CASE STUDY
In part , that ’ s why The Home Depot chose to partner with Nutanix , and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as the platform to migrate its legacy applications and workloads .
IT challenges
Because of the lower TCO , The Home Depot ’ s development teams have been able to reallocate their budgets to launch additional development projects and add more virtual machines to increase the performance of existing applications and services .
The Home Depot has a long and well-earned reputation as a technology leader . In 2015 , the company decided to revolutionize its entire IT environment to enhance the performance and scalability of its infrastructure and reduce the total cost of ownership ( TCO ).
“ We used to try to cut costs by just upgrading to faster servers and more efficient storage ,” noted Kevin Priest , Senior Director at The Home Depot . “ We needed to find a better way to reduce TCO .”
The Nutanix solution
The Home Depot evaluated multiple hyperconverged infrastructure ( HCI ) vendors and storage virtualization solutions for its next-generation architecture .
“ We looked for vendors that shared our vision of moving to a software-driven world ,” noted Priest .
The Home Depot started by moving its nonproduction applications over to Nutanix , followed by the company ’ s production workloads , including those on Cloud Foundry .
The Home Depot also virtualized its Apache Tomcat grid implementation and deployed a VDI environment using Nutanix as the underlying infrastructure platform .
More than 98 % of The Home Depot ’ s data center virtual workloads – including those supporting its retail operations , decision analytics and supply chain – are now delivered by Nutanix . “ Our decision was reinforced by the ability to run Nutanix on whatever hardware platforms we chose .”
Benefits
Significant TCO reduction
According to Priest , one of the biggest benefits of partnering with Nutanix has been the reduction in TCO .
“ Nutanix software is making such a positive difference in the supportability and performance of our entire environment that we direct all new workloads to Nutanix ,” noted Priest .
Provisioning time reduced from three weeks to one hour
Another benefit of moving to Nutanix was the increased speed of deploying new capacity .
“ Nutanix is a unified , hyperconverged platform that allows us to build , expand and tear down VMs much faster than before ,” reported Priest .
“ Our developers used to have to wait three weeks for us to provision technology resources to them . With Nutanix , it ’ s done in less than an hour .”
With the faster provisioning , The Home Depot ’ s developers have been able to dramatically accelerate delivery of their software development projects , resulting in a faster launch of new services and applications to internal end-users and customers .
Enabling capacity management
There wasn ’ t an easy way to perform capacity management on the legacy architecture . As a result , The Home Depot ’ s IT team would deploy new server pods , and then keep adding workloads until they ran out of resources .
Application performance would inevitably degrade over time , and the operations team would have to go in and manually tweak the system in different ways , but only after the performance issues had already occurred . Examples included increasing the number of CPU cores or adding additional storage .
The Home Depot is now using Nutanix Prism Pro to obtain comprehensive visibility and control over the entire environment .
“ When an application team comes to our group and says they need CPUs , memory and storage , I give them a price for the project ,” explained Priest .
“ Prism Pro makes it extremely easy to watch all of the clusters in our environment and quickly reconfigure things as needed ,” said Priest .
“ Since the introduction of Nutanix , I have been able to lower the internal chargeback costs to my customers by almost half .”
“ It provides very clear metrics on oversubscription and utilization , giving us a powerful , proactive capacity management function that we never had before .”
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