NKGSB in India accelerates next-gen banking with Nutanix

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

Benefits

• Increases performance by 10x for growing workloads
• Completes upgrades in 2-3 hours instead of more than a working week
• Provisions new workloads in 10-15 minutes rather than 2-3 days
• Cuts IT administration costs by 45-50%
• Lowers time for proof of compliance by 50%
• Reduces hardware footprint by 80% & thereby datacenter cost
• Lowers costs of co-location as well as power and cooling
• Simplifies recovery with native snapshots

SOLUTIONS

Nutanix Cloud Platform

• Nutanix AOS
• AHV hypervisor
• Prism Pro management software
• Flow network segmentation
• Files scale-out storage
• Calm application lifecycle management

Applications

Core banking

• Infosys Finacle
• Oracle databases

Non-core banking

• Mobile Banking DB
• FRM
• AML
• ADF
• Aadhar Data Vault

BUSINESS BENEFIT

NKGSB Bank is one of the premier cooperative banks in India, delivering a range of financial services. The bank is expanding with growth driven by technology and the development of digital financial services. Yet it needed to move away from a three-tier IT infrastructure to continue its services transformation. It started migrating non-core and core banking applications to the Nutanix Cloud Platform, giving IT the power once more to drive development. Now the bank is accelerating change with Nutanix, completing upgrades in hours and provisioning IT in minutes. Not only has workload performance jumped 10x, but administration costs have been cut by 45 to 50 percent.

CHALLENGES

NKGSB Bank is one of the premier cooperative banks in India, delivering financial services including savings accounts, loans and ATMs across multiple states including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.  Like financial service providers worldwide, NKGSB Bank is driving growth through digitization; however, it needed to overhaul its IT to enable continued growth.

The existing three-tier infrastructure was aging and there was no guarantee of 24/7 availability. Plus, the IT team was unable to scale performance in line with increasing workloads. Team members had to manage multiple vendor relationships, making support complex. They were also forced to administer the infrastructure using multiple consoles, adding complexity to upgrades.

SOLUTION

By migrating workloads to the Nutanix Cloud Platform, NKGSB Bank has given IT back its power to drive business growth. Amit Jaokar, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at NKGSB Bank says, “Upgrading the infrastructure wouldn’t have addressed the underlying issues. It was imperative to totally rethink our solution and build a scalable, robust and easy-to-manage infrastructure.”

The bank deployed Nutanix nodes across its data center and disaster recovery site. It migrated non-core banking applications to the platform, including applications for Mobile Banking services, AML, FRM, ADF, HRMS and Multiple instances of Microsoft SQL Server databases. Recently, the bank deployed 12 more nodes and began moving its core banking systems to Nutanix, including an upgraded Infosys Finacle and Oracle database.

As part of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, NKGSB Bank is running the AHV hypervisor along with Nutanix Flow for network segmentation, Nutanix Files for scale-out storage, Nutanix Calm for application lifecycle management and Nutanix Prism Pro for single pane of glass administration.

OUTCOME

Upgrades in hours instead of days and new workloads provisioned in minutes

As a result of the migration to Nutanix, NKGSB Bank has transformed its IT capabilities, moving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. “It gives us the freedom of choice and flexibility to move workloads to the clouds we deem best suited for our workloads,” comments Mr Jaokar.

Nowadays, IT can act much faster, giving the organization the agility to respond quickly to new opportunities. For instance, through simplified management, IT can complete upgrades in 2-3 hours instead of more than a working week. Additionally, the team can provision new workloads in 10-15 minutes rather than 2-3 days.

Mr Jaokar says, “One of the great things [with Nutanix] is the ability to gain greater visibility combined with advanced analytics to give us actionable intelligence to proactively manage service levels, optimize resource usage and help ensure configuration compliance across physical, virtual and cloud environments.”

Improved performance by 10x with increasing workloads

The IT infrastructure is now 100 percent virtualized, using the Nutanix Cloud Platform and supports over Two hundred virtual machines. The infrastructure is much easier to scale as demand grows, and the bank has seen a 40 percent enhancement across application workloads.

Mr Jaokar comments, “We have been impressed with the improvements achieved, which are nothing less than phenomenal. Moreover, these performance gains have been sustained against a background of on-going workload growth from a still expanding client base and without the need for additional expenditure.”

Hardware footprint cut by 80% reducing power and cooling costs

As well as improving performance, the bank has significantly reduced the size of its infrastructure. The footprint has gone from array of racks to merely half a rack. This in turn is reducing costs at the data center co-location site, both in terms of rental charges and power and cooling.

Administration expenditure down by up to 50% and proof of compliance 50% faster

With zero downtime, the bank has greater confidence in the running of its IT. The simplicity of the Nutanix platform has also helped the bank cut IT administration costs by 45 to 50 percent. Noticeably, the simplified management has lowered the risk of security incidents because it’s easier to manage data access and implement access and identity governance. As a result, it takes the bank half the time it once did to produce proof of compliance to regulators.

Simplified recovery with native snapshots as well as DR solution

The bank ensures business continuity thanks to the data protection built into the Nutanix Cloud Platform. “This solution encapsulates a lot of industry intelligence that effectively does away with a multitude of mundane and routine tasks which were earlier performed manually,” says Mr Jaokar.

NEXT STEPS

Once the bank has completed the migration of its core banking systems to Nutanix, NKGSB plans to consider Nutanix Era for a database refresh. With Nutanix Era, the bank can automate and simplify database operation management, bringing one-click simplicity to provisioning and lifecycle management.