Transcript
My father purchased a computer for his business, and no one knew how to run it. My dad bought me my first PC. I opened up the computer, I installed the circuitry, and then from there I just kind of fell in love with computers. I started at Westgate in 1999, handing out towels at a pool, and now I'm the systems manager for all of Westgate. Westgate Resorts is a hospitality company. We've become a company that was just focused on selling timeshares to now a company that does rentals and runs food and beverage locations. We have over 70 resorts and are still continuing to grow. Infrastructure-wise, this has put a lot of demand on the administration teams, but we were able to keep up with it thanks to all these technological advances. The application that we've internally developed allows us to check in our customers, it allows us to sell timeshares. This application is the lifeline of the company, and that's why we chose the Nutanix database service. Our journey with Nutanix started about a year and a half ago. What can we do in order to move over to new emerging technology and also manage this application that has lived and grown for the last 30 plus years? When we first went to Nutanix, I just kind of fell in love with the platform, fell in love with the simplicity of it. We started asking the tough questions, they started providing architectural answers. We flew back and I already knew in my mind that Nutanix was the way to go. The hardware was already racked and stacked and ready to be powered on. We had access to all their engineers, all their developers, and their NDB experts. That's where Nutanix really shined. We didn't skip a beat. We got more performance than we ever thought we were going to get, and the business didn't even know we actually did the migration. With Nutanix database service, we were able to reduce our CPU counts from 24 down to 16. At the same time, we were able to deliver the same performance. With our previous technology, the cloning process and refresh process took anywhere from 13 to 18 hours. Now with NDB, the process takes about the time it takes us to take a lunch. Transitioning to Nutanix database service has improved the work-life balance for us because our patching time has reduced from 10 to 12 hours down to only one and a half hours. Ultimately, moving to the Nutanix database service saved us around $1.6 million. Now I don't have to worry so much about the physical footprint and the hardware. We can focus on pushing the needle towards adopting new technologies. We've used technology to provide a story and to make that story easier and a better story for our customers and our team members as well.
