Hallmark Cards’ B2B arm replaces three-tier datacenter infrastructure with Nutanix to reduce development build times by 72 Percent
San Jose, California – August 19, 2015 – Nutanix, the next-generation enterprise computing company, today announced that Hallmark Business Connections has selected Nutanix as the infrastructure platform of choice for its next generation datacenter. The company is already realizing the benefits of Nutanix’s invisible infrastructure solution and has seen substantial performance and productivity returns. To date, Hallmark Business Connections has implemented a datacenter migration program which will allow it to slash its operational costs by as much as 55 percent.
As the business-to-business arm of Hallmark Cards, Hallmark Business Connections focuses on the delivery of reward and incentive programs for employees and customers of Fortune 500 companies located across the US. The company first evaluated hyperconverged offerings as a scalable, yet affordable, solution that would not compromise its existing three-tier compute, storage and virtualization infrastructure for a planned business analytics project. Following impressive proof of concept trials and the subsequent successful implementation of the data analytics project, Hallmark quickly expanded the project’s scope and budget, and now plans to migrate all of its datacenters to Nutanix.
“We rely heavily on in-house applications to support our business and take a DevOps approach favoring continuous integration builds. With a traditional architecture, developing and deploying new production builds took 1-2 hours,” said Bob Dussault, Director of Infrastructure and Information Security Officer at Hallmark Business Connections. “Moving that workload to the Nutanix cluster allowed us to decrease development time considerably, by up to 72 percent, enabling us to easily meet our target of delivering new system builds up to 12 times a day.”
Now in the second year of a three-year roadmap, Hallmark Business Connections is on track to complete its next generation datacenter by the end of 2016. The company expects to move all customer-facing workloads to the Nutanix platform within the next few months, and an offsite disaster recovery cluster, based in a separate facility in Chicago, will be up and running later this year.
Currently, Hallmark’s development and production infrastructure operates across 11 datacenter racks. After completing the migration to Nutanix, this footprint will be reduced to just five racks, equating to a 55 percent reduction in operational costs.
“Nearly two years ago, Hallmark Business Connections bet on Nutanix, buying in to the promise of our flexibility, scalability and performance,” said Sudheesh Nair, SVP of Worldwide Sales & BD at Nutanix. “As they realize dramatic productivity gains and estimated operating cost savings, and begin implementing Nutanix across their entire datacenter environment, we’re humbled by that bet and proud to work with such a strong partner.”
Other key factors in Hallmark’s migration to Nutanix include the ease of integration with the company’s existing infrastructure, the hypervisor agnostic nature of the Nutanix approach and the potential productivity gains of eliminating the need for separate storage management. Migrating to Nutanix is expected to reduce engineer workloads from an estimated 20 hours a week to just two or 90 percent time savings.
For more information about how Hallmark Business Connections is using Nutanix to power its critical infrastructure, visit: https://www.nutanix.com/customers/
About Hallmark Business Connections
Hallmark Business Connections is the business-relationships unit of the iconic Hallmark Cards brand. We leverage more than 100 years of Hallmark heritage, creativity and innovation to help businesses build and strengthen the relationships that make them thrive. Turning customers into advocates, employees into champions, and companies into healthier environments, Hallmark Business Connections crafts innovative solutions that boost employee engagement and business growth. Hallmark Business Connections is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn., with locations in Kansas City, Mo. and Duluth, Minn. For more information, visit http://www.HallmarkBusinessConnections.com. Follow on Twitter @HallmarkBiz.
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.
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