Taiwanese retail brand Heng Leong Hang has moved its IT infrastructure to the cloud to leverage data and gain insights into client preferences for efficient business decision-making.
Established in 1960, the company started as a brand distributor, and it now represents 25 renowned global brands.
As a first step, the company, in 2020, worked with Nutanix to modernise its data centre to streamline operations and overcome challenges associated with its traditional three-tier architecture.
These included network instability, the inability to scale as the business grew, and labour-intensive processes.
Heng Leong Hang’s head of information technology, Timo Lu told iTnews Asia that the company shifted applications and virtual machines (VMs) to the Nutanix Cloud Platform using the Nutanix Move tool.
Lu added that after the initial phase, the company recorded 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
The company also migrated internal databases, IT systems, and applications including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and e-commerce operations to Nutanix, to enhance the stability of the ERP system and eliminate backup and scheduling issues.
The number of daily alerts about the ERP applications decreased by up to 98 percent, reducing the burden on IT personnel.
Lu said earlier when IT encountered a problem, the team could not identify whether it was a database problem, an application problem, or an infrastructure problem – resulting in delays in identifying the cause.
He added that by using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Pro – an IaaS solution – the team can see the performance of systems and the status of applications and databases in real time.
This streamlined approach has reduced the management burden on the team, which now requires one or two team members to monitor the platform, allowing other IT resources to focus on important tasks, said Lu.
Enhancing employee efficiency
Heng Leong Hang also moved its SQL server to Nutanix which resulted in improvements in monitoring the operational status of the database.
According to Lu, the eForm - an integrated system for workflow and electronic form - used to take over 20 seconds to open, especially during the peak morning hours when order volumes remain high.
It can now be done in one second, he added.
The time required to initiate virtual machines has declined from 36 hours to five minutes, improving business productivity and efficiency.
Lu said with SQL Server running on Nutanix, it becomes easy to view its health and performance in real-time.
He added that this improves monitoring efficiency and the automated anomaly detector using Nutanix's NCM Pro provides timely alerts and notifications.
The company runs internal IT-related systems, the official website and the e-commerce marketplace that serves B2C (business to consumer) customers on the Nutanix cloud platform.
Lu said this led to an improvement in the performance of systems, allowing the website to handle large traffic. Previously, manual interventions were required every one to two hours, but now issues are resolved in real-time.
Using Nutanix, Heng Leong Hang has gained the ability to use one platform to improve the management of a hybrid multi-cloud environment which includes an on-premises data centre and the public clouds the retail brand uses for applications, Lu said.
The retail brand plans to leverage business intelligence on Nutanix for better customer insights and aims to adopt a CI/CD model.
It has plans to transition to a containerised environment and implement Nutanix Kubernetes to support cloud-native architectures and AI advancements, enhancing the consumers’ shopping experience.
