Lenovo and Nutanix help AGORA Group quench the thirst of millions in Spain
Growing a business, while exciting, also brings about challenges. AGORA group’s main challenge was managing stock at its new locations whilst making sure the most popular products are always available when people expect them.
Guillermo Po Gallardo, IT Project Manager at the company, explains: “Traditionally, our target markets have always been the north of Spain and the region around Barcelona. However, we have recently started planning a country-wide expansion to bring our products to people all around the country.”
Up until recently, AGORA group’s business operations had been underpinned by slow, aging hardware solutions – something the company knew would be a hindrance to expansion.
“To support our growth, we needed maximum speed, reliability and performance,” states Guillermo Po Gallardo. “It sounded like a lot to ask for… until we learned about hyperconverged technology.”
AGORA group was impressed by the potential of the Lenovo-Nutanix alliance to “support the company’s progressive growth”. AGORA worked closely with Lenovo Services to implement a hyperconverged infrastructure made up of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3000 and HX7000 Series appliances, powered by Intel® Xeon® E5 processors. The redundant Lenovo RackSwitch G8124E 10GE switches ensure lowest latency connectivity between the HX Series nodes for maximum performance and highest reliability on the clustered storage network. By bringing together Lenovo compute, networking and storage components with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, the solution enables the company to better allocate resources in accordance with actual demand.
Today, AGORA runs its critical SAP enterprise application environment on the Lenovo hyperconverged solution, supported by SAP HANA, which runs on Lenovo System x3850 X6 servers with Intel Xeon E7 processors.
Guillermo Po Gallardo notes: “This new infrastructure enables us to obtain real-time information reliably and share it company-wide at the touch of a button. This is incredibly helpful when managing stock levels, planning marketing campaigns, or preparing to deal with a sudden spike in demand because a heatwave is coming or a city festival is about to start.”
With the hyperconverged solution, AGORA group is now well on its way to pursuing its business expansion plans. Tight integration between the HX Series infrastructure and the backend SAP HANA environment means that AGORA group can make the most out of real-time business information.
Guillermo Po Gallardo concludes: “Our collaboration with Lenovo and Nutanix has been excellent, and we are already working on several new projects with them. We truly believe that the Lenovo-Nutanix solution will help us to grow our business successfully and bring our quality products to all corners of Spain We truly believe that the Lenovo-Nutanix solution will help us to grow our business successfully and bring our quality products to all corners of Spain.”