La empresa española de renovables Soltec ha implementado la tecnología de Nutanix para mejorar la escalabilidad y flexibilidad de su infraestructura tecnológica, aumentar su capacidad, reducir las incidencias y ofrecer un entorno de alta disponibilidad que mejore el rendimiento de todos sus empleados.
Todo el proceso de implantación, que empezó en marzo de 2020, coincidió con la crisis generada por la COVID-19, lo que hizo que se tuviera que trabajar en remoto. Aún así, se consiguió hacer toda la instalación en apenas dos semanas.
The challenge
Soltec , a Spanish company specializing in the manufacture and installation of solar trackers, has a team of more than 1,600 employees and 16 years of experience in the market, with projects in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, the United States, Spain, India, Italy, Israel, Mexico and Peru.
Digital transformation is one of the essential factors in the development of the renewable energy sector and companies are increasingly incorporating more strategic plans to address its necessary renewal. In this context, » Soltec had experienced exponential growth in staff over the last few years and the technological infrastructure it had was no longer sufficient to respond to the needs of the company . In fact, employees themselves were beginning to complain about the performance of the systems and demanded more capacity and performance, not only from the engineering departments but also from the administration departments ,» says Adrián Fernández, IT System Manager at Soltec.
“ Until 2019, Soltec’s technological infrastructure was based on a more traditional model, with physical servers and a data cabinet, which meant that performance was not as efficient as all-flash environments. In addition, we had servers with high graphic potential, but without high availability, which meant that, in the event of a system failure, the company’s activity could be interrupted, ” adds Adrián Fernández.
Solución
Faced with this situation, at the end of summer 2019, Soltec decided to undertake the renewal of its technological infrastructure. “ In addition to the capacity and performance challenges already mentioned, the servers we had were already fully amortized, after four or five years of operation. After evaluating several market options, they decided to start working with Nutanix. The IT consultancy Lunia , a Nutanix partner, was the one who implemented the project. They gave us an environment for a few days that we could test to see the performance and to know that it was compatible, its use was very simple and it worked perfectly. We had a technician at our disposal who gave us all the necessary support and we realized that the implementation was going to be very fast. That’s why we decided to start working with them ,” says Adrián.
The final award was made in December 2019. When the most suitable components were considered to carry it out, they decided to rely on a solution composed of the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor, the Nutanix hyperconvergence platform with HX3520-G servers with all-flash storage, Tesla D4 graphics, and Lenovo NE2572 switches.
“ The implementation process began in March 2020 and coincided with the crisis generated by COVID-19, which meant that we had to work remotely. Even so, thanks to the help of Lunia and Nutanix, we managed to complete the entire installation in just two weeks, from the moment the servers were received. Subsequently, the configuration work, creation of the machines and migration of the environments took us another two weeks ,” says Fernández.
For Adrián Fernández, one of the great advantages of having Nutanix technology is its agility and performance. “ Some of Soltec’s engineering departments have to perform large data simulations and they have managed to reduce the time by almost 50%. In addition, the complaints we used to have from employees about the performance or capacity of the systems have completely disappeared. And we must not forget that given the international nature of the company and the numerous offices it has distributed throughout the world, employees from other countries such as Brazil, the United States or China also connect to the new servers installed in Spain and enjoy their capacity .”