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Retailer backs Nutanix for its first-time leap to virtual servers

LONDON, UK - 29th April, 2015 - Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company, today announced that specialist lingerie retailer Bravissimo is to deploy its hyper-converged infrastructure to make the move from physical to virtual servers supporting its business-critical applications.

Bravissimo offers a wide choice of lingerie, swimwear and clothing. Established in 1993, Bravissimo has grown to become an award-winning, multi-million pound company with 25 high street stores and an ecommerce channel.

With many of its servers coming to the end of their lives, Bravissimo needed to update its server infrastructure. Moreover - and unusually for a mid-size enterprise - the company had not virtualised, and was therefore looking to consolidate 30 physical servers overall. Traditional servers and SAN storage were initially considered, but following recommendations from other Nutanix retail customers, the IT team decided that a web-scale solution - in the form of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform - was the better option.

"We looked closely at both approaches," explains Bravissimo's IT Manager Ian Murphy, "and, although blown away by what Nutanix had to offer, initially we thought it was out of our reach. However, after further discussions we realised there was a lot of extra value to be gained from the Nutanix platform, particularly from the integrated compute and storage management, as SAN management has always been a big headache for us."

The company was also planning to add offsite disaster recovery in a later phase of its infrastructure refresh project, so the Nutanix Metro Availability option further helped to seal the deal.

"Metro Availability will enable us to add off-site DR without the need for anything more than another Nutanix appliance," said Murphy. He continued: "I am confident that Nutanix is the right choice for Bravissimo and will enable the company to deliver even higher levels of service to customers and staff over the coming years."

With the hardware installed, the Bravissimo team plans to migrate all of its physical workloads to the Nutanix-hosted VMware environment, including SQL database servers and payment processing applications linked to the tills in Bravissimo stores. Testing and familiarisation are well under way and the team is already impressed with both the performance and ease of management of the Nutanix platform.