Mary Kay China Builds the Foundation for a Beautiful Future

Case Study - Mary Kay China
Mary Kay China Builds the
Foundation for a Beautiful Future
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Lowers Both
CapEx and OpEx, Simplifies Management
Company Background
Mary Kay, Inc. is a Texas-based, privately owned multi-level sales and marketing
company. Founded in 1963, Mary Kay’s 3.5 million Independent Beauty Consultants
now sell over $4 billion high quality cosmetic products around the world each year.
Mary Kay cosmetics are very popular in China. The company now has a large presence
in Shanghai, with thousands of beauty consultants and 138 full-time IT employees.
Steven Dai is the datacenter infrastructure manager for Mary Kay China. He is
responsible for all of the IT infrastructure at Mary Kay’s two datacenters in China. One
facility is dedicated to production data and the other is used for disaster recovery.
IT Challenges
Industry
Retail
Business Needs
Needed a high performing, costeffective, and easy to manage storage
and server solution for new VDI
deployment
Solution
The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform
Mary Kay China’s IT team manages more than 1000 VMs, and several custom office
automation and productivity applications used by the office staff and sales teams
across China and APAC. With such a large amount end users and IT infrastructure to
support, management complexity and operational expenses were increasing rapidly.
Benefits
Mary Kay China was getting ready to deploy a new virtual desktop infrastructure
(VDI) solution for its remote workforce. “According to all of our research, the costs of
implementing VDI with our traditional 3-tier storage and server infrastructure would
be far too high,” noted Dai. “With that approach, we could not justify implementing
virtual desktops to replace our employees’ conventional personal computers.”
•Reduced capital investments by 30%
versus 3-tier systems
•Reduced management overhead by 50%
through simplified management
•Obtained the ability to easily scale the
virtual desktop environment on demand
Dai and his team began searching for more efficient and cost effective solutions
for the proposed VDI deployment. “We wanted to find a solution that would deliver
high performance for the virtual desktops,” Dai explained. “Ease of management
was also essential, with one unified console to manage all of the hardware and all of
the software. Scalability was also a top criteria, since we needed to be able to add
capacity quickly as the demand for virtual desktops grew.”
Finding Nutanix
Dai and his team evaluated several storage and server options for the new VDI
deployment. “The first option was a traditional 3-tier storage infrastructure approach,
the second was a NetApp FlexPod and Cisco UCS solution, and the third and best
option was a hyper-converged technology platform, since it is very popular in the VDI
world,” Dai reported.
Dai first heard about Nutanix while reading a leading analyst firm’s research. “Gartner
listed Nutanix as a leader in the hyper-converged infrastructure space,” noted Dai.
“Our IT team in the United States also suggested that we look at the hyper-converged
trend and specifically, Nutanix.”
Dai then made the decision to run a POC on the Nutanix NX-3000 series systems.
The China IT team worked closely with Mary Kay’s corporate group in Texas during
the trial phase. “Nutanix had two significant advantages over the competitors,” Dai
reported. “The first advantage was that the CapEx costs were a lot lower with Nutanix
than with any of the traditional 3-tier infrastructures. The second major advantage is
that Nutanix is compatible with our VMware vSphere hypervisor, as well as our Citrix
XenApp and XenDesktop 7.5 deployments.”
Fast Deployment
At the end of the evaluation period, Mary Kay China purchased several Nutanix
nodes for its main production datacenter in Suzhou, China. “The Nutanix systems
were very easy to deploy,” according to Dai. “With our previous 3-tier server and
storage technology solution, it always took at least two weeks before the systems
were configured and running. With Nutanix, it only takes a day or two to do all of the
configuration and physical deployment. Our team was very impressed with how easy
and fast it was to deploy the Nutanix systems.”
