Regional, Family-Managed Bank Deploys the Same Enterprise IT Environment Used by the World’s Largest Financial Institutions
Banking
By moving to Nutanix, F&M Bank was able to deploy a robust IT platform to support company growth and prepare for the launch of new technologies. The Nutanix solution simplifies IT management, increases system uptime, improves the end user experience, and frees up the IT team to manage more strategic projects.
With the power, easy scalability, simple management, and flexibility of the Nutanix platform, we can easily grow to any size we choose. When implementing new infrastructure, my philosophy is to do it the best way or not at all.
Since November 23, 1907, Farmers & Merchants Bank of Long Beach (F&M) has grown deliberately and safely, helping to earn its reputation as one of the strongest banks in California. F&M specializes in commercial and small business banking, business loan programs, home loans, and a robust offering of consumer retail banking products. The bank has grown significantly over the past 114 years, with office locations stretching from San Clemente to Santa Barbara.
“We are a fourth-generation, family-managed bank,” explained Greg Sachs, F&M’s Chief Technology Officer. “We strive to be California’s strongest bank in every way ─ from the high quality of our client service to our investment returns, and the white glove attention we give to every client, regardless of size.”
Sachs joined F&M in 2016, chosen for his 30+ years of expertise in banking. He has unique skills which have helped to update the IT infrastructure at numerous other banks and financial institutions. “F&M was still relying on separate servers, storage, and networking systems,” said Sachs. “There were only 10 virtual hosts for the entire bank, six in one datacenter and four in the other. Our current infrastructure wouldn’t enable us to tackle all of the data, networking, cloud, and security challenges we would be facing in the coming years. We needed to find a more powerful and flexible technology platform that would be capable of accommodating the Bank’s strategic initiatives while also addressing our IT goals across two production data centers. We had to have our own private cloud while planning to connect to the public in the near future. Flexibility, performance, and scalability were key to our decision.”
Sachs performed extensive research on the available infrastructure options before choosing Nutanix. “At the time of our search, several of the companies we evaluated had recently undergone massive reorganizations. Concerned about their ability to implement quickly and efficiently, we decided to remove them from our list.”
With the support of F&M Bank’s Executive Committee, Sachs moved forward with the Nutanix platform. “Nutanix has always had a great reputation in the financial industry,” noted Sachs. “Even though hyperconverged infrastructure wasn’t well understood at F&M Bank at that time, I felt it was the right technology for our current needs and future requirements.”
Eager to move forward, Sachs put in the order for the Nutanix systems within three weeks of the initial discussion. “We acquired the technology in a different manner than most enterprises,” he shared. We went from the decision to go with Nutanix to the actual installation in a very short period of time. We highly leveraged Nutanix pro services and are extremely happy we did so.”
Running Everything on Nutanix
F&M’s IT team deployed 14 Nutanix nodes initially at the Bank’s two large datacenters. They added additional clusters at each of the company’s remote branch offices and banking centers over time and greatly expanded both data centers. At last count, the Bank had 142 hosts.
“Our Nutanix expansion doubled the capacity of each datacenter initially, and recently we doubled it again. This second expansion took less than two months from approval to deployment,” Sachs explained. “We now have approximately 300TB usable capacity in each data center. That amount of usable storage and memory is unprecedented by a regional bank, but we wanted to build an enterprise-level platform that could handle any imagined technologies we decide to deploy over the next decade. Each of our new hosts has 1 TB of RAM, so though we added 10 hosts, it was like adding 20 per center. All NVMe, 100 gig throughput per host. Blistering performance is an understatement.”
Deploying a Private Cloud
F&M runs business-critical applications on the Nutanix systems in a private cloud. “When I joined the company five years ago, we considered moving our existing technologies up to the public cloud, but I lobbied against it,” Sachs reported. “With that approach, we’d have no back out plan. What if there were security events at one of our IT partners and we needed to re-think cloud planning and execution? With our private cloud strategy, we could carry the conversation exactly on point. Running Nutanix in our own private cloud gave us much more powerful systems, the ability to improve uptime, and better control over our data storage and backup requirements.”
