Flight Centre New Zealand has implemented the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform hyperconverged infrastructure to help its travel consultants better serve New Zealand residents travelling abroad.
Hyperconverged infrastructure comprises processing, storage and networking hardware and virtualisation software very tightly integrated, generally from a single vendor. This tight integration simplifies management and reduces costs.
According to Nutanix, its Enterprise Cloud Platform replaces outdated legacy infrastructure, provides enhanced reliability with no single point-of-failure and higher availability and performance. “Travel experts can better identify opportunities for customers, who in turn have faster and more reliable access to Flight Centre services,” Nutanix said.
Flight Centre has more than 200 locations in New Zealand running 900 Citrix-based virtual desktops. These deliver a range of applications including Flight Centre’s global booking tool that is used by all travel consultants, a corporate retail booking app used by specialists and customers, and travel destination informational apps. These systems are hosted in Flight Centre’s two data centres in Auckland and Hamilton.
Flight Centre has installed two Nutanix clusters—one at each of the data centres. According to Nutanix these have improved performance and have shrunk Flight Centre NZ’s data centre footprint by 80 percent. “The scale-as-you-go model inherent with Nutanix means that Flight Centre can simply add additional compute and storage resources as needed,” Nutanix said.
Flight Centre NZ CIO Angus Armstrong said the old system had data availability limitations that comprised the company’s ability to service its customers.
“With the Nutanix platform, our data is safe and secure and our team can focus on securing the best deals for our customers, giving us a competitive advantage in attracting the growing number of customers travelling from New Zealand and within the country,” he said.