A Nutanix HCI Journey to Achieve Maximum Uptime and Business Continuity at LNJ Bhilwara Group

When everything runs through IT, you need a backup plan. If your mission-critical applications go down, it can be disastrous. Manufacturing businesses often cannot financially survive even a day of downtime. If that’s your business’ reality, it’s time to think about proper disaster recovery.

LNJ Bhilwara Group is one of India’s most diverse business conglomerates that comprises 17 companies and 21 manufacturing units across textile, power, graphite electrode, and IT sectors with its roots in the Bhilwara established by Mr. L.N. Jhunijhunwala in 1961.

Today, LNJ Bhilwara Group, with five textile companies, is one of India’s textile conglomerates and textile exporters, with 14 operational facilities spread across the country. GAP, H&M, Tesco, Tommy Hilfiger, and United Colors of Benetton are few of our renowned international clients. Our textile companies are also committed to reducing our environmental footprint. We have made strides in reducing water use and carbon emissions. 

LNJ Bhilwara Group management always encourages the use of the latest technologies. From a business perspective, everything from ordering to procurement, production to dispatch runs on ERP systems, which is maintained in-house.

In continuation to our management’s philosophy, the LNJ Bhilwara Group IT team has started a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) journey in 2018 with an objective to consolidate IT Infrastructure to achieve:

• Maximum uptime
• Reduced infrastructure cost
• Ease infrastructure management
• Green initiative to protect the environment

A Need for Disaster Recovery

Our ERP and email systems across all the locations of Textile Group Companies are on-premises. Our biggest challenge was around disaster recovery (DR), which was non-existent on the application and database level. We used to take backups and kept them offsite, but we had no data center infrastructure at a DR site to run the business, and business continuity had become so dependent on our systems.  An analysis revealed that the company could only survive for maximum of 24 hours in the event of a failure. Hence, for business continuity, a proper DR system of these services was the need of the hour.

Our IT team has started exploring various options in consultation with IT partner Tech9Labs for establishing a DR Solution. With any technology implementation, you need a good partner who will go the entire journey with you. The Tech9Labs team had the expertise we needed, and they were very helpful in introducing us to available technologies and evaluating the solutions. They arranged customer references and visits. We looked at several solutions, including VxRail, but looking to improve our IT team’s experience as well as inbuilt robust DR replication technology, we shortlisted Nutanix to be part of our application DR system and third-party replication tool for our ERP database. 

Our Experience with Nutanix HCI

The switch to Nutanix was seamless. It took only a few hours to install Nutanix at our data center, and the migration was simple because of Nutanix Move, Nutanix’s in-built migration tool. We were able to easily bring over our physical as well as virtual machines from ESXI to Nutanix. 

We were happy with what we’d seen so far, but we needed Nutanix to prove itself in our environment. Nutanix proved itself again and again, both in uptime and performance. Since adopting Nutanix, we have significantly reduced CPU and memory utilization, and have experienced no downtime or hardware failures. At the same time, now, we can perform upgrades with a single click, and they can happen during regular business—even peak— hours. 

After the initial six months, we migrated our ERP infrastructure. Then, after about a year, we moved all our mission-critical applications to Nutanix. Once we consolidated our infrastructure, it became easier to move ahead with our DR project. 

A New System That Can Weather Any Storm

Today, we have a three-node block of Nutanix as our DR setup for all mission-critical services. We can manage everything from Nutanix’s single dashboard, where we receive alerts and can see the health of our data center and DR sites. 

We plan to perform a DR drill once a year, and our first of these was successful in that we didn’t have any issues. It used to be that we wouldn’t survive a day of downtime, but we don’t have to worry about that anymore with our DR facility. Should something happen, we will be protected, and our business can recover within four hours. 

When mission-critical applications rely on your IT environment, it’s important to have DR and business continuity plans in place. We are confident that Nutanix protects us from downtime, which gives us peace of mind.