Nutanix has announced that its technology is supporting Drakes Supermarkets, the largest and first vertically integrated independent retailer grocer in Australia. The organization chose Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure to modernize their IT environment while continuing to support its communities and respond to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Family-owned and operated, Drakes Supermarkets operates more than 60 stores across South Australia and Queensland. They employ more than 6,000 staff, a number that is rapidly increasing as the company strives to preserve local jobs and meet the sudden surge in consumer demand brought on by the pandemic.

With Nutanix and Adelaide-based IT partner, Nuago, Drakes was able to replace its aging IT environment with Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). The new infrastructure now supports Drakes’ $125 million, state-of-the-art automated distribution center in South Australia’s Edinburgh North – including its advanced robotics technology, warehouse management, point of sales (POS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems – enabling the retailer to access and respond to real-time stock demand.

“We’ve seen our warehousing and IT requirements more than double in the past few weeks, but we’ve maintained 100% availability across all of our systems,” said Phillip Romano, IT Manager at Drakes. “We can now focus on taking care of our communities’ shopping needs and hire new staff directly from the increasing pool of unemployed Australians.”

Drakes brought its distribution in-house and modernized its IT environment primarily to lower costs and pass those savings onto customers, with the aim of taking $1,000 off the average family’s annual grocery bill.

“Drakes understands the value of its data and the insight it gives into the purchasing profile of its customers. So, it makes perfect sense to ensure that proprietary information is internally retained,” said Lee Thompson, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand at Nutanix. “By taking its distribution in-house, Drakes is taking control of its infrastructure and helping drive the future of retail.”

With its Nutanix solution demonstrating performance and resilience during the current turbulent times, Drakes aims to expand the HCI environment across all stores and wholesale arms. In the future, Drakes aims to leverage the Nutanix Xi IoT edge intelligence platform – which uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time data insights – along with video analytics, to create new personalized experiences for customers. It is also considering migrating to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor to support Drakes’ 250 virtual machines.