Cloudy Nutanix has scored a big contract with Auto Europe, a global leader in international car rental services.
The car rental outfit is implementing Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software to support a fully remote workforce amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as improve system performances, enhance disaster recovery and simplify management of their IT infrastructure.
Auto Europe serves travel agents and brokers at approximately 24,000 car rental locations in 180 countries around the world. Their service enables customers and travel agents to search and compare rates across leading car rental providers. With so many customers and locations, Auto Europe needed a solution that would improve scalability and performance.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck they knew their solution could enable employees to work from home and support their 24/7 call centres. Auto Europe was able to seamlessly transition employees to work from anywhere and allowed them to respond to customers quickly, improving the online experience and increasing customer loyalty.
Karen Schaffer, VP of eCommerce, Auto Europe Group said: “Had we not been forced into going totally remote so quickly because of the pandemic, we probably wouldn’t have done it this soon. We were completely convinced it would be more of a daunting task than it ended up being with Nutanix. The process was seamless, and switched everyone to remote desktops running on Nutanix in a matter of days.”
Auto Europe can scale when new projects or contracts are signed. Before Nutanix it could take them upwards of six months to deploy new infrastructure, but now it takes less than two weeks. All Auto Europe enterprise workloads are now running on Nutanix, along with supporting about 660 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) users.
In addition to Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and VDI, Auto Europe also implemented Nutanix Files, a software-defined scale-out file storage solution to support their user data, file shares, profile data, shared systems, web and application servers, system logs and more.
Moving from their 3-tier environment to Nutanix allowed the IT team to increase the ease of management of their infrastructure. In the past, the IT team would have to schedule maintenance windows to complete any upgrade but now with Nutanix the upgrades are transparent and allow employees to work as usual. These maintenance tasks can now be completed without impacting the performance of their critical e-commerce systems.
Nutanix VP/GM, Desktop Services Nikola Bozinovic said: “Ensuring business continuity during a global pandemic has left many organisations scrambling to find the right solutions. With Nutanix already implemented, Auto Europe was able to quickly and seamlessly enable employees to work from anywhere. By partnering with Nutanix, Auto Europe was able to remain proactive during these unprecedented times and continue to serve their customers without fail.”
