{"id":18596,"date":"2022-08-15T15:46:44","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T14:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/?p=18596"},"modified":"2022-08-31T10:29:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-31T09:29:37","slug":"the-home-depot-partners-with-nutanix-to-drive-it-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/2022\/08\/15\/the-home-depot-partners-with-nutanix-to-drive-it-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Home Depot partners with Nutanix to drive IT innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Home Depot, the World\u2019s largest home improvement retailer, standardizes on Nutanix to accelerate software development and reduce TCO to create a better customer experience.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot\u2019s legacy IT infrastructure was slow, difficult to manage, and expensive to procure and maintain. The Home Depot\u2019s IT team started the search for a more cost-effective IT solution that would provide better performance, enable rapid scalability and simplify delivery of all enterprise workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Business benefits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By moving to Nutanix, The Home Depot has been able to consolidate its technology infrastructure and merge its server, storage and virtualization teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new unified operations group can now optimize and manage the entire infrastructure stack from a single console, driving IT innovation across the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot has also reduced TCO with this platform by double digits and shortened the time to provision new capacity from three weeks to one hour, reducing infrastructure costs and enabling developers to more quickly deploy new applications to internal users and customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot difference<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot lives by a simple premise: Put customers and associates first, and the rest will take care of itself. By holding true to its values and corporate vision, The Home Depot has grown exponentially from just two stores in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1979, to become the world\u2019s largest home improvement retailer today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company currently employs nearly 400,000 associates and operates more than 2,200 stores in the US, Canada and Mexico. It also has a very successful e-commerce business that offers more than one million products to its do-it-yourself customers and professional contractors throughout North America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot has obtained its great success through decades of hard work, with a strong and unwavering commitment to providing the industry\u2019s best products and exemplary customer service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to achieve these goals and continue to grow, IT innovation is more important than ever for The Home Depot. From inventory tracking, to online ordering, to supply chain management – The Home Depot is always looking for new ways to improve productivity and operational efficiency for its vast retail store and e-commerce business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot also believes in cultivating strong relationships with all of its vendors, built on a solid platform of trust, honesty and integrity. The vendors chosen by The Home Depot are those that offer the best solutions and services the industry has to offer, coupled with the desire and willingness to work as true business and technology partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In part, that\u2019s why The Home Depot chose to partner with Nutanix, and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as the platform to migrate its legacy applications and workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT challenges<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot has a long and well-earned reputation as a technology leader. In 2015, the company decided to revolutionize its entire IT environment to enhance the performance and scalability of its infrastructure and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe used to try to cut costs by just upgrading to faster servers and more efficient storage,\u201d noted Kevin Priest, Senior Director at The Home Depot. \u201cWe needed to find a better way to reduce TCO.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nutanix solution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot evaluated multiple hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors and storage virtualization solutions for its next-generation architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe looked for vendors that shared our vision of moving to a software-driven world,\u201d noted Priest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot started by moving its non-production applications over to Nutanix, followed by the company\u2019s production workloads, including those on Cloud Foundry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot also virtualized its Apache Tomcat grid implementation and deployed a VDI environment using Nutanix as the underlying infrastructure platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 98% of The Home Depot\u2019s data center virtual workloads – including those supporting its retail operations, decision analytics and supply chain – are now delivered by Nutanix. \u201cOur decision was reinforced by the ability to run Nutanix on whatever hardware platforms we chose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benefits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Significant TCO reduction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Priest, one of the biggest benefits of partnering with Nutanix has been the reduction in TCO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen an application team comes to our group and says they need CPUs, memory and storage, I give them a price for the project,\u201d explained Priest. \u201cSince the introduction of Nutanix, I have been able to lower the internal chargeback costs to my customers by almost half.