Driven by fintech in financial services, Minmetals Securities creates a hybrid cloud using Nutanix that empowers the business to increase development
Financial Services
To speed up business transformation, Minmetals Securities actively promotes a hybrid cloud and has found that Nutanix meets our requirements. In the future, with the development of a hybrid financial cloud 2.0, Nutanix solutions will become more important.
Minmetals Securities, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, is affiliated with state-owned China Minmetals Corporation. With the development of fintech and digitization across the financial services industry, Minmetals Securities looked to transform its operations and empower the business to innovate.
As part of this journey, Minmetals Securities began working with Nutanix in 2015, moving from a legacy infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), integrated with a public cloud. Xu Jin, chief information officer at Minmetals Securities says the cooperation between Minmetals Securities and Nutanix will help the company move to a hybrid financial cloud 2.0 infrastructure. The expanded Nutanix platform will enable Minmetals Securities to increase platform and application capacity for rapid business development.
Fintech is booming, accelerating the adoption of big data, cloud, blockchain, and artificial intelligence in financial services. The securities industry is at the forefront of the digital transformation process, developing innovative business models through the deep integration of technology and finance to improve the customer experience.
Minmetals Securities has developed quickly in this changing marketplace. It has more than 50 branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other parts of China; and operates two wholly-owned subsidiaries. Its business covers securities brokerage, investment banks, asset management, credit, securities investment, and transactions. The company has constantly evolved and become expert in financial services and wealth management, providing customers with a full range of high-quality products.
Rapid development challenged the existing IT infrastructure, and Minmetals Securities managers saw how growth put pressure on capacity and performance. More IT speed was needed to support new business opportunities. The legacy infrastructure couldn’t deliver the scalability, agility, and continuous service improvements the company required. Space and power at the dual data centers became issues and IT personnel couldn’t continue working under the increasingly heavy management loads.
Minmetals Securities saw that IT was at the core of the company’s competitiveness and vital to its future. Coordinated development and innovation were both required, and the company’s IT had to enable business growth. Xu Jin, chief information officer at Minmetals Securities, says, “After we first came into contact with hyperconvergence, we thought it represented the future direction of Minmetals Securities, meeting our needs for rapid IT transformation.”
After a six-month analysis in 2015, which included proof of concepts (POC), Minmetals Securities chose a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from Nutanix. The company upgraded its IT to an HCI to support its growing business application needs. The responsiveness of the IT team improved greatly. Hardware procurement and deployment had been a long process with the legacy infrastructure. But after the migration to a HCI, development, testing, and production performance were much improved.
With Nutanix, Minmetals Securities built an enterprise cloud virtualization platform, which it integrated with a public cloud in 2018 to create a hybrid cloud. In 2020, following the expansion of the company’s research and development (R&D) team, Minmetals Securities added Nutanix products and expanded capacity for cloud development and cloud desktop clusters. Today, Minmetals Securities is planning five cloud environments for production, management, R&D, testing, and disaster recovery as part of its infrastructure transformation.
Xu Jin says Minmetals has enabled private and public cloud integrations thanks to Nutanix’s cloud management platform. The advantages of a Nutanix HCI, such as space and energy savings, expandability as well as rapid deployment have helped Minmetals Securities create a stable, high availability, and high performance platform that is easy to maintain.
Upgrades the IT infrastructure with HCI
Minmetals Securities has now solved many problems of its infrastructure challenges with Nutanix. After that, Minmetals Securities built an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform based on Nutanix and renovated its IT, including operations and maintenance capabilities.
Virtualization and cloud computing have saved data center space, reduced energy consumption, improved operational efficiency, and enabled easier expansion. Minmetals Securities has automated deployment and the delivery of resources, reducing server deployment time from 12 hours-plus to less than 10 minutes.
The company runs thousands of servers on Nutanix but needs less than one full-time member of staff for management. Expansion of private cloud resources can be completed in a few hours, using Nutanix Prism. Many of the processes for resource allocation, including financial accounting and resource integration, are now automated.
Hardware costs are just 35 percent of what they used to be in the past. Plus, the company has consolidated rack space by more than 90 percent in the dual data centers. Of the company’s IT, 81 percent is virtualized with the average virtualization ratio on a single computing node being 1:30—lowering the need for servers, network equipment, and power and cooling.
Creates hybrid cloud to support rapid business development
Xu Jin says that Minmetals Securities has met its need to transform to a hybrid-cloud infrastructure. Nutanix products are constantly improving and Minmetals Securities is using Nutanix AHV for virtualization and Nutanix Prism for cluster management. “In the future of our hybrid cloud evolution, Nutanix will have a bigger role to play,” Xu Jin says.
Efficient local services guarantee high performance
Minmetals Securities had developed its remote-working capabilities before the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the scalability and stable performance of its Nutanix solution, Minmetals Securities R&D personnel were able to support a remote-office model for employees. Xu Jin says the company has newly added 13 DX-190R nodes to the original NX-8035 nodes purchased. At present, the company has 56 nodes, supporting over 80 business systems.
Xu Jin is highly satisfied with Nutanix local services, which responded quickly when there was an issue with a cluster node last year. Nutanix mobilized the global technical support center and local field engineers solved the problem together, ensuring platform stability and security.
At present, Minmetals Securities is constructing three distributed cloud-computing data centers in two locations, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Xu Jin says the three data centers will help Minmetals Securities evolve from a hybrid financial cloud 1.0 to a platform as a service (PaaS) hybrid financial cloud 2.0 platform. Nutanix will play a vital role in the process, both in the management of the underlying hyperconverged virtualized cluster and the PaaS platform.
Comments Xu Jin, “Nutanix helps Minmetals Securities build solid IT infrastructures to support rapid business development. Nutanix has leading technologies while Minmetals Securities has a grand development vision. Therefore, we are sure to choose a professional service provider in terms of technical solutions. The positioning of the two companies means that we become partners.”
He continues, “While Minmetals Securities is transformation and constantly upgrading and evolving, Nutanix is upgrading its own products. The characteristics of the two companies are compatible, which supports future cooperation."