INDUSTRY
Healthcare: Payer/Insurance
BENEFITS
- Always-on availability
- Increased security
- 50% cost savings on data recovery solutions
- Ease of scalability
- Excellent customer experience
- Time savings
- Business agility
- Fast, efficient customer support
SOLUTIONS
- Nutanix AHV
- Nutanix HCI Software (AOS)
- Nutanix Calm
- Nutanix Era
- Nutanix Files
- Nutanix Flow
- Nutanix Frame
- Nutanix Prism
- Nutanix Karbon
BUSINESS BENEFITS
With Nutanix solutions, SulAmérica is providing an excellent, modernized customer experience with always-on availability, increased security and business agility. Providing technology forward and increasingly attractive products is a central part of the insurance company’s strategy for surviving and thriving in this new, highly-digital world. The infrastructure modernization by the Brazilian national insurance leader using Nutanix's hyperconverged solution has helped the company save time, increase business agility and save 50% on the cost of data recovery solutions.
CHALLENGE
For over 125 years, SulAmérica, the largest independent insurer in Brazil, has been dedicated to protecting their customers to improve their quality of life by caring for their physical, mental and financial health through health, dental, life, pension and investment products and services.
With 4,000 employees serving more than 7 million customers across Brazil, the company is focused on taking care of their customers by offering various services based on supporting their physical, emotional and financial health decisions.
Marcelo Rodrigues Fonseca, Superintendent of IT Infrastructure at SulAmérica, manages an IT team composed of nearly 90 employees divided between the areas of cloud, SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), telecom, database, production and operations that are all focused on operating within a well-defined multi-cloud strategy and using hyperconvergence as the basis for managing this infrastructure. “SulAmérica is a company with a very innovative spirit,” shares Fonseca. “Despite being 125 years old, every year we end up looking at the innovation aspect, studying a lot and partnering with Gartner for research and advice to support all the decisions we make inside the company.”
Before Nutanix, SulAmérica faced challenges that often arise from the very complex structure of a mature company. The company had an environment filled with several storage units and several servers that required annual updates and replacements to extremely expensive pieces of equipment. “It was complicated for us. Imagine this: I used to buy new storage here for my production environment and I had to be concerned about whether the storage would be compatible with our replication to the DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) world,” Fonseca explains.
As a well consolidated company serving the entirety of Brazil, Fonseca and his team knew that they needed to find a simpler, more agile, highly available and resilient technological environment to support the continued success of SulAmérica.
SOLUTION
Fonseca and his team began their quest for a better technological environment with research that looked at the issue of hyperconvergence, an idea guided by their existing hybrid cloud strategy.
“We were looking for something that would allow us to have a leaner environment, but also a hypervisor while getting away from the traditional hypervisor that we were using at the time. We were looking for something that was cheaper in terms of budget and robust enough for us to continue to maintain our availability,” shares Fonseca. “My main goal was to look at the cost and add more technology, so that we could continue to attack our very high availability metrics and make an even greater technological contribution.”
Marcelo and his team started a research to migrate one of their legacy environments to a leaner environment, in which the complexity of managing this infrastructure was close to zero. As opposed to acquiring the traditional 3-tier environment: storage , server and network switches separately, they migrated the entire legacy to a hyperconverged framework.
They had a virtualizer that they wanted to change due to budgeting issues and that’s when they came across Nutanix AHV, which was already an integral part of the solution. Fonseca and his team ended up conducting some tests with Nutanix AHV and quickly saw the vast possibilities that Nutanix solutions could offer SulAmérica.
Fonseca found that Nutanix was able to offer the cost-effective, highly available, complete solution that SulAmérica was looking for. They then decided to migrate their entire traditional virtualization solution to Nutanix AHV. They also added other technologies and concepts and paradigm shifts, all without asking SulAmérica executives for a single extra penny in the budget, on the contrary, delivering a few millions back to the coffers in a 3-year ROI.
