Notino is the largest online fragrance and beauty retailer in Europe, active in 23 countries and growing. The company provides more than 1,500 brands and 60,000 products, with deliveries to more than 400 million European customers. For three consecutive years, Notino has been awarded by Deloitte as one of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.
By 2017, Notino had over €280M turnover, and a growing ecommerce-driven company requires a stable SDDC to ensure business continuity that can take and dispatch up to 80,000 orders per day throughout the continent.
Michal Kopecny and Jaroslav Toman are IT Administrators at Notino and responsible for the company’s VMware infrastructure.
With 3 vCenter Servers (managing over 50 ESXi hosts) and a Horizon VDI environment, Notino was experiencing 4-5 VMware-related IT incidents per month, which could be disastrous to a company with roughly half a million daily visits to online shops. Also, the company’s presence in 23 countries gave the challenge of needing to find workarounds to fix issues proactively, without the help of on-site VMware support.
According to Mr. Kopecny, “We needed better support, either from VMware or Runecast… and with VMware that would be adding ‘mission-critical plus a TAM’, which was more expensive than Runecast. Using Runecast gives us the real-time support that we need.”
Notino had experienced challenges with VMware support, resulting in a negative experience that influenced Mr. Kopecny and Mr. Toman to focus on changing the dynamic. Within the first two weeks, Runecast Analyzer found and alerted on 5-10 VMware issues that the team were able to fix proactively. Notino took advantage of integrating Runecast Analyzer with VMware Orchestrator to provide benefits of a self-healing environment.
“We compared Runecast with VMware Support and the difference was enough for us to go with Runecast,” said Mr. Toman. “Presenting the Runecast ROI was easy... when we compared the price between Runecast and VMware support, Runecast made the most sense.”
By using Runecast for an hour each day, Notino’s issues have been reduced to about 1 per month and are shown, immediately upon identification, in the Runecast Analyzer dashboard. Notino reduced OPEX tied to troubleshooting costs, as their team immediately demonstrated savings of one full-time admin, enabling them to focus those savings on additional initiatives.
“Runecast Analyzer provides us with better productivity and increased uptime,” according to Mr. Kopecny.
“Runecast is straightforward enough that you see what you need to do,” said Mr. Toman, “and Runecast Support is always ready to hear our feedback and help us with our questions.
”TOTAL minimum savings with Runecast Analyzer: €78K/year + potential downtime costs
“Runecast saves us from issues before they happen, the value of which cannot be overstated. In addition, Runecast’s real-time data saves us weeks and months that were previously spent on dealing with VMware support.”
Michal Kopecny
Run it... you will be amazed by the findings. We always think that a lot of applications are secure by nature and by how they’ve been designed, but after deploying Runecast you really understand the gaps that you might have in your environment and it’s definitely an eye-opener.
Vice President - Infrastructure & Security at Oman Airports
