EG Group drives miles further with Nutanix in the tank
Graham Billsborough of EG Group
Nutanix, a provider of hybrid multicloud computing, announced that, following the deployment of Nutanix Cloud Platform across its global network, convenience retailer EG Group is already reaping the benefits of that investment and is empowered to implement ambitious plans for further rapid growth.
Starting with a single location in 2001, EG Group has become one of the UK’s growing forecourt operators with an expanding portfolio of approximately 6,200 sites across mainland Europe, Australia, the U.S. and the UK. One byproduct of this rapid growth, however, tends to be a mixed inheritance of legacy IT unfit for purpose in the context of a large, fast-paced business like EG Group.
“Keeping on top of a business which is growing at a phenomenal rate calls for agile, scalable, secure and always available IT, and that wasn’t what we had,” says, Graham Billsborough, group CIO at EG Group. “Over time we’d acquired a collection of some twenty or so data centres running a mix of applications, largely under invested and end of life and far below what’s needed to support a large global business.”
Tasked with unifying and transforming the IT infrastructure across the Group, Billsborough had a clear plan for simplicity, resilience and, above all, innovative and flexible technology. All of which led to Nutanix, with the company opting to build a network of data centres spread across the UK, North America and Australia, each equipped with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. The new network would also be configured to replicate data for rapid failover and disaster recovery, with Nutanix Prism to deliver simple management of all physical and virtual IT resources from a single interface.
In order to minimise disruption, the Nutanix migration was staged over several months, but the benefits were almost instant. A very welcome 50% uplift in legacy application performance was immediately noticed.
Dom Poloniecki
Complexity has been significantly reduced and reliability of the Group’s IT transformed, with no outages since migrating to the Nutanix infrastructure. Resilience, too, has been proven, as the built-in data replication tools enabled the company to withstand a wave of coordinated cyber-attacks thought to be behind recent outages across other forecourt businesses.
“EG Group’s experience is typical of what we see and a great case study of the benefits available to Nutanix Cloud Platform customers,” comments Dom Poloniecki, vice president & general manager, Western Europe & Africa at Nutanix. “Key features of the Nutanix Cloud Platform such as its on-demand scalability and intuitive integrated management through a single interface have been instrumental in driving EG Group’s business forward, and doing so through a period of such rapid and sustained growth. Growth that continues at speed and which we at Nutanix are delighted to help manage as a provider of cutting edge technologies and services to this burgeoning and forward thinking business.”
With the Nutanix infrastructure fully installed and working across the EG Group, Billsborough and the team are busy putting it to work supporting yet further expansion and growth. Beyond that, the company also has plans to leverage its investment to capture, understand and utilise customer data to further its ongoing digital transformation process.
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