“I know that today Nutanix has many clients in Brazil running Nutanix AHV, but I was one of the first to take the decision to acquire the solution and put Nutanix's hypervisor to operate in production,” says Fonseca. “Many companies today have begun to see that Nutanix AHV really is a robust product that leaves nothing to be desired.”
Since becoming a client in late 2019, SulAmérica has adopted many other Nutanix products including Prism, Flow, Calm, Era and Karbon whose use grows month after month to provide solutions for private cloud, database, business continuity and disaster recovery, and automation and operations.
SulAmérica also has an Oracle SQL database, HR OpenShift, SAS and others running inside the Nutanix environment in addition to the entire portfolio that Nutanix offers.
CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
Always-on availability
One of the benefits Fonseca and his team most enjoy about working with Nutanix is the always-on availability of the hyperconverged infrastructure.
SulAmérica highly values increasing the availability of their products for their customers. They were able to achieve this with the Nutanix hyperconverged capabilities that connect to their multi-cloud environment.
“When you have very decentralized solutions—storage from one brand, processing from another—the end of life of that equipment is different. These issues brought about complex management problems and incidents from the heterogeneous infrastructure that were acting as roadblocks to our availability,” Fonseca says.
With the support of Nutanix products, Fonseca reports that over the last few years SulAmérica’s availability has risen to border on 99.9999%. “I think the market asks for more and more availability close to or even at 100%. Today, the client is used to high-tech solutions and reliable customer service. They don't want to go visit their doctor and not be able to access our company to authorize the service, so SulAmérica values this matter of high availability,” explains Fonseca.
Increased security
Amid a world with many high-profile cyber attacks, SulAmérica is grateful to benefit from increased security through network micro segmentation with their use of Nutanix Flow.
"Security is increased by creating virtual network segments within the virtual network layer. With this, we are able to isolate the environment. For example, the development environment does not talk to the validation environment which does not talk to the production environment. These become distinct networks,” explains Fonseca.
50% cost savings on data recovery solutions
By partnering with Nutanix to utilize their solutions, SulAmérica experienced a 50% cost savings on data recovery solutions, a figure that Fonseca says many people find extremely impressive who learn of his success with Nutanix.
SulAmérica's previous data recovery solution was not only difficult to manage, but it was also extremely costly. Individual pieces of equipment for the solution would need to be replaced, but would not be compatible with the other elements, causing Fonseca to have to replace many pieces of extremely expensive equipment that were functioning fine on their own.
“With Nutanix, we were able to utilize a much more robust data recovery solution with much more advanced technology and a much smaller budget than I had been using in previous years, all while maintaining a very heterogeneous environment with a lot of equipment that I only needed to change every so often,” shares Fonseca.
“Buying enterprise storage solutions has never been cheap. When I considered changing the storage a few years ago because of obsolescence and compromised scalability, I started comparing quotes from other companies and at the cost of just one of them, we replaced my entire production environment for Nutanix."
Ease of scalability
Fonseca also appreciates that Nutanix provides a more cohesive, easily scalable solution that’s directly aligned with SulAmérica's business strategy.
“I have an ongoing initiative with Amazon Web Service (AWS) which is another partner of ours for this hyperconverged world. I started to do some tests to transfer from the Nutanix world to the AWS cloud, and found that the elasticity of my environment expands with Nutanix's scalability extremely quickly. For example, if in my legacy environment, I start having a lack of resources in the Nutanix environment, I can overflow this environment using an AWS cloud,” says Fonseca.
Excellent customer experience
Before the pandemic, Brazil faced a transportation issue with a national truck driver strike across the country, which prompted SulAmérica to offer their employees the option to work remotely to avoid getting stuck at roadblocks and traffic jams. The transition required the company to examine aspects of their technology solutions they would need to improve in terms of resilience and robustness of the environment to succeed with remote teams long-term.
