Restaurant Chain Bloomin Brands International in Brazil Deploys Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Bloomin Brands International, a large casual dining restaurant company, is implementing the its Enterprise Cloud to support production and homologation environments in Brazil.

With global brands including Outback Steakhouse, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Abbraccio Cucina Italiana, Bloomin Brands holds a significant presence in Brazil with 110 restaurants and nearly 12,000 employees in the region.

About ten months ago, the company implemented three Nutanix five-node appliances, running Acropolis, and three more DR appliances.

With an annual expansion of around 10%, the out-of-home food sector in Brazil generates about 450,000 new job opportunities per year, according to the Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants (Abrasel). This growth requires IT teams to build a data center that can respond to changing employee and customer needs and help keep restaurant data available in an emergency.

In response to these needs, Bloomin Brands implemented Nutanix solutions in 90 computers at the end of their cycles. The main goal was to deploy a hyperconverged infrastructure model that could offer an active environment for DR, and to support the performance of current operational systems, like Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Since choosing Nutanix, Bloomin Brands has made a few improvements that can already be seen in the new environment. The rack space – which previously occupied 98% of the datacenter – only consumes 50% of the total.

In addition, the decrease of energy consumption meant that the park could pay for its own investments, cutting costs and reaching up to a 40% rate reduction in comparison with the previous equipment, which were composed of six servers and three storage arrays, consuming less energy on a daily basis.

The scalability with Nutanix is also completely different from the traditional models, allowing for faster growth without any concern for downtime. The benefit of this can be seen, for example, in improving the monthly consolidation process of the ERP. Composed of two basic operations, sale and payment, the consolidation of the ERP is performed in half the previous time, requiring four hours for the full procedure.

Sales operation problems – such as the large amount of daily accounts in the system – were also positively impacted by the implantation. Previously, the time to load the sales data of a restaurant was 8 minutes per day. However, with the adoption of Nutanix, this time has changed to 5 minutes, giving peace of mind for business planning.

A DR feature was also implemented to prevent any system from being disrupted, including sensitive and critical systems of the business. The DR solution is the first solution of its kind for Bloomin Brands, and it allows that the servers remain online, with the number of fails dropping from 3 to 0 on a daily basis. The RTO of 5 minutes was an achievement for a company that previously had no DR feature.

Marcos Antônio Nogueira, chief operations and technology officer, Bloomin Brands, commented that he had known about the Nutanix solutions for two years and that the hyperconverged infrastructure industry impressed him as soon as he heard about it.

“It was clear from the start that all the use cases would be greatly benefited from a hyperconverged infrastructure deployment. Before adopting the Nutanix technology, we assessed other providers that, at first, showed us a concept of hyperconvergence similar to the one from Nutanix, but without the advantage of support experience. The fact that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS has enabled a native DR environment was an advantage that the others could not offer, making our infrastructure more scalable and giving us time to think about other matters, like optimizing our growing business,” he explained.

“We always strive to improve our customers’ experience with our solutions. We are very pleased that in such a short time, we were able to help Bloomin Brands achieve superior IT performance, which has changed the paradigm of the company setting, accelerating reporting and results, as well as reducing costs and streamlining processes and operations. Through this process, we have helped the brand maintain its constant focus on offering the best service to its customers,” concluded Leonel Ol, sales director of Brazil, Nutanix.