Financial Services
One of the first management funds in China, Fullgoal Fund overcame the need for massive data storage and support for large numbers of virtualized servers with a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and enterprise cloud solution. By using Nutanix AHV virtualization software, Fullgoal Fund has reduced spend on virtualization software and with Nutanix Prism, the company has unified cluster management and maintenance. Plus, Nutanix Files has simplified operations around unstructured data storage and file sharing.
With Nutanix’s built-in protection, Fullgoal Fund ensures disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for applications and data. The company can also monitor DR plans and run one-click failover tests. Technical complexity is now in the past, and Fullgoal Fund has improved both the recovery time objective and recovery point objective.
Finally, Fullgoal Fund has consolidated its hardware by more than 60 percent, significantly reducing the number of physical servers and shared storage. In turn, it has cut rental and equipment maintenance costs and improved overall IT performance several times.
Nutanix’s ROI was higher than we expected. Based on the new infrastructure, Fullgoal Fund can drive business innovation, enabling us to keep pace with digital transformation in the financial services industry.
Launched in 1999, Fullgoal Fund Management Co., Ltd. (Fullgoal Fund) was one of the first 10 fund management companies approved in China by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. In 2003, the Bank of Montreal, one of Canada’s oldest banks, participated in Fullgoal Fund, and Fullgoal Fund became the first fund management company with a foreign shareholding. Fullgoal Fund has been rated as a Golden Bull Fund Management Company eight times, serving over 60 million customers, with a management scale of more than 600 billion yuan. Its star funds include Fullgoal Tianhui, Fullgoal Tianli and Fullgoal Tianrui.
Fullgoal Fund has created many firsts in the industry: the first stock fund, the first debt fund, the first currency fund. Twenty years ago, it began adopting a storage area network (SAN) architecture to operate alongside compute nodes, and by 2014, had begun a mobile data strategy, achieving good results. With the company’s rapid growth, however, the separation of storage and computing no longer met business requirements. There were four key issues:
Fullgoal Fund looked for an architecture to overcome these challenges. Like many financial services companies, it couldn’t fully embrace a public-cloud solution because of data protection requirements. Guaranteeing the security of data could be a big challenge based on current industry regulations. The company also needed a solution that could meet the business requirements and still be supported by its small IT team.
Based on this criteria, Fullgoal Fund decided on a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that aggregated computing, storage, and networking. An HCI would also protect data, offering snapshots, data deduplication and compression. Seamless horizontal expansion of a unified resource pool would also be possible. Combined, these advantages would increase availability, efficiency, IT flexibility, and data protection, while reducing cost.
When Fullgoal Fund went to market for an HCI, Nutanix stood out. This was thanks to its simple management, strong performance, stability and reliability, flexible expansion, and easy data protection.
Fullgoal Fund engaged Nutanix to deliver storage capacity, virtualization performance, disaster recovery protection, consolidation, and high return on investment. The solution included Nutanix-certified Inspur hardware coupled with Nutanix software. In total, Fullgoal Fund deployed 20 HCI nodes in the data center. By adopting the Nutanix AOS operating system and Nutanix Prism, the company was able to achieve unified management and operation of the system. Furthermore, using Nutanix Files, Fullgoal Fund overcame challenges around Windows file sharing performance and scalability. It could now use common internet file system and network file system storage protocols for updating file sharing and improving the efficiency of file storage and circulation.
Fullgoal Fund can meet the challenges of growing data storage and a large number of virtualized servers using Nutanix. A single platform unifies management of virtual machines, storage, database and files. And with Nutanix’s distributed storage architecture, Fullgoal Fund has enterprise-level reliability, seamless scalability, security, and high availability. It can also streamline data to make full use of its storage capacity, while making administration easier, reducing management overheads and storage occupancy.
Nutanix Files provides Fullgoal Fund with a simple, integrated management panel. Using the in-depth analysis intelligence of Nutanix Files, the company has solved the problem of file sharing. In addition, Nutanix Files also delivers high availability, support of large-scale expansion, statistical analysis and problem-detection functions. It can also be deployed on its own or as part of the Nutanix enterprise cloud solution.
With Nutanix, Fullgoal Fund has fixed the performance problems and bottlenecks of its legacy architecture. Using Nutanix AHV, Fullgoal Fund avoids the cost of virtualization software, while benefitting from the hypervisor’s excellent performance to meet the stringent requirements of the financial industry. The company also benefits from Nutanix AHV’s built-in high availability, online migration, switching, and dynamic resource allocation.
Fullgoal Fund also simplified application management, grouping virtual machines by teams and projects through Nutanix Prism. The resource usage of each team or project can be seen at a glance, using Nutanix Prism’s analysis capabilities, and resource allocation optimized. It has greatly simplified the daily operations of system administrators, who no longer have to manually complete complex virtualization and storage configuration tasks.
With Nutanix’s built-in protection, Fullgoal Fund achieves full DR for applications and data. Administrators can monitor DR plans and run one-click test failovers, while protecting applications with local and remote backups. It reduces the technical complexity of DR, and significantly improves the recovery time objective and recovery point objective.
As a result of the Nutanix HCI, Fullgoal Fund has significantly reduced the number of physical servers and shared storage in the data center—cutting the hardware footprint by more than 60 percent. This not only solves the problem of space shortages, but also saves room rental costs and equipment maintenance. What’s more, the overall performance of the company’s IT has improved several times.
Thanks to the excellent performance of Nutanix, Fullgoal Fund is preparing to migrate core production systems to the HCI. The company wants to make the leap from a traditional architecture to the HCI and upgrade the infrastructure.