Future-proofing business operations in Fiji

Established in 1931, Fijian conglomerate Motibhai Group has a diverse portfolio of businesses including luxury domestic and travel retail, manufacturing, import/export and the wholesaling of fast-moving consumer goods. The group also operates in print and digital news media, real estate and serviced apartments, as well as quick service restaurants and food outlets.

“For 95 years, Motibhai Group has been leading the way in a wide range of industries,” said Sujan Patel, Executive Director. “To achieve these milestones, we work really hard to innovate and excel — especially when it comes to IT.”

As it continued to grow, Motibhai Group aimed to ensure that the IT infrastructure underpinning mission-critical business systems could support rising demand for compute and storage resources. The group’s existing data centre infrastructure was approaching end of life, leading to shrinking capacity and waning performance.

“Our existing infrastructure was more than five years old, and we were ready to jump into something bigger and better,” Patel said.

Motibhai Group worked with Datec Fiji to evaluate its current and projected future compute and storage needs, as well as its goals in terms of flexibility, scalability and management. Together, the teams determined that the best way to future-proof the group’s data centre was to replace its existing three-tier architecture with a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution based on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

“Our decision to invest in an HCI solution was part of the wider strategic modernisation and digital transformation of our IT operations,” Patel said.

Working closely with Lenovo and Datec Fiji, Motibhai Group deployed three Lenovo ThinkAgile HX650 V3 Certified Nodes, powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform integrates storage, computing and networking resources into a single virtual pool. Motibhai Group runs VMware ESXi as its hypervisor and runs 30 virtual machines on the Lenovo HCI solution, supporting everything from the group’s SAP ERP and business intelligence applications to email and file servers.

“The software-defined nature of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series solution gives us the flexibility and easy scalability of the cloud from the security of our own data centre,” said Purushottam Pathak, Group IT Manager.

The move to HCI has transformed Motibhai Group’s IT operations, giving the group more capacity, better performance and greater resiliency in a smaller, more cost-effective footprint,” Pathak said. “We’ve gone from five servers and a SAN to just three Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Certified Nodes. The smaller physical footprint reduces energy costs while delivering almost double the usable capacity compared with our previous infrastructure. It’s also much easier to manage: we use Nutanix Prism to orchestrate all our virtualised resources via a single pane of glass, and Lenovo XClarity to monitor the health of our environment.”

The Lenovo HCI solution delivers a significant boost to compute performance, helping Motibhai Group keep mission-critical business systems and demanding analytics workloads running smoothly.

“It used to take almost five hours to run a single report,” Pathak recalled. “Now it only takes a couple of minutes. This means that we can get key insights to executives when they need them, supporting their decision-making with the very latest data.” Backups are faster now, too. “With the Lenovo HCI solution, creating a 1 TB backup takes about 15 minutes, as opposed to hours in the past. This means that we can run multiple backups throughout the day rather than one nightly backup, reducing our recovery point objective and keeping our data better protected.”

“As Motibhai Group approaches its centenary, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series infrastructure gives us a solid foundation on which to build and innovate,” Patel said.

“Lenovo is committed to serving the Fiji market well, and their support is extremely valuable,” said Veer Sharma, COO, Datec Fiji. “We particularly appreciate the time and effort that goes into knowledge transfer and keeping us up to date with the latest products and innovations.”

Image credit: Motibhai Group