Moving from VMware to AHV
“When we first deployed Nutanix, we stayed with the VMware hypervisor since our team was familiar with that platform,” said Sachs. “Our IT admins are now considering AHV. This strategy will simplify management and save us significant money on licensing costs.”
Management Simplicity
Due to the support of F&M’s Executive Committee and the CIO, F&M Bank was able to increase efficiency exponentially. “By moving to Nutanix, infrastructure management can now be performed by just one resource as part of his overall responsibilities. Our IT team had been spending a lot of time managing and moving our data,” Sachs said. “Our technicians don’t have to work 24 hours per day during upgrade cycles anymore, since they can upgrade all 142 of the Nutanix nodes during business hours. As a result, upgrades are no longer a huge, disruptive project that we all dread. Everything we need to do is so much easier and faster with Nutanix, freeing our team up to tackle more strategic projects.”
‘Blistering Fast’ Nutanix Systems
“Before COVID, our infrastructure specialists used to continually monitor a dozen 65-inch screens in our 55,000 sq. ft. datacenters. I would keep my eyes on several more monitors in my office to make sure everything was working in an optimal manner,” Sachs shared. “I am so comfortable with the Nutanix systems now that I only look at the dashboard a few times each week. The clusters are ‘blistering fast’, and I love to watch the sub-millisecond latencies on the monitors and as reported on our infrastructure reports. If we ever have any application anomalies or slowness in any of our systems, it’s not due to Nutanix.”
Higher Availability
“When the branch systems went down, our tellers would have to record all customer transactions on paper until their systems were back online. If something broke on a Friday night, it could easily be Wednesday before the issues were fixed on traditional servers. That’s why we decided to put a Nutanix cluster in every branch and connect them through our private cloud for redundancy. Now if we ever have a system issue at a branch office, we literally flip a switch and all virtual servers are ‘flipped’ to our datacenters, since they’re all virtual. With Nutanix at each location, our branch offices can be back online in just minutes instead of days.”
Moving Data in Seconds
Moving data and restoring systems is also faster on Nutanix. “We can easily move 100TBs of servers with the flip of a switch,” said Sachs. “We use complimentary technology, and they all work seamlessly together. I recently had a consultant with decades of experience watch me roll back an 18TB email archive server in real-time during the middle of the day. The process was almost immediate and done to perfection. He was simply speechless and appreciative that he wasn’t going to be writing memos explaining why all that data was no longer available.”
Working Remotely During the Pandemic
“When the Covid pandemic started, it was ‘just another day in the office’”, said Sachs. “Sure, we worked some long days relocating call centers and providing remote setups for bankers, but we were extremely well prepared relative to many others.” While many banks were closing their doors or reducing hours, F&M employees stayed committed to serving their clients and communities. F&M did not close any locations or reduce office hours and clients continued communicating with their bankers via cell phone and email at all hours of the day, including weekends. “We immediately sent hundreds of back-office staff home to work remotely to support those working in the branch offices. Our board meetings also went virtual, and you can imagine the stress if you schedule a board meeting, and the technology doesn’t work! Luckily, we already had all of the Nutanix infrastructure in place, with 10GBE Internet connections and next-gen firewalls. Our employees were able to easily work from home without hardly missing a beat.”
Relying on Great Nutanix Support
“Nutanix has absolutely fantastic support,” admitted Sachs. “Their sales and technical teams will do whatever it takes to get things done. They’re always able to solve our problems and answer the team’s questions very quickly. When you have the right people, the right products, and the right support groups in place, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.”
F&M continues to be an early adopter of promising new technologies. “When implementing infrastructure, my philosophy is to do it the best way or not at all,” explained Sachs. “By moving to Nutanix, we ended up with a bank we only dreamed of from a technology perspective. With the power, incremental scalability, simple management, and flexibility of the Nutanix platform, we can easily grow to any size we choose.”
When asked if he could summarize his journey with Nutanix in just one word, Sachs replied, “Extraordinary.” He followed up with “There is simply no better word to describe Nutanix. If I were a professor, I’d be the one that never gives anyone an A grade. I might give an A-, but only if you did all of the extra credit. Nutanix is the only technology vendor I have ever worked with that has clearly and consistently earned an A+ in my gradebook.”