HYCU improves backup fitness for a sporting goods leader

Business Challenge

In 2017, under the direction of IT Manager Simone Ferrigno, Nencini Sport replaced its obsolete three-tier infrastructure with a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This offered a compelling combination of rapid implementation, simplified governance, and greater flexibility to accommodate growth. Starting with two three-node clusters for the headquarters and the flagship stores in Calenzano, they later extended the infrastructure to encompass all stores: nine clusters with a total of 26 nodes hosting 122 virtual machines with more than 220TB of data.

As Nencini Sport navigated the transition to Nutanix, Ferrigno evaluated several solutions for backup and disaster recovery.

Their legacy solution did not support Nutanix AHV and another option evaluated required specialized backup hardware. “We were looking for a solution that would allow us to have well-programmed and verifiable backup plans, continuously tested even in restorations,” Ferrigno explains. “Our previous solution was satisfactory as long as the main hypervisor was VMware, but it was also expensive to purchase and manage.”

Solution

Nencini Sport’s technology solution partner, Ergon Mediasecure, suggested they take a look at HYCU. Ferrigno was impressed by HYCU’s tight integration with Nutanix AHV, including a familiar, Prism-like interface that simplifies management of the company’s entire backup and restore infrastructure.

Implementation of HYCU was simple and straightforward.

The company’s backup requirements vary depending on the criticality of the virtual machine and Ferrigno’s team was able to establish backup policies quickly and easily with HYCU.

“Currently, all backups are done on premises, with redundancy across several different media. The future will surely be oriented towards cloud backups,” Ferrigno explains, noting that HYCU is purpose-built to support Nutanix cloud infrastructures, ensuring a seamless transition.

Benefits

Easy implementation

The Nencini Sport IT team had HYCU up and running quickly and easily. “The installation on each cluster was nearly transparent. Even the implementation of sources, policies, targets has been very intuitive,” Ferrigno says, noting that HYCU support has been exceptional. When he explained that he wanted the capability to exclude certain disks from backup, this capability was incorporated into his next update of HYCU.

Simple management

HYCU’s tight Nutanix integration simplifies backup management for Nencini Sport’s entire infrastructure. “Previously, our backup management was more fragmented and complex,” Ferrigno says. “With HYCU, all backup management is now dedicated and no longer organized separately through the data protection part.”

Improved performance

With HYCU, Ferrigno reports greater speed and efficiency. “We have seen a significant time savings for backup management, together with excellent performance and scalability,” he says. “The ROI with HYCU was timely and definitely very positive.”

About the customer

Nencini Sport is a premier sporting goods retailer, with eight store locations across central Italy and a dynamic online business. Founded in 1985 as a pioneer in consumer sporting goods in Italy, the company is recognized for innovation, customer service excellence and consistent in-store and online growth.

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To learn how HYCU can help your Nutanix, Azure or Google Cloud Platform backup strategy, visit www.hycu.com or email info@hycu.com.