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the lower TCO, The Home Depot\u2019s development teams have been able to reallocate their budgets to launch additional development projects and add more virtual machines to increase the performance of existing applications and services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNutanix software is making such a positive difference in the supportability and performance of our entire environment that we direct all new workloads to Nutanix,\u201d noted Priest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Provisioning time reduced from three weeks to one hour<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another benefit of moving to Nutanix was the increased speed of deploying new capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNutanix is a unified, hyperconverged platform that allows us to build, expand and tear down VMs much faster than before,\u201d reported Priest. \u201cOur developers used to have to wait three weeks for us to provision technology resources to them. With Nutanix, it\u2019s done in less than an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the faster provisioning, The Home Depot\u2019s developers have been able to dramatically accelerate delivery of their software development projects, resulting in a faster launch of new services and applications to internal end-users and customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enabling capacity management<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There wasn\u2019t an easy way to perform capacity management on the legacy architecture. As a result, The Home Depot\u2019s IT team would deploy new server pods, and then keep adding workloads until they ran out of resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Application performance would inevitably degrade over time, and the operations team would have to go in and manually tweak the system in different ways, but only after the performance issues had already occurred. Examples included increasing the number of CPU cores or adding additional storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot is now using Nutanix Prism Pro to obtain comprehensive visibility and control over the entire environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPrism Pro makes it extremely easy to watch all of the clusters in our environment and quickly reconfigure things as needed,\u201d said Priest. \u201cIt provides very clear metrics on oversubscription and utilization, giving us a powerful, proactive capacity management function that we never had before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After identifying any issues, The Home Depot can now shift capacity from one cluster to another to provide an \u2018infrastructure-as-code\u2019 management experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consolidating teams<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By moving to Nutanix, The Home Depot was able to consolidate its server, storage and virtualization teams into a single, operations group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prism Pro provides the combined team with full visibility into the entire environment, rather than aggregating information from separately managed infrastructure silos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe \u2018people benefits\u2019 with Nutanix are just as impressive as the reduction in TCO,\u201d explained Priest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy consolidating teams, our admins are finally able to see the bigger picture. Server specialists can now make suggestions about our virtual infrastructure, and storage experts offering feedback on our servers. The consolidated team has unleashed a wave of innovation across the organization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empowering application developers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot recently deployed a dedicated Nutanix environment for its database teams and is encouraging the teams to participate in the management of the infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSince Prism Pro is so easy to use, we told the database engineers they could quickly learn to manage their own environments and monitor capacity utilization,\u201d said Priest. \u201cThey really like the ability to see their VMs, servers and storage, with detailed forecasting that shows when they\u2019re likely to run out of resources. It enables them to proactively ensure application performance and formulate more accurate budgets for their projects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enabling the admins<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot is now able to train its combined operations team members on one, standardized hyperconverged platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Nutanix training team has been a great help in adopting the new technology. Education helps overcome any fears of adopting a new platform and ensures that we are using best practices,\u201d acknowledged Priest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u2018justifiably famous\u2019 support experience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Nutanix Support team has been impressive,\u201d Priest stated. \u201cWhen you call in with an issue, you\u2019re immediately connected to someone who actually understands your problem. With many IT vendors, you progress from someone who is only there to route your call, to a second person who can take notes on your case, and then hopefully to another person who\u2019s able to solve your problems. Nutanix has set the standard of what customer-centric technology support should look like.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Applications on-prem or the cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Home Depot is currently running a mix of workloads on-prem and in the cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe do know that it\u2019s easier to do infrastructure in the external cloud, but cloud costs are variable and must be managed differently,\u201d said Priest. \u201cNutanix has equipped us to enhance our decision on when to run something externally or on internal servers and that has made a fundamental difference for us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A true partnership for innovation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNutanix not only converges technologies; their software has enabled us to converge infrastructure, teams and opportunities,\u201d concluded Priest. \u201cBy combining IT specialists into a single operations group, we can now see our end-to-end IT environment, work collaboratively and make better decisions for the business. Our partnership with Nutanix makes IT visibility, efficiency and innovation possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This content was originally published in June of 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Home Depot, the World\u2019s largest home improvement retailer, standardizes on Nutanix to accelerate software development and reduce TCO to create a better customer experience. The Home Depot\u2019s legacy IT infrastructure was slow, difficult to manage, and expensive to procure and maintain. The Home Depot\u2019s IT team started the search for a more cost-effective IT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":18597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,510,50,34,38,514],"tags":[679,2214,271,3581,3582,2209],"class_list":["post-18596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-east-coast","category-more-news","category-retail","category-used","tag-atlanta","tag-georgia","tag-nutanix","tag-software-development","tag-tco","tag-the-home-depot"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18596"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19100,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18596\/revisions\/19100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}