Australian Sentinel taps Nutanix tech for Natures Organics green IT overhaul

Local cloud, transformation and enterprise service management specialist Australian Sentinel has deployed Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for cleaning product maker Natures Organics in a project aimed at lowering its technology and carbon footprints.

The initial deployment in the project, which is also aimed at reducing IT costs and future-proofing Natures Organics’ infrastructure, leveraged Nutanix’s hypervisor AHV, centralised management platform Prism Central  and software-defined storage solution Files for data management and analytics.

The project to overhaul Natures Organics’ ageing IT environment was undertaken in such a way as to be in keeping with its company ethos, which very much revolves around an environmentally-friendly approach to its business and its products. 

As such, the new IT infrastructure was intended to not only help reduce tech costs but also cut back on energy consumption. Indeed, the move was intended to complement the company’s $3 million, 1299kW roof-mounted solar deployment on its Victorian manufacturing plant.

The company’s prior IT environment consisted of an array of fragmented and overly complex three-tier infrastructure that was inefficient, expensive and cumbersome to manage, negatively impacting speed and productivity in important areas such as business intelligence and management of critical applications.

“We receive thousands of customer enquiries per year, and it’s vital we log and record those emails so the information can be transformed into actionable data,” Natures Organics head of IT Alex Plattfuss said.

“Our old environment slipped and stumbled to manage this, causing internal delays and headaches to get the data we needed. It was becoming prohibitively expensive and out of sync with our ethos and environmental commitment.”

Now, the company, which makes the Earth Choice brand of cleaning products, projects IT-related energy consumption to fall by up to 55 per cent, with reduced costs of 32 per cent, as well as a 700 per cent improvement in business intelligence reporting capacity and performance.

It is claimed the deployment has also had a positive impact on critical application management performance and security, eliminating 70 per cent of risks identified by Australian Sentinel in its analysis of the company’s IT infrastructure.

“Just by switching Nutanix on, the vast majority of these risks were mitigated or eliminated, with a clear pathway and simple platform to address the remainder,” Australian Sentinel director Tim Crouch said. “This frees Natures Organics to securely launch new products, services, and digital programs as it continues to expand in an exciting time for the manufacturing industry.”