Hyperconverged infrastructure from Lenovo and Nutanix has enabled Maxima to support its growth and scale its back-office operations.
To provide employment and training solutions to an increasing customer base across Australia, Maxima is rapidly expanding its services across the country. To enable it to scale its back-office operations in line with fast-paced growth, the organization recently deployed a flexible, future-ready Lenovo infrastructure.
Maxima is a non-profit employment, training and recruitment services organization that empowers people to find meaningful and fulfilling work. With headquarters in Hindmarsh, South Australia, Maxima operates across the country through a network of more than 70 offices and 450 employees.
Its dedicated team each share a vision to work towards a better Australia by helping people into meaningful employment. They partner with eligible jobseekers and assist employers to help meet their recruitment needs.
For 35 years, Maxima has been helping people from all walks of life to find work. The organization is particularly committed to closing the gap in Indigenous employment outcomes, and assisting people living with injury, health conditions and disability, as well as other disadvantaged groups.
Today, Maxima supports more than 650 apprentices and trainees in work placements including more than 260 Indigenous Traineeships and is a leading player in the federal government’s Disability Employment Services (DES) program.
Since becoming a certified provider, Maxima has grown significantly to serve more than 6,300 DES customers nationally. Throughout the past 12 months, the organization has opened more than 30 new branches and has taken on more than 100 employees to meet increased demand for its DES services.
Craig Chatterton, General Manager Corporate Services at Maxima, said: “Our goal is to help as many people into work as possible by becoming the DES provider of choice, opening more sites and increasing our coverage across Australia. We aim to offer high-quality services at the right place, at the right time for jobseekers – and our IT systems play an important role in enabling us to do that.”
From its headquarters in Hindmarsh, Maxima delivers essential back-office services to branches throughout Australia. The organization relies on its Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to provide employees with secure remote access to business applications, such as email, customer relationship management (CRM) and finance systems. But the organization’s recent growth and rapid expansion meant that its server and storage infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.
Ben Rosenberg, ICT Manager at Maxima, explains: “Our existing IT infrastructure was both reaching its end of life and approaching capacity, so performance wasn’t what it used to be, and the ability to scale with growth was diminishing. We decided to look for a new, future-ready infrastructure that would scale in line with our business growth.”
Together with long-term technology partner Subnet, Maxima set about evaluating potential solutions.
“We’ve worked with Subnet for more than 10 years, so we trust their advice and guidance,” said Ben Rosenberg. “The Lenovo and Nutanix solution stood out to us, as we have worked with Lenovo hardware in the past and know it to be very reliable, and we were eager to gain the scalability benefits of the latest advances in hyperconverged technology.”
The Lenovo and Nutanix solution was ideal for managing the scalable growth that Maxima would need across its increasing number of branches.
Lenovo and Nutanix have been collaborating since 2014 to help businesses simplify their IT and shrink their operating expenditure.
The ThinkAgile HX Series from Lenovo consolidates compute, storage and virtualization software into a resource pool, easily managed in scale-out clusters through a single interface.
While Nutanix supports through one-click planning, provisioning, insights and firmware updates to achieve faster, simpler IT operations. This brings significant time and cost savings to customers like Maxima.
Working with a team from Subnet, Maxima implemented three Lenovo ThinkAgile HX1320 appliances, pre-integrated with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, as the foundation for its core back-office operations.
They also included Citrix management systems, and three Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers to support the Citrix user platform.
Maxima also deployed three additional Lenovo ThinkSystem servers at a secondary site in a high-availability configuration, enabling seamless Business Continuity in the event of an outage at the primary site.
Once the solution was deployed, the results were noticeable almost immediately. The new Lenovo infrastructure underpins everything from the organization’s Citrix environment to its file server and other key production systems.
Equipped with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Lenovo systems have delivered a significant boost in performance, particularly for the VDI environment.
Chatterton remarks: “Users’ desktops load faster, applications run more quickly and videos stream seamlessly – it’s a vast improvement. The fact that files and systems are now available instantly means that staff can work more productively.”
Crucially, with the Lenovo infrastructure in place, Maxima can support the growth of its DES program and other vital employment, recruitment and training services with no impact on the end-user experience.
“The beauty of the Lenovo and Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure is that whenever we need more capacity, it’s a simply a matter of adding more nodes,” notes Ben Rosenberg. “Knowing that we can quickly and easily scale to meet increased demand puts us in a strong position to drive future growth.”
Chatterton concludes: “With Lenovo infrastructure underpinning our operations, we have the robust, secure and scalable foundation to grow our services across Australia – enabling us to connect more disadvantaged people with employment opportunities.”
As Maxima rapidly grows and continues to deliver excellence in services around apprenticeships, traineeships, Disability Employment Services and workplace health, the company now has the IT scalability, flexibility and performance to enable its team to meet their vision for a better Australia.
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