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Bank of Stockton Enhances Customer Experience and Compliance    

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INDUSTRY

Financial Services

CHALLENGES

  • Migrate separate storage and compute environments to a single hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for better performance, availability, and compliance.
  • Streamline and simplify data recovery, accelerating 1.4 TB server backup processes from three days to overnight.
  • Enable consolidated dashboard management for compute, storage, and virtualization to simplify administration.

SOLUTION

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

  • HYCU Backup and Recovery for Nutanix

Applications

  • Microsoft SQL Servers
  • Microsoft Exchange Servers
  • Microsoft SharePoint & Web Servers
  • Fiserv bank teller applications • Risk and compliance applications

BUSINESS BENEFITS 

Bank of Stockton relies on IT infrastructure to support all of its operations and 19 branches, spanning nine counties in Northern California. With Asset size of 3.1B, its IT Infrastructure must be secure, reliable, available, and fast. To deliver the unique, personalized experience its customers have come to expect, the Bank must not only deliver dependable, nonstop service, but meet audit and regulatory compliance requirements as well. To keep its banking operations on the leading edge, the Bank deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, which enables it to consolidate all its core applications on one HCI, for simpler, more consistent management and improved performance. The Bank also needed a tightly-integrated backup and recovery solution with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. The organization chose HYCU for Nutanix to help ensure it could meet its backup window timeframes and recovery objectives for its critical data. 

With Nutanix, life is good. We no longer have to worry about the issues that long plagued us. I have been in IT long enough to know that users call IT when things are running slow or offline. With Nutanix in place, things are running nice and quiet. The Nutanix and HYCU systems do not require much attention. Their performance, capability and simplicity are absolutely awesome!

Vincent Lo, VP of IT, Bank of Stockton

CHALLENGE

Serving California’s Central Valley and beyond for more than 150 years, the Bank of Stockton is constantly upgrading its technology to keep pace with fast-changing customer needs. When its existing storage and compute environments on its infrastructure began showing their age, the Bank’s IT team spotted an excellent opportunity to get out in front of the upgrade curve and build a foundation that could support future requirements and address the challenges it faced in backups that took several days. “Our legacy computing servers were approaching end of life, and they were also difficult to manage,” said Lo. “It was a perfect time to migrate out of our storage array as well. Those two pieces of equipment were expensive, and were difficult to meld together with virtualization software running between them. Moving to an HCI was an attractive option, because it would give us a single vendor, with just ‘one throat to choke.’ And, moving to a tightly integrated backup would help us address our backup windows, which were taking longer as the volume of data we needed to manage and protect increased.”

SOLUTION

Bank of Stockton deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud at its two primary data centers. Working closely with Nutanix Professional Services, Lo and his team migrated the Bank’s key operations to the new platform quickly and smoothly. “This is one of the best projects I have managed in my 30 years in IT,” said Lo. “Nutanix did the heavy lifting during installation, and within a couple days, everything was running like clockwork. 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.”

The Nutanix-led solution supports nearly all of Bank of Stockton’s applications and workloads, including its bank teller and risk and compliance applications from Fiserv, its imaging server, Security Information Manager Event (SIEM) tool, and more. “In the past, we had separate management tools for our different environments. Now all that goes away, and we can take care of business with Nutanix Prism. It’s a lot easier to use.”

The initial performance statistics are also very strong in Prism Central. The Bank had a daily batch process that normally would take 90 minutes to complete in the legacy VMware/Cisco-UCS/Tegile SAN. In the new Nutanix environment, the first test run was completed in 33 minutes.

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

Migrating to Nutanix has produced some immediate benefits for Bank of Stockton. Demanding, compute-intensive processes such as the compliance server database are now running at nearly twice the speed of 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. We also went from backups that were taking several days to hours once we had HYCU up and running. HYCU is doing everything I hoped it would do. The simplicity, easy-of-use and efficiency are absolutely awesome.”

Security and compliance are always top of mind for financial services organizations, and Lo was pleased that Nutanix supports data encryption at rest, to help protect confidential end customer information. To further safeguard the reliability and integrity of its data, Bank of Stockton is using HYCU for Nutanix for this as well. HYCU is purpose-built and offers richer features and faster performance 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,” said Lo. “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.”

NEXT STEPS

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud provides a highly flexible foundation that Bank of Stockton can scale to accommodate new needs. To minimize risk in the event of an outage, Lo and his team are evaluating the Nutanix Metro Availability solution. “Our auditors are interested in our abilities to ensure availability of bank teller applications and other critical applications,” said Lo. “Metro Availability would enable near real-time data replication and recovery on Nutanix. I’m considering deploying the solution to support failover between two of our key servers in Stockton and Sacramento.”