Nutanix Has It All – Vitacost.com Switches to Nutanix for VDI
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform
- Nutanix NX-3000 Series
- VMware Horizon View
Tech Stack
- VMware hypervisor
- Fusion-io PCIe flash storage cards
Implementation Scale
- Departmental Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Vitacost.com, Inc. is a prominent online retailer specializing in healthy living products, offering over 45,000 items, including dietary supplements, natural personal care products, sports nutrition, and health foods. The company features more than 2,500 third-party brands alongside its proprietary product line. With nearly 800 employees, Vitacost.com operates a customer service center, two distribution centers, and a robust website and backend infrastructure. The company is recognized for its customer satisfaction, ranking #2 among the top 100 US websites during the 2013 holiday season, according to the ForeSee Experience Index (FXI): 2013 US Retail Edition.
The Challenge
The original VDI system at Vitacost.com was running on legacy Dell servers and EMC SAN storage, which were shared with other datacenter applications. This setup led to slow and unresponsive virtual desktops, with applications taking a long time to load, resulting in frequent user complaints about performance and speed. Administrators faced challenges as the task of recomposing images took all night, and system resources were maxed out, preventing the addition of more desktops. The IT staff considered alternatives like rack servers with Fusion-io PCIe flash storage cards and SAN storage on the backend, but the costs were high. They desired a dedicated infrastructure for VDI to avoid interference with other datacenter applications.
The Solution
The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform was chosen as it perfectly met Vitacost.com's requirements. The Nutanix converged compute and storage architecture is easy to manage and can be expanded by adding nodes to the cluster. The appliance comes pre-loaded with a VMware hypervisor and is ready to run Horizon View, delivering high IOPS to handle workload spikes during boot storms and anti-virus scans. Nutanix offers disaster recovery with native per-VM replication, and a smaller appliance can be set up as a failover target if Vitacost.com decides to add DR capability in the future. The capital cost of Nutanix was about 30% less than the legacy infrastructure, saving the company approximately $30,000. The Vitacost team installed a 4-node Nutanix NX-3000 Series appliance, which took only an hour or two. The installation process was quick and simple, and today about 140 virtual desktops are running on Nutanix, handling heavy workloads with users accessing applications, including ERP systems, email, web, and telephony through VDI.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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