Multi-cloud in fashion at Forever New

Melbourne fashion brand Forever New has refreshed its cloud strategy to cut energy consumption while giving it global real-time inventory management and faster access to corporate systems.

The multinational operation is powered by AWS for its ecommerce platform and Azure for corporate workloads, and has completed a Nutanix implementation so it can move workloads between private and public clouds and improve its backend infrastructure.

The energy savings were achieved by cutting Forever New’s 16-node stack down to 10, the company said in a statement.

The ecommerce platform supports more than 400 retail and concession stores in 26 markets.

“Our Melbourne data centre powers everything from our very own Chadstone shop floor to our stores on Singapore’s Orchard Road and London’s White City,” Forever New's general manager of IT Naresh Teckchandani said.

“With multiple ways for shoppers to reach us all around the world for a seamless shopping experience, backend performance is the essence of a better, more personalised customer experience (CX).

“With Nutanix, we’ve woven confidence into our infrastructure outfit.”

The company first adopted Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure in 2016.

Last year, the company completed an infrastructure modernisation project which replaced Dell servers running Hyper-V for Nutanix AHV.

“Since completing the migration, middleware errors have gone, and our Warehouse Management System is more accurately providing shop staff and customers real-time inventory data," group head of infrastructure Ben Tobgui said.

“Performance of the underlying infrastructure has immensely improved. Our offshore teams and stores, who access the information they need through Citrix, have felt it too. Logins which used to take minutes now connect in seconds.”

Other systems recording better performance include online APIs, payroll, ERP, product lifecycle management, and backups.

Forever New says eight-hour backups are now down to less than one hour, and 12-hour data warehouse backups are down to two hours.

“Our ecommerce platform largely lives on AWS, while corporate workloads run on Azure. But not everything is cost effective in public cloud, so we use a combination of on-premises private cloud and public clouds. This keeps cloud costs controlled, and ensures applications run where they best fit,” Teckchandani said.

“Nutanix simplifies managing this environment through a single pane of glass, giving us the flexibility to move workloads across clouds as new assets enter the business or as needs change – this aligns perfectly with our hybrid multi cloud strategy,” Tobgui added.

Melbourne IT partner Perfekt managed the migration across the retailer’s Christmas season a year ago, from November 2022 to February 2023.