Canadian Solar Selected Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Canadian Solar, Inc., an energy provider, has chosen its Enterprise Cloud Platform to run its mission-critical enterprise applications including MS Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, enterprise applications and the company intranet.

Using the Enterprise Cloud Platform, including Nutanix’s Prism management solution with VMWare ESXi virtualization, Canadian Solar has seen increased application performance for end users, greater productivity from the IT team, major cost savings and reduced rackspace from 14U to 4U.

Canadian Solar first decided to switch to Nutanix after struggling to manage its previous NetApp storage system with the IT team’s limited resources and time. After reviewing three options for an upgraded infrastructure solution, it chose Nutanix to run the company’s workloads at one of its primary data center and remote offices in the Americas and EMEA regions. The entire process of migrating VMs from its NetApp solution to Nutanix took a few days. As part of its deployment, the team is also using Prism to manage storage, compute and virtualization, proactively monitor storage capacity and enable one-click software upgrades.

Since Canadian Solar moved all workloads from NetApp to Nutanix, its end users saw an increase in application performance. In addition, it can upgrade its system live during the day, as opposed to previously having to conduct it at night and following a network reboot. 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. With Nutanix, we don’t have to worry about our underlying infrastructure any more. The peace-of-mind I get allows me to reallocate time to more important initiatives. That’s a big win for me, as well as for Canadian Solar.“

“Being able to choose a datacenter solution that offers the cost and simplicity benefits of the public cloud, but in a private cloud environment has become increasingly essential for solar energy providers to respond to strong competition and demand,” said Robert Yelenich, country manager, Canada, Nutanix. “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, and allows the company to emerge as an even stronger player in the solar energy industry.“

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