I try to talk to as many Nutanix customers as possible, and it’s always nice to get positive feedback in the form of a great story.
Here’s an example. If a seasoned IT executive in the banking industry told you his team combined data storage, computing, dashboard management, and backup and recovery systems – and it all works great – would you believe it?
Meet Vincent Lo, vice president of IT at the venerable Bank of Stockton, founded in 1867 and one of California's oldest banks still operating under its original charter.
“With Nutanix, life is good, and things are running nice and quiet,” he happily reported. But there’s more to this story.
Turning a problem into an opportunity
Unfortunately, from an IT perspective, it wasn’t always nice and quiet at the Bank of Stockton.
“Our backup windows took longer as the volume of data we had to manage and protect increased,” Lo noted. “I’ve been in IT long enough to know that users call when things run slow or are offline.”
Another problematic legacy issue involved the curse of having to juggle a multitude of management tools for different storage, backup, database, computing, and virtualization environments.
“Our legacy computing servers, which were difficult to manage, were approaching their end of life,” Lo explained. “This presented an opportunity to migrate out of our storage array as well. The legacy approach was expensive and difficult to meld together with virtualization software.”
Considering the best options
After careful consideration, the bank’s IT organization opted to combine the Nutanix Cloud Platform with the Hybrid Cloud Up Time (HYCU) backup and recovery system.
With Nutanix and HYCU, the bank could build a better foundation that would support growth in the future and address the problems they faced with sluggish backups – all at the same time.
“Moving to HCI was an attractive option because it would give us a single vendor to manage and speed up our backup times,” said Lo.
The bank’s IT organization was delighted to find everything it was looking for in the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution combined with HYCU for Nutanix for backup and recovery.
With these industry-leading solutions, the bank’s IT team could build a better foundation that would support growth in the future and address the problems they faced with sluggish backups all at the same time.
“Moving to HCI was an attractive option because it would give us a single vendor to manage and speed up our backup times,” said Lo.
Life without the legacy shackles
Lo and his team worked with Nutanix Professional Services to migrate the Bank of Stockton’s key operations to the Nutanix Cloud Platform at its two primary datacenters. And to Lo’s expectations of Nutanix, the process was quick, smooth, and simple.
With Nutanix in place, “We no longer worry about the legacy issues that long plagued us,” Lo said. In fact, he noted that this was one of the best projects he had managed in his 30 years in IT.
“Nutanix did the heavy lifting during installation, and within a couple days, everything was running like clockwork,” Lo said. “The solution worked as advertised, with no surprises whatsoever. Compared to what we had to go through with virtualization, having the hardware and software working together is a godsend.”
Today, the Nutanix solution supports almost all the bank’s applications and workloads, including:
The bank’s daily batch process, which used to take 90 minutes in its legacy VMware/Cisco-UCS/Tegile SAN, gets done in just 33 minutes in the new Nutanix environment.
Other compute-intensive processes like the compliance server database have also become much quicker, running twice as fast as the bank’s legacy equipment.
“The Nutanix solution delivers the reliability and performance we need, which gives me peace of mind and frees up time,” said Lo. “In the past, some of our batch processing was slow, which caused me headaches, especially when end users noticed a degradation of performance. We have not seen anything like that on Nutanix.”
In terms of security, Nutanix support for data-at-rest encryption was perfectly suited for the bank’s requirement to protect confidential customer information.
HYCU: Silver living in the cloud
HYCU for Nutanix is tightly integrated with the Nutanix cloud solution, making the backup and recovery process much faster, easier, and incredibly efficient.
“With HYCU, our backups went from several days to mere hours,” said Lo. “HYCU is doing everything I hoped it would do. The simplicity, ease-of-use and efficiency are absolutely awesome.”
HYCU also offers richer features than the bank’s older legacy solution.
“HYCU provides a single pane of glass for administration, as well as features like journaling, which were not available on our legacy platform,” Lo said. “We feel that we are well protected, based on the reputation of Nutanix and the backup from HYCU. I’m looking to turn on new features for both solutions later this year.”
Stay tuned for more customer feedback and stories from the front line.
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