It turned out that the COVID-19 pandemic began just as Fonseca and his team had been expanding their work from home options, offering more virtual products to customers, and starting to acquire the first Nutanix nodes. “SulAmérica took some actions a few years ago in offering telehealth and telecounseling that nearly anticipated this pandemic problem. In addition, the issue of being able to quickly get our employees home from our previous remote work experience, brought our customers a level of service that many companies could not achieve so quickly,” explains Fonseca.
SulAmérica also believes that customers today are looking for businesses that are simple, easy to use, highly available and fair-priced. “As a company with a segment of our business in healthcare, our customers are using SulAmérica services because they really need it. As their suppliers, we need to provide more agility and availability, and Nutanix helped us with this. We believe that we can truly better serve our customers as a hybrid cloud company with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure,” explains Fonseca.
Time savings
With Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, SulAmérica has benefitted from time savings for their team.
“Before Nutanix, if I had a crisis that needed to be solved, I would have to gather several people in a room—a storage expert, network expert, cloud expert, operating system expert, web expert—so that I could understand what was happening,” says Fonseca. “With Nutanix hyperconvergence, I have a single console that does all the management and with an integrated and informed team, I can understand more quickly what is happening."
With the simplicity offered by the Nutanix environment, SulAmérica was able to set up their site reliability engineering (SRE) team, which provides all the support to their development team. Today, the SRE team is no longer a traditional infrastructure model, but a team of people with multidisciplinary skills to serve the entire company, saving time and resources. “SulAmérica values its employees. The team that manages the entire SulAmérica environment is not an outsourced team, it is a team of our employees. For the SRE team, we selected people who performed different services for this new concept that we believed in and we believe that this model is the key to success for the high availability we offer our customers,” shares Fonseca.
Business agility
SulAmérica’s business agility has improved, thanks to their partnership with Nutanix.
Today, the company is able to set up environments much faster. “If remote development takes place in a single environment, and the development environment needs to perform a test to see if there is a security hole or performance issue, the developer himself can then automatically and quickly publish the application in question to the Nutanix environment and from there start to carry out its test chain based on all the security we have before publishing something in production,” details Fonseca.
Additionally, SulAmérica is always in the market looking for new companies to invest in. When making acquisitions, the agility of the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure makes it easier for SulAmérica to approach mergers, thanks to the ability to quickly integrate the companies into the SulAmérica environment.
Fast, efficient customer support
Fonseca and his team also appreciate the fast and efficient customer support available to SulAmérica from Nutanix.
“The customer support from Nutanix is exceptional. My technical team can quickly connect through a virtual room with Nutanix engineers to identify a problem together and quickly solve it. They provide the agility that we need by quickly identifying the problem and bringing the solution,” says Fonseca.
NEXT STEPS
According to Fonseca, all of SulAmérica’s legacy production environment—dental department, health department, web databases, Kubernetes, everything—has been migrated or will be migrated to the Nutanix environment by the end of 2021. SulAmérica will have nothing except Nutanix running in their data center, effectively furthering the robust adoption of Nutanix solutions for the Brazilian insurance conglomerate.
SulAmérica also plans to grow their use of Nutanix hypervisor (AHV) to 100% within the company next year since it has proven to be such a strong hypervisor. Additionally, in the next year, as part of its data recovery strategy, SulAmérica plans to operationalize 100% of its environment using the Nutanix concept in two different sites.
Security is another opportunity for the further adoption of Nutanix solutions that SulAmérica plans to continue exploring in the coming years. SulAmérica currently utilizes Nutanix Flow for security aspects, but there are other Nutanix elements that can be used to protect their environment. “I think that today the whole technology sector is very concerned with the issue of security. SulAmérica is increasingly studying the tools, platforms and monitoring that can be used to solve the issue of security in the technology sector. We currently hold a strong belief in the concepts of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and observability for the coming years,” shares Fonseca.
Nutanix is proud to provide SulAmérica with the hyperconverged infrastructure and solutions they need to provide the best support to their valued customers while technologically advancing their operations and saving both time and money for their business.