A leading manufacturer in the automotive parts sector has deployed innovative cloud technology to achieve greater business agility.
Coventry-based Unipart Powertrain Applications (UPA), part of the Unipart Manufacturing Group (UMG), is a Tier 1 supplier to the global automotive industry. Its challenge was managing stock held on-site balanced with the need to deliver it on a just-in-time basis, a tight supply chain where even minor service interruptions can have knock-on effects across the entire Unipart business.
UPA identified a need to eliminate database latency issues impacting the just-in-time delivery capabilities of its automotive parts division, and its solution was to deploy the Nutanix Cloud Platform and AHV hypervisor. It said the combination was able to provide the necessary performance uplift and also reduce complexity, simplifying management and making the business as a whole more flexible.
The Unipart team turned to independent infrastructure specialist and Nutanix partner Softcat, which recommended migration to a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). Two clusters were installed, the first to support day-to-day production workloads followed later by a second for data replication, load balancing and disaster recovery, along with backup to NAS and long term archiving offsite. Beyond support for core manufacturing, ERP and database workloads, the ability to install graphics accelerator (GPU) cards in the new cluster and share them using the AHV hypervisor was seen as another plus, according to UPA.
With AHV handling virtualisation, more than 80 VMs needed to be migrated, a process managed using Nutanix Move. UPA said performance has been improved across the board while the database latency issues have disappeared entirely with measurable effects in terms of productivity.
In the short term, UPA is concentrating on automating day-to-day management tasks and supporting teams responsible for product development. Looking beyond that, the group’s new cloud investment is expected to play a significant role in enabling rapid diversification away from automotive engineering into other areas such as battery manufacture and other low-carbon technologies requiring flexible production facilities, backed up by an agile and easy to manage IT infrastructure.
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