Mercedes-Benz Brazil Drives Innovation and Automation with Nutanix

By AIT News Desk On Jun 18, 2021

Automotive Leader Increases IT Agility with Nutanix Solutions Improving its Time to Market

Nutanix, a leader in private, hybrid and multicloud computing, announced that Mercedes-Benz do Brasil Ltda., has chosen the Nutanix cloud platform to digitally transform their IT infrastructure. With Nutanix, Mercedes-Benz can take advantage of a more agile infrastructure and simplified automation, enabling the company to work more efficiently, improve time to market, and decrease costs.

“Thanks to the ease of deployment, Mercedes-Benz was quickly able to realize the benefits Nutanix provides. Since implementation, the IT team only needs one person to manage the infrastructure instead of entire teams, allowing resources and time to be allocated to other projects.”

The automotive industry is in the midst of a big transformation. With climate concerns, changing consumer interests, and urbanization, vehicle makers are moving quickly to develop a host of new technologies, including electric vehicles and autonomous driving capabilities. To innovate in this new market landscape, the capabilities of traditional IT infrastructure will fall short, and automotive companies need to rethink their approach. To succeed, IT needs to become a strategic enabler of innovation rather than simply a cost center.

Working across four plants in Brazil with more than 10,000 employees, Mercedes-Brazil operates in all industry segments in Latin America: selling cars, light commercial vehicles, trucks, bus chassis, gearboxes, engines and axles. Prior to Nutanix, the company’s IT team was operating a legacy IT infrastructure requiring laborious and time consuming installation and upgrades. The company set out to find a solution to automate these processes, perform faster upgrades and installations, simplify system management, and reduce data center space, all while reducing costs. After an extensive evaluation, Mercedes-Benz decided to deploy the Nutanix cloud platform, based on the company’s market leading hyperconverged infrastructure software, to address their needs.

“With Nutanix, we experienced speed and simplicity right away,” said Anibal Ulisses Coral, IT Infrastructure Architect at Mercedes-Benz do Brasil. “We now have a more agile development process to provide updates and new features in our apps quicker – and it’s all invisible to the end-user.”

Since implementation, Mercedes-Benz was able to see a significant reduction in cost, reduced space within their datacenters, and are completing installations at a rate that’s five times higher compared to their previous legacy system. For example, with Nutanix the installation time of virtual machines has been reduced by 75%, and server reboots now only take about three seconds.

Additionally, in the past, it used to take the IT team about three to four days to set up a Kubernetes cluster. With Nutanix Karbon, the company’s kubernetes management solution, they are able to create one in approximately 20 minutes with high availability. Nutanix Calm also allows the IT team to automate all of the activities required to create a server, helping them to perform key technical tasks in an efficient manner.

“With products like Calm and Karbon, customers like Mercedes-Benz are able to focus on proactive projects instead of being bogged down by slow upgrades and installations that require a lot of manpower,” said Andres Hurtado, VP of Sales, Latin America at Nutanix. “Thanks to the ease of deployment, Mercedes-Benz was quickly able to realize the benefits Nutanix provides. Since implementation, the IT team only needs one person to manage the infrastructure instead of entire teams, allowing resources and time to be allocated to other projects.”

Mercedes-Benz is currently in the process of implementing DevOps practices with Nutanix as well as expanding the deployment. This will allow Mercedes-Benz to have a more agile development process and more quickly provide updates and new features in its applications. Having seen successful results throughout Brazil using Nutanix, Mercedes-Benz is considering expanding the solutions to several other subsidiaries across regions.