Merlin Entertainments Transforms IT With SimpliVity Hyperconvergence

SimpliVity Corporation announced that Merlin Entertainments Group has standardized on its hyper-converged infrastructure to transform its data center.

Hyperconverged infrastructure reduces capital and operational expenses (CAPEX and OPEX), while ensuring performance and availability for Merlin’s business-critical applications. As a result, Merlin projects a three-year TCO saving for its theme parks and attractions, compared to alternative solutions, of 25%.

The £1.2 billion organization is the largest European-based entertainment company. It operates 110 attractions in 23 countries. Some of the most renowned and famous resort theme parks and midway attractions in the world are operated by Merlin, including LEGOLAND resorts, Madame Tussauds, and SEA LIFE aquariums.

Merlin was looking to streamline operations, simplify management, and free up its IT team to work on more business-progressing initiatives. The organization needed a solution that would reliably support its revenue-critical retail systems, ticketing and admission systems, hotel management systems, and core IT services. After vetting solutions from a number of vendors, Merlin decided that SimpliVity was the good fit for the entertainments company.

“The product’s built-in data protection capabilities, ease of implementation and operation, and tight vCenter integration were major differentiators,” said Sean Channon, global infrastructure architect, Merlin. “With SimpliVity, we no longer have to rely on in-house server or storage experts for routine system admin and support tasks. Instead, a small team of IT generalists efficiently manages our entire global operation.“

Merlin can get a site up and running quickly, deploying the essential IT required to run attractions in hours when it used to take days with the organization’s previous data center technology, enabling faster time to revenue. The SimpliVity solution also offers built-in data protection and enables backup and recovery to occur in seconds or minutes as opposed to hours or even days with its previous IT infrastructure.

“It’s great to see Merlin Entertainments benefiting from the exceptional operational efficiencies that SimpliVity delivers,” said Klaus Seidl, VP of EMEA sales, SimpliVity. “IT is changing dramatically, as leading companies spur the move from maintaining complex infrastructure to serving the current and future needs of their businesses with the power of simplified IT.“

According to an April 2016 IDC White Paper sponsored by SimpliVity¹, customers increased the time spent on innovation and new projects from 16% to 29% – the equivalent of an 81% increase. Organizations in the study were also able to spend their budget more wisely as the study notes that companies increased the percent of budget spent on new technology projects and purchases by an equivalent of 33%, as opposed to budget spent maintaining existing infrastructure.

SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure provider combining all the functionality of an entire data center stack below the hypervisor including compute, storage, network switching, replication, backup, and more onto industry-standard x86 hardware. The company was founded on the belief that modern data centers need to be simplified in order to function at the highest level of performance and efficiency.

Case study

¹SimpliVity Hyper-convergence Drives Operational Efficiency and Customers are Benefiting, April 2016.