Nutanix today announced that Vast-Auto Distribution has opted to use the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud on Dell EMC XC Series for faster performance and fewer administrative costs. By transitioning to a Nutanix and Dell EMC virtualized solution, the company reduced its previous expenses needed to maintain three expensive HPE LeftHand storage systems by consolidating down to one system with storage and compute functionality included.

Vast-Auto Distribution is a provider of auto parts in Eastern Canada, and oversees hosted IT services for over 50 parts stores and 80 garages. Previously, Vast-Auto Distribution's IT team had been relying on aging five-year-old legacy infrastructure, including SAN servers, which required manually spreading and monitoring all its customers' day-end processes throughout the night.

When the team decided to upgrade its IT, they first evaluated infrastructure options from SAN and storage vendors. However, once they heard about the hyperconverged solution from Dell EMC and Nutanix, Vast-Auto immediately purchased four Dell EMC XC630 appliances powered by Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform software.

Dell EMC's x86 server platform integrates with Nutanix's web-scale software to provide an enterprise-class, hyperconverged appliance for Vast-Auto's virtualized environment. The company quickly provisioned the Dell EMC XC Series appliances, and once up and running, seamlessly migrated the older VM environment over to Nutanix. Vast-Auto now has 50 virtual machine environments running on the XC Series, including the company's mission-critical Eagle (Epicor) point-of-sale (POS) system. This setup allows the company to house its customers' entire infrastructure at its main datacenter, run their backups every night and resolve issues right away with its fully redundant systems.

The high performance of the Nutanix solution has also allowed Vast-Auto Distribution to launch a variety of new services for its customers including Compass, a business intelligence tool. All the company's corporate stores have already deployed Compass and are seeing elevated insight into their sales with this new solution.

"All of our applications are running much faster on XC Series," said Mario Campbell, IT Director for Vast-Auto Distribution. "We haven't had a single complaint from any of our customers since we went live. End-of-day processing jobs now complete on time, without any issues or impacts on system performance. Backups are much faster, too. Jobs that used to take multiple hours on our legacy systems finish in less than 20 minutes on XC Series."

"Since launching the XC Series through our OEM partnership, customers that have standardized on Dell EMC hardware have benefitted from the performance, scalability and flexibility of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform," said Robert Yelenich, country manager, Canada, Nutanix. "Vast-Auto Distribution is yet another in a long list of customers whose deployment of our platform has simplified the IT team's day-to-day and has bettered the company's output. We look forward to continue enriching our customer's IT infrastructure with these offerings and further building out our OEM partnership with Dell EMC."