Europe, USA and Australia.
Zuber Issa CBE and Mohsin Issa CBE, Founders and co-CEOs, EG Group, were recently honoured in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2020, for their contribution to business and charity. They were also jointly named the 2018 EY Entrepreneur of the Year in the UK.
For more information see the Group’s website: www.eurogarages.com.