Leading Bay Area regional bank saves money migrating to consolidated Nutanix solution
A leading business and community bank in Northern California, Bank of Marin has 26 retail branches and eight commercial banking offices located across seven counties. The Bank provides commercial banking, personal banking, and wealth management and trust services.
When its three-tier legacy environment began to experience poor performance, the organization migrated to a Nutanix on-premises Infrastructure. Nutanix delivers dependable operations for key customer-facing applications with a redundant architecture that can recover fast from unexpected issues.
I can’t say enough about Nutanix and its resiliency, as well as the recovery process. It is wonderful.
The financial services world has changed a lot since the Bank of Marin was founded in 1990. But one thing that hasn’t changed is its commitment to focusing on its customers.
“We run a small IT environment, but as a bank we have to be competitive,” said Dan Seletzky, Vice President of IT at Bank of Marin. “Our customers expect access to all the same services and tools that larger banks offer.”
Like most financial services innovators, the Bank of Marin relies on its network infrastructure as the primary platform to support its core operations.
“Our core banking systems, including online banking, are hosted environments provided by FIS and Q2,” said Seletzky. “We depend on our infrastructure to run companion applications that are required to support the hosted environment and serve our customers. Our imaging system resides on our infrastructure as well.”
When Seletzky joined the organization, Bank of Marin was in the process of merging with another bank, but its existing environment was already beginning to near end-of-life.
“The infrastructure was very aged, but I couldn't address it immediately because we were integrating a newly acquired bank,” said Seletzky. “But I was relatively comfortable with hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs), and I had been a proponent of Nutanix for many years.”
The IT team knew that it was time to modernize its environment to maintain the consistently high levels of service that employees and customers expect.
Seletzky replaced the Bank of Marin’s three-tier network environment with a Nutanix infrastructure at its headquarters and a colocation facility. This HCI environment lets the bank converge its entire datacenter stack, including compute, storage, storage networking, and virtualization onto a single unified platform.
“The whole process of acquiring Nutanix and getting it up and running went more smoothly than I had anticipated,” said Seletzky. “We used the Nutanix Move tool to move our VMs with minimal downtime. I was incredibly thankful when we were finally on the Nutanix environment and replicating over to our colocation facility.”
Nutanix Prism lets the team manage its entire stack, from the storage and compute infrastructure to its VMs. To further simplify administration, the bank utilizes the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.
“The fact that we could run the native Nutanix AHV hypervisor and not have to purchase additional licenses from VMware and other vendors like Proxmox was a huge plus,” said Seletzky. “AHV was also a criteria when we were choosing an archive solution. We wanted to make sure that whoever we chose would backup native VMs and would be compatible with AHV, so we chose the Rubrik data protection solution.”
The Nutanix infrastructure gives the Bank of Marin a modern HCI platform to support its most essential banking operations. The new solution proved its resiliency just as the organization was completing its migration.
“Our legacy environment included older uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), and they were slated to be replaced and load balanced with new ones, but before we had a chance to do that, we suffered a brownout within our complex that took down the data center. Our UPSs were so old that the batteries didn't hold the load,” said Seletzky.
“It was a heart-stopping experience, because four of my Nutanix nodes went down hard, and they have servers and storage,” he continued. “In minutes, my senior engineer was able to get back into the administrative console and start assessing the damage. The nodes started coming back up, we didn't suffer data corruption, and everything came back up fine and rebuilt itself.”
Seletzky is confident that his staff and the unified, easy-to-manage solution will continue to provide the consistent availability his organization requires to meet high customer expectations.
“We haven't needed a lot of support, and that's a good thing,” said Seletzky. “We did use Nutanix Professional Services as part of our migration from the previous environment and it went really well. We were able to shadow them during the first parts of the process, and then my engineers pretty much did the rest.”
With its highly available Nutanix HCI infrastructure running smoothly, the Bank of Marin is now taking steps to further improve the solution’s resiliency.
“We have enhanced the capacity of Nutanix at the colocation and are running a virtual instance of the Rubrik appliance there,” said Seletzky. “We have an appliance at the main headquarters, and it's backing up our Microsoft 365 applications as well as Nutanix. It’s also replicating out to Microsoft Azure. This gives our operations an additional level of redundancy and further peace of mind.”
Learn more at www.nutanix.com
Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom.
Roundstone Solutions has years of experience helping organizations deploy the best IT infrastructure for their particular requirements. The company helps their customers migrate to more modern, higher performing, simpler, and less costly IT infrastructure.
5/24