Financial Services
Minsheng Trust is a leading trust and investment management company, with total assets over CN¥4.710 billion. Like other financial services firms, Minsheng is facing new market challenges, driven by national financial reform and stringent regulatory supervision. Realizing that its existing infrastructure needed to deliver better flexibility, performance, and manageability, Minsheng deployed the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. The solution’s batch cloning features enable Minsheng to accelerate the launch of new services and capabilities when conditions change. When expanding or modifying the solution, IT can maintain continuity and stability, exceeding the expectations of business stakeholders. After nearly a year of stable data center operation, Nutanix has consistently delivered quality performance, dynamic expansion on-demand, efficient and streamlined one-click management, as well as data protection features in disaster recovery.
After testing multiple solutions, we deployed a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. Just one year after implementation, its efficiency, usability, performance, flexibility, and ease of use have greatly strengthened our confidence in digital transformation.
Facing multiple challenges from society as well as market and technology development, the trust sector has entered a period of deep transition. The business structure of the sector has been moving towards professionalization, distinguishing characteristics, investment-banking and profitability. To support this dynamic new market environment, Minsheng Trust realized it needed a major enterprise strategic initiative to transform its business operations. The organization has expanded to cover five major areas, including Wealth Management, Investment, Investment Banking, Asset Management, and Financing. This transition has positioned Minsheng Trust to dramatically improve its profitability and maintain its industry leadership.
To support its operational transformation, Minsheng Trust also urgently needed to update its IT infrastructure. Its original data centers were not able to meet its demand for large-scale data storage and dense computing. Its traditional IT infrastructure was also limited in its ability to support business process upgrades and transformation, especially for diverse finance service use cases, seriously restricting the development of new businesses. Minsheng Trust needed a more flexible, scalable, high-performance infrastructure to meet its strategic transformation goals.
“The trust industry is fundamentally evolving and moving into a transitional period. As industry institutional dividends have vanished and a new period of development opportunities has emerged, traditional legacy IT infrastructures can no longer keep pace with rapid changes,” said Meng Kaixiang, General Manager of Information Department at China Minsheng Trust Co., Ltd. “To gain business agility, we chose to move beyond our existing infrastructure and upgrade and replace our technology to develop IT-driven online financial services.”
After rigorously testing several solutions, Minsheng Trust began migrating its traditional legacy infrastructure to a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The first step focused on transferring its key business systems to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
“After testing multiple solutions, we deployed a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution,” said Meng. “Just one year after implementation, its efficiency, usability, performance, flexibility, and ease of use have greatly strengthened our confidence in digital transformation.”
To meet the latest industry requirements for disaster recovery and backup, Minsheng Trust also deployed Nutanix at its data center in Shanghai. The solution supports disaster recovery across hybrid virtual systems between the firm’s primary data centers in Beijing and Shanghai. The deployment allows its IT team to monitor the operations of multiple data centers from one screen, while protecting data security.
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has dramatically improved Minsheng Trust’s business agility. The solution has accelerated the firm’s data center transformation and upgrade processes, including hardware installation, HCI environment debugging, and application launch to only two days. Batch cloning enables Minsheng Trust to create 70 virtual hosts in just a few minutes. In production environments, Nutanix delivers flexible scalability and outstanding performance, enabling IT to add new nodes to an existing cluster within a few hours, with no impact on stability and normal business processes. The extraordinary performance and availability of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud in Minsheng Trust’s high-frequency transaction system has also surpassed IT expectations, enabling the team to expand resources easily, without impacting its operations.
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud enables Minsheng Trust to seamlessly add new infrastructure resources on-demand, reducing the costs associated with one-off purchases, and minimizing redundant investments driven by unclear performance evaluation. The firm also realized storage savings, applying data compression to achieve a ratio of 1.84:1 without affecting the business response time. The solution has saved nearly 10TB of storage space and its associated costs. The HCI architecture consumes just 4U rack space, compared to 16 2U-space servers under a traditional architecture.
IT operation management is more efficient, thanks to the solution’s distributed and multi-copy architecture modes that support dynamic resource allocation, while providing a foundation for future automation. One-click management provided by Nutanix Prism helps IT save time and work more productively, as well as free up resources to focus on research and development of its own business systems. Nutanix’s disaster recovery and backup has also delivered strong benefits, helping Minsheng Trust maintain and assure its financial data security.
Minsheng Trust continues to build on the capabilities provided by Nutanix. In the future, the firm plans to gradually increase its software applications, creating a next-generation data center with automated deployment, supervision, and daily operations. Nutanix provides safe and secure enterprise-level cloud solutions with high usability and outstanding performance. Minsheng Trust is looking forward to continuing to build on its strong foundation for IT-driven business transformation, while planning its corporate strategy for a new era of consumer finance.