©2015 Nutanix Inc., All Rights Reserved
www.nutanix.com
CS/MaryKay/5715
Case Study - Mary Kay China
Supporting VDI
Lower Costs and Easier Management
“The Nutanix web-scale converged platform saved us a lot of money on the initial
hardware purchase, as well as our on-going operational resource expenses,” Dai reported.
“Nutanix has already saved us 30% on hardware costs alone. Before Nutanix, we had two
dedicated administrators – one for our storage and a second admin for our virtualization
environment. With Nutanix, the environment is far less complex. One person can easily
manage both environments.”
Future Plans
Dai and his team are now making plans to expand the use of Nutanix beyond the
VDI deployment. “We are considering using Nutanix for our new disaster recovery
datacenter,” Dai said. “We would also like to move our server virtualization platform onto
Nutanix as well. We will start by moving the 100 server virtual machines first. After we
evaluate how Nutanix works for that environment, we will migrate our entire production
environment, including nearly 1,000 virtual machines, over to Nutanix.”
“
Based on my
understanding of
the architecture and
comparing the Nutanix
web-scale approach to
other vendors’ products
and services, I believe
it will be a mainstream
technology in the
enterprise datacenter
going forward.
“
Dai and his team have already deployed 300 of the 1,500 virtual desktops scheduled for
the first phase of the VDI launch. 60% of the desktops are used by knowledge-users who
need to access their applications when away from the office. VDI enables Mary Kay’s
remote workers to be more productive and not worry about physical desktops, and it also
cuts down on support. 30% of the desktops are used by Mary Kay’s sales team members
that need a way to access their email and applications without going on restrictive VPN
to obtain information. The remaining 10% of the desktops are used by the organization’s
senior management. Mary Kay’s executives also travel frequently and have the same
requirements for access as the sales teams. All of Mary Kay’s knowledge workers have
shared desktops. “Nutanix is delivering the performance we needed for VDI at a fraction
of the cost of traditional three-tier architectures,” noted Dai. “The solution has certainly
lived up to everything Nutanix has promised.”
—S
teven Dai,
Datacenter Infrastructure
Manager, Mary Kay China
Inc.
Advice for Others
Dai offered some advice for other organizations that are evaluating new IT infrastructures.
“For VDI deployments, you should start by considering why your enterprise needs a
VDI solution and determine if it will improve individual productivity. When choosing a
technology platform, consider how easily and expensive it is to scale out the architecture
to accommodate the future. VDI deployments tend to grow rapidly, and will quickly
consume a lot of your infrastructure and facility resources. You should consider using a
hyper-converged system because it is the latest evolution of IT infrastructure and far less
complex. With traditional 3-tier infrastructures, you will need twice as many people to
manage the environment compared to hyper-converged platform.”
“And finally, be sure that you choose the right partner to design the environment – one
with a lot of experience with storage and servers,” Dai continued. “If possible, it is best
to choose one partner that can manage all aspects of your deployment. Finding the
right partner to deploy VDI is also important. Pay attention to their references and past
experience.”
Closing Thoughts
“Nutanix has developed a great technology,” Dai concluded. “Based on my understanding
of the architecture and comparing the Nutanix web-scale approach to other vendors’
products and services, I believe that Nutanix will be a main stream technology in the
enterprise datacenter going forward.”
About Nutanix
Nutanix delivers web-scale IT infrastructure to medium and large enterprises
with its software-driven Virtual Computing Platform, natively converging
compute and storage into a single solution to drive unprecedented simplicity
in the datacenter. Customers can start with a few servers and scale to
thousands, with predictable performance and economics. With a patented
elastic data fabric and consumer-grade management, Nutanix is the blueprint
for application-optimized and policy-driven infrastructure. Learn more at
www.nutanix.com or follow up on Twitter @nutanix.
©2015 Nutanix Inc., All Rights Reserved
Tel 855.NUTANIX | (855.688.2649)
Fax 408.916.4039
Email info@Nutanix.com
@nutanix
www.nutanix.com
CS/MaryKay/5715