Businesses are feeling the urgency to step up and digitally transform as customers demand the level of service that only advanced technology can provide.

Looking for a solution to serve its expanding guest capacity, Celtic Manor Resort Ltd, a hotel group based in Wales, U.K., deployed Dell EMC VxRail, a hyperconverged appliance that combines compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources in a single device.

“We could see where our pain points were in the environment we currently had, and with all the additional hotels, conference centers coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed to, from the core, build outwards. So VxRail was an obvious choice. … It was key to transformation,” said Chris Stanley (pictured, right), information technology manager at Celtic Manor Resort.

Stanley was joined by Shannon Champion (pictured, left), director of product marketing, hyperconverged infrastructure, at Dell Technologies Inc., for an interview with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Celtic Manor’s adoption of VxRail. (* Disclosure below.)

Celtic Manor IT staff now have time to work on passion projects

Deploying VxRail has freed the Celtic Manor IT department to focus on their areas of specialization. “You can see the staff are embracing it; they’re happy they’ve got this additional time,” Stanley said.

What differentiates VxRail from its competitors are seamless experience, familiar tools, automated deployment, and a single point of support, according to Champion. The single-point of contact is key for Stanley’s IT department.

“In the past, we’d be ringing [various providers], all blaming each other, and you’re going back and forth and you’re wasting key time. With one support number … you’ve one call, you’ve got a one-stop-shop to sort it,” he said.

Another big benefit for him is recover points that enable Celtic Manor to maintain dual environments and close to 100 percent uptime. “We can lose one … one total environment lost but still operate as a business,” Stanley stated.

Implementing virtual desktop infrastructure is the next step in the transformation journey for Celtic Manor. “With all these additional hotels coming on, the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go … centralizing the data more so people aren’t taking all data off of their laptops, so we’re a more secure environment,” Stanley stated.

“[VxRail] is the future product, and it’s not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than everything else we’ve experienced in the past,” said Stanley, recommending VxRail to his peers. “It’s just seamless integration now, and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell, and this environment, to go forward and grow even bigger as a business.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE