INDUSTRY
Financial Services
CHALLENGES
- Consolidate separate infrastructure onto a single hyperconverged platform to control costs and improve performance
- Improve DR recovery time while minimizing restore failures
- Implement a scalable platform to support new technologies in the future
SOLUTION
Applications
- Insurance value chain applications
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Since 1874, Foresters Financial has been providing socially responsible financial services to individuals and families. The organization offers insurance products to members and clients in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Foresters Financial depends on insurance value-chain related applications, and continually strives to control costs, while improving business agility. The organization turned to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to accomplish both objectives. This single hyperconverged platform enables Foresters Financial to consolidate its operations, improve application performance, and drive network administration cost savings that can be passed on to Foresters.
Nutanix has enabled us to achieve significant cost reduction from an infrastructure support standpoint. We have been very aggressive in encouraging our technology service providers to be more realistic in terms of pricing due to the use of the Nutanix solution. We definitely have achieved our target.
Richard Hung, Platform Architect, Foresters Financial
CHALLENGE
Foresters’ infrastructure stack, including virtual, physical infrastructure, and core business applications, was typically hosted on a traditional tiered architecture. This siloed infrastructure was costly, difficult to manage, and lacked the performance and agility Foresters required. “We were experiencing performance bottlenecks in I/O, and we were paying a hefty price for SAN storage,” said Hung. “One of our key objectives was to reduce cost as much as possible. It was also challenging to provision new environments, and we were looking to simplify the management of the environment in terms of provisioning and maintenance.”
SOLUTION
After considering a variety of solutions, Foresters chose Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Aligning the solution to its specific business needs was easy, thanks to assistance provided by the Nutanix account team. “As we developed our proof of concept, Nutanix provided the support we needed to help build our business case for the solution,” said Hung. “Nutanix assisted us with our deployment, and the team was very cooperative and responsive. The technology made it easy to work that way. Nutanix Prism provided a dynamic interface that delivered the visibility we needed to fine tune our configuration as we added workloads to the platform.”
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud enables Foresters to replace its legacy, expensive infrastructure elements, such as its SAN components and costly on-premises servers with a high-performance, hyperconverged infrastructure solution that also delivers better management insight. “The ease of support and maintenance of Nutanix allowed us to reduce overall support costs,” said Hung. “We have leveraged Prism and other tools to spot inefficiencies in hardware configurations, SQL profiles, and other areas, to get to the bottom of issues.”
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Nutanix has set the stage for dramatic improvements in performance and efficiency, for faster, more dependable operation. “Instead of separate tiers of infrastructure to manage and maintain, Nutanix provides everything in a single platform. It allows us to reduce the I/O latency that created significant bottlenecks for our operations. We haven’t heard any complaints about our financial services applications since the migration.”
To help safeguard critical financial data and meet compliance requirements, Foresters also utilizes Nutanix Data Protection and Disaster Recovery capabilities that are built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. “The ability to virtualize our workloads and move them into a Nutanix virtualized environment enhances our backup and recovery processes. It improves DR recovery time significantly for large file servers and large application servers, while minimizing restore failures.”
NEXT STEPS
Now that Foresters is hosting its core business applications on the Nutanix platform, Forester has gained a more scalable technology foundation that can accommodate the latest advances. The organization is already exploring migrating its applications to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor that is included at no extra charge. “Managing, maintaining, and upgrading the hypervisor was a major benefit,” said Hung. “Nutanix gives us the flexibility to gradually migrate our applications to AHV as needed.”
Foresters Financial and Foresters are trade names and trademarks of The Independent Order of Foresters (a fraternal benefit society, 789 Don Mills Road, Toronto, Canada M3C 1T9) and its subsidiaries.