Nishat Emporium Mall: VMware to Sangfor HCI Migration

Customer Background

Emporium Mall is a beacon of shopping, dining, and entertainment in the heart of Lahore, offering every visitor a diverse and unforgettable experience. With over 300 international and local brands, including a ten-screen multiplex cinema called Universal Cinemas, Pakistan’s largest indoor amusement park known as Fun Factory Park, and the largest food court featuring 40+ eateries and an all-in-one hypermarket Carrefour.

IT Challenges

All in one Solution which can address challenges faced in current Infrastructure.

The customer was running their virtualization environment on VMware vSphere Standard. However, the absence of a SAN storage system created significant limitations. Critical clustering features such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vMotion were not enabled, which reduced overall system resilience and scalability. The downtime in case of hardware failure was in hours. In addition, backup operations were being carried out manually, consuming valuable time and introducing operational risks.

The customer was seeking a solution that could:

• Ensure high availability and resilience
• Provide automation and simplified management
• Include integrated backup capabilities
• Remain easy to use while avoiding the complexity and recurring costs of traditional 3-tier architecture

Several vendors proposed 3-tier architecture with SAN storage, but the customer declined these solutions due to the complexity, high cost, and recurring end-of-life replacement cycle of SAN storage.

Sangfor HCI Solution Values​

Proposed Solution​

Sangfor proposed its Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution tailored to the customer’s requirements. A Proof of Concept (POC) was conducted, where Sangfor HCI demonstrated:​

• Full clustering capabilities (HA, live migration, load balancing)​
• Automation and simplified management of virtual resources​
• Scheduled and automated backup functionality​
• A stable, user-friendly platform​

Outcome​

The POC proved to the customer that Sangfor HCI not only addressed all their pain points but also offered a highly resilient, scalable, and intuitive platform. Impressed by the ease of use, stability, and comprehensive feature set, the Emporium Mall team chose Sangfor HCI as their preferred solution.

With the support of Sangfor HCI, the system downtime has been reduced from hours to mere seconds or minutes in the event of physical node failure. Latency has also been significantly reduced, and the manual processes have been converted to fully automated ones, allowing the IT team to focus on more strategic and high-value tasks.

The deployment and migration were handled entirely by the local Sangfor team, ensuring a smooth and worry-free transition for the Emporium Mall team. This eliminated their usual hesitation associated with platform replacement and further strengthened their confidence in Sangfor’s reliability and capabilities.

The successful project highlights Sangfor’s ability to replace complex, costly legacy setups with a modern, efficient, and future-proof infrastructure.
 

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