A resilient and powerful solution for Sangers AAH | ET Works
Case Study

A resilient and powerful solution for Sangers AAH

Sangers AAH innovate in IT

“The Nutanix solution supplied by ET puts our IT organisation on the forefront of technology and enables us to meet the stringent demands of our dynamic and growing business. The Nutanix platform covers both our desktop (VDI) and server virtualisation requirements and yet can be managed through a single management interface, thus reducing the burden on IT staff. It’s resilience and advanced replication features mean we can reduce our Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to zero and our Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to minutes. None of the competing solutions we investigated could deliver this capability with quite the same ease of use and elegance as Nutanix.”

RYAN MAGILL, IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGER 

Challenge

Sangers AAH can trace its history back to the 1860’s with the Thomas McMullan pharmacy in Belfast and since then it has grown through a series of mergers to become the largest wholesale pharmaceutical distributor in Ireland. It has a long history of innovation: in 1976 it became the first company in Ireland to run all systems by computer and in 1986 it offered the first overnight service to pharmacists. In Sept 2015 McKesson announced it would acquire United Drug Sangers and merge with existing Celesio wholesaler AAH Pharmaceuticals to form Sangers AAH.

Due to Sangers AAH’s constantly changing business demands, coupled with continual growth, the IT department saw a need to implement a more flexible, scalable and easy to manage IT infrastructure than their legacy SAN-based environment could offer. The refresh of the current environment extended to include both servers and desktops and would take place over two phases. For the first phase (desktop refresh), it was decided that a virtual desktop solution (VDI) would enable faster deployment of users, reduce image management overheads and break the historical dependency on expensive PC’s. For phase two, an increasingly rigorous compliance framework and a business need to guarantee core system uptime required further innovation in terms of how virtual servers were deployed.

Solution

  • Nutanix 1065-G4 clusters
  • Integrated storage, memory and compute resources in a single appliance,
  • Centrally managed through Nutanix’s Prism management interface.
  • Two clusters at the primary site (VDI, servers) mirrored to a corresponding set of clusters at the DR site.

ET worked closely with Sangers AAH to assess the business requirements and develop an appropriate IT solution. It was decided that a complete refresh of the existing infrastructure with a next-generation hyper-converged solution from Nutanix would provided the needed business flexibility, scalability, ease of management and high availability that the business demanded.

Benefits

Complete system resilience in the event of hardware failure, with one-click failover to DR; high performance for VDI and enterprise LOB applications; ease of management.

 

 

 

How can we help you?

We’re real people, with years of collective knowledge and a real commitment to enabling our clients to harness the utility of technology.

Book a consultation