BoCom, a well-established and the only integrated platform providing securities and related financial services in Hong Kong, uses hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution from Lenovo and Nutanix to gain greater scale, simplicity and savings
Overview
Bank of Communications (BoCom) International Trust specializes in trust and retirement management. Founded in Hong Kong in 1981, it is a fully owned subsidiary of the Bank of Communications, one of China’s oldest banks. The company offers a range of products and services aimed at meeting clients’ financial and retirement needs, with over HK$700 billion (US$89.2 billion) in assets under management. As a major investment and retirement manager, BoCom International Trust today has achieved better utilization of its resources, improved IT efficiency and more importantly gained agility to accommodate a growing business.
Key Results
| Reduced datacenter size | Improved OPEX | Achieved business agility |
|---|---|---|
| 50% smaller hardware footprint | 50% lower operation and maintenance cost | Seamless scalability supports efficient business growth |
An operating environment as diverse as ours asks a great deal of the underlying infrastructure. We need high-performing servers and storage, virtualization, high availability, and disaster recovery. Thanks to deeply integrated HCI-based solutions from Lenovo, Nutanix, and VMware, we can deliver on these demands more easily and efficiently.
Challenge
Previously, BoCom International Trust relied on a three-tier infrastructure to support their diverse system landscape. Managing this traditional infrastructure took a heavy toll on the company’s small IT team. To complicate matters, the hardware was hosted in a datacenter at BoCom headquarters, an hour’s drive from the trust’s own offices. Remote management was not possible, meaning that if issues or support tasks arose, a member of the IT team would have to make the journey out to the datacenter to resolve them in person.
With business growing steadily, BoCom International trust recognized that continuing its existing infrastructure was no longer a viable option. The company looked for a future-proof platform that could accommodate a greater volume and variety of workloads, and provide cost-effective disaster recovery, all without driving up operational complexity and costs.
“Because we are a small IT team, it was vital to find a new IT infrastructure that could scale efficiently, while reducing the total amount of time and resources required for day-to-day management and maintenance,” said Yao, senior manager of IT department at BoCom International Trust.
Solution
Working closely with Lenovo, BoCom International Trust built a new cloud-based datacenter. At the core is a six-node Lenovo ThinkAgile HX5520 cluster, which supports key production systems. This server layer is built on a VMWare vSphere-based hyperconverged infrastructure. Alongside it is a tightly integrated layer of distributed storage, featuring Nutanix AHV virtualization and Nutanix AOS Storage.
In addition, BoCom International Trust deployed a second cluster for testing, which is built on six Lenovo ThinkAgile HX1320 nodes virtualized with Nutanix AHV. The company is currently piloting a disaster recovery (DR) environment on this cluster. Once testing is complete, it will move ahead with establishing a dedicated DR environment, bringing a valuable boost to business continuity and resilience.
Customer Outcome
By moving to a Nutanix-Lenovo HCI platform, BoCom International Trust has reduced its datacenter footprint by 50% and cut overall operation and maintenance costs in half. The HCI enables better utilization of resources and easier scalability, paving the way for efficient growth.
In addition, the cloud-based datacenter has massively reduced daily workload for the IT team. Compute, storage, and network resources are now integrated in a single resource pool that can be managed, scheduled, and allocated in a uniform and flexible way. Even better, this can all be done remotely, without the need for staff to physically travel to the datacenter, increasing IT’s responsiveness to the needs of the business while driving down costs.
What’s more, as the Nutanix-Lenovo HCI platform avoids singe points of failure and increases service redundancy, BoCom International Trust has strengthened overall resilience while further reducing pressure on a lean IT team. “Lenovo and Nutanix’s HCI solution has delivered on all of our requirements, giving us much greater scalability, agility, and resilience, all at a greatly reduced effort and expense,” said Yao.
Partner
Lenovo is a Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, Lenovo is proud to be the world’s largest PC vendor. Lenovo’s portfolio now includes workstations, servers, storage solutions, IT management software, smart TVs, tablets, smartphones, and even apps.
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