Canadian Solar has selected Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to run its enterprise applications including MS Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and the company intranet.
Canadian Solar has achieved increased application performance for end users, greater productivity from the IT team, major cost savings and reduced rackspace from 14U to 4U by using the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, including Nutanix’s Prism management solution with VMWare ESXi virtualization.
Canadian Solar decided to switch to Nutanix after struggling to manage its previous NetApp storage system with the IT team’s limited resources and time.
Canadian Solar reviewed three options for an upgraded infrastructure solution and chose Nutanix to run the company’s workloads at one of its primary data center and remote offices in the Americas and EMEA regions.
Canadian Solar took a few days for the entire process of migrating VMs from its NetApp solution to Nutanix. As part of its deployment, the team used Nutanix’s management solution, Prism, to manage storage, compute and virtualization, monitor storage capacity and enable one-click software upgrades.
Since Canadian Solar moved all workloads from NetApp to Nutanix, its end users immediately saw a huge increase in application performance. Canadian Solar can now upgrade its system live during the day against night in the previous regime.
The team has also saved on datacenter rack space and power. Nutanix systems fit 4U in the main data center as opposed to the 14U from their previous solution. Since Nutanix systems require 4 power suppliers, in contrast to the former NetApp systems that required a total of 17 power suppliers.
“Nutanix makes our private cloud infrastructure so much easier,” said Richard Briston, senior network and infrastructure specialist, Canadian Solar. “We have eliminated all of the complexity of our previous environment, especially with the addition of Prism, which has simplified upgrades down to a single click.”
Robert Yelenich, country manager, Canada, Nutanix, said with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, Canadian Solar’s IT team is able to focus on the applications and workloads that directly help its customers minimize their environmental impacts.
