Delivering high-quality food products on time, every time.
NENI deployed an easy-to-manage hyperconverged solution based on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and Scale Computing HyperCore, boosting the availability of mission-critical business systems to 100% while keeping IT spending under tight control.
Customer Overview
NENI is an international hospitality business and food producer headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The family enterprise, built around the motto “life is beautiful”, operates nine restaurants in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Spain, and France for casual, communal eating influenced by the family’s diverse Israeli, Romanian, and Spanish heritage.
In addition to its restaurants, NENI produces chilled foods for major supermarket chains across Germany, Austria, and Hungary, including SPAR, EDEKA, Tegut, and GLOBUS.
The company depends on continuous processes to support its large-scale food production and distribution operations. Every day, the company processes huge quantities of raw materials to produce 60,000 food items. To keep its production lines stocked with raw materials and deliver finished products to restaurants and retailers on time, NENI relies on its inventory and logistics planning systems running 24/7.
Challenges
As NENI’s end-to-end processes are so tightly integrated, an ERP system outage of as little as three hours can cause production delays as long as two business days—adding up to a six-figure sum in lost revenue.
As the infrastructure for its ERP system approached end-of-life, NENI realized that the business risk of unplanned downtime was rising fast—presenting a significant threat to profitability.
Margins are tight in our industry, so it’s very important to keep costs under control. To protect our all-important production processes, we decided to move our mission-critical ERP systems to a highly available and reliable platform. Crucially, we targeted a solution that would enable us to keep IT headcount and spending lean.— Ilan Molcho, CEO, NENI
Partnership
NENI reached out to Lenovo partner Ingram Micro GmbH in Austria, a specialist IT distributor focused on logistics and services, to refresh its IT infrastructure. Following an extensive evaluation period, NENI selected a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 and Lenovo ThinkSystem SR250 servers running Scale Computing HyperCore.
Given NENI’s requirements, Ingram Micro and Lenovo recommended the Scale Computing-Lenovo solution. This fully certified, turn-key solution comprises a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with virtualization and disaster recovery from Scale Computing running on a three-node cluster of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 and Lenovo ThinkSystem SR250 servers.
Built with the specific challenges of small and medium companies in mind, this solution from provides all the essential features packaged with an easy-to-use management and control panel.
With SC//HyperCore running on Lenovo servers, we implemented a highly automated and intelligent hyperconverged solution. Together with Ingram Micro, Scale Computing, and Lenovo, we carefully planned the deployment and configured the appliance off-site. We tuned the platform configuration and then installed the infrastructure in our server room without interrupting business operations. The whole implementation project was characterized by smooth collaboration between specialists, where everyone involved worked towards a shared goal: making NENI fit for future business growth.— Ilan Molcho, CEO, NENI
Scale Computing solution
The solution offers NENI enterprise-grade performance and reliability in a simple, cost-effective package, complete with self-healing and failover capabilities to increase application availability and reduce the business risk. By using the integrated HyperCore Data Protection Suite, NENI takes advantage of the flexible snapshot feature to further increase overall reliability.
Today, NENI relies on SC//HyperCore and Lenovo servers to run its central Microsoft Windows Server, providing essential infrastructure and communications services. The platform also runs a dedicated node for a mission-critical Microsoft SQL Server instance that powers the company’s GUS-OS Suite ERP solution for food production management. Additionally, NENI relies on a range of special-purpose applications on four virtual desktop instances running Microsoft Windows.
Results
For NENI, the combination of Lenovo and Scale Computing technologies with Ingram Micro services offers the peace of mind that mission-critical business systems will be online 24/7/365. Equipped with advanced disaster recovery capabilities such as snapshots for virtual machine backups, NENI can now recover from failures within minutes, minimizing the business impact of potential IT issues.
The HCI solution enabled NENI to consolidate IT workloads and to reduce administration and maintenance overheads. NENI already capitalizes on its investment by adding a new production management solution to the platform, harnessing real-time Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data to enhance quality management for fast-moving food production lines.
Molcho adds, “Ingram Micro is not just an IT distributor for us, but a true innovation partner. Scale Computing, Lenovo, and Ingram Micro have delivered what they promised: a solution that is easy to manage and that we could deploy rapidly without interruption to production processes or business users.”