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Sligro Food Group supports VDI initiative with Brocade VCS Fabric technology
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Sligro Food Group, a prominent name in the Dutch hotel and catering industry, was in search of a solution to support around 1200 virtual desktops that required constant replication between the primary and secondary data center. The company was using Citrix to access the back office, but with the end-of-support for Windows XP, Sligro started looking for a new uniform desktop. The company needed a switch platform that was compatible with Nutanix and offered a good price-quality ratio. The switch had to be a 10 GbE switch with powerful performance and ease of management.
About The Customer
Sligro Food Group is a well-known name in the Dutch hotel and catering industry. The company serves business customers throughout the Netherlands via a network of 46 cash-and-carry outlets, nine wholesale delivery outlets, and a product range extending to over 60,000 items. Sligro supplies customers with quality food, non-food, and fresh products. The company's 46 cash-and-carry stores operate at a regional level, each outlet offering a nationwide and complete range of products. This guarantees customers a powerful mix of premium brands and exclusive (private) labels. In addition, an elaborate regional network of nine delivery wholesale outlets enables Sligro to provide a streamlined delivery service for ordered goods. Likewise, 130 EMTÉ supermarkets form part of the Sligro concern. All branches are supported from the head office in Veghel, where the IT department manages the central back office housed in two data centers located several kilometers from each other.
The Solution
After analyzing the possibilities, Sligro decided on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure based on VMware technology and hardware from Nutanix. For replication of the virtual desktops, Sligro implemented four Brocade VDX 6740 switches in one VCS cluster. VCS has been developed by Brocade to simplify the network architecture in virtualized data centers. This technology provides the possibility of showing the various switches as a single system in the management environment, simplifying its management. The integration with VMware makes it possible to manage the virtual desktops and the network from a single console. This smart technology from Brocade enables Sligro to bring about savings for a more effective management.
Operational Impact
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