As a subsidiary of one of the largest banks in the world, ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) has a presence in 18 of the 23 provinces in the country and employs over 4,000 people. Within the digital transformation process, the ICBC Argentina team set out to modernize their technological infrastructure to optimize it for the cloud, increase its agility, and decrease its induction and maintenance time. After an internal evaluation process, the team decided to partner with Nutanix to implement their hyperconverged infrastructure solution (HCI). Since the partnership began, ICBC has benefitted from ease of implementation, simplicity of the operation, and reduction of planned downtime.
| Ease of implementation | Simplicity of the operation | Reduction of planned downtime |
|---|---|---|
| Correct implementation of the solution despite restrictions imposed by the pandemic. | Improved operational efficiency with less learning and maintenance time. | Decreased planned downtime for applying patches to the infrastructure and regularly scheduled maintenance, which also improves the availability of services for end customers. |
The biggest impact that the Nutanix solution had at first was in the availability of the infrastructure at the time of implementation. A standard solution with restrictions on circulation, number of components, and human interaction would have been much more complex or almost impossible to advance quickly.
As a universal bank, ICBC is a subsidiary of ICBC China, the largest bank in the world in terms of market capitalization, deposits, and profitability with a presence in 42 countries and regions.
ICBC has 120 branches, 25 minibanks, two data centers, that supportall the digital channels, call centers, and applications required by the different business verticals.
Edgardo Serra, Head of Infrastructure & IT Operations at ICBC, is responsible for Platform Engineering within the team. The team conducts engineering, analysis, and evaluation of technologies and their use in the market to make recommendations on all platforms that support the business.
“The Platform Engineering team has 25 collaborators, and we also work with other technology companies that provide support in different verticals of the platforms we support, especially Kyndryl, where we outsourced the two data center operations and what it entails in the different platforms,” shares Edgardo.
Within their digital foundation program and as part of the company’s digital transformation journey, ICBC is committed to adopting new technologies and platforms that allow the bank to implement a private cloud and modernize its stack of applications, starting with the hardware, base software, and network components, with the objective of being a more agile bank, improving time to market and maintaining very good levels of availability, security and robustness.
As part of this macro initiative, they are in the process of migrating the company to a modernized “cloud native” infrastructure, simpler technology with less induction and maintenance time compared to their traditional three-layer solution that was becoming increasingly complex to keep up to date.
Additionally, they found themselves specifically struggling with problems related to SAN maintenance, cabling, fabrics, storage, GBICs, and SFP as well as excessive lag time to get a solution up and running with many critical external components.
“The issues we were facing were only exacerbated in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the strict quarantine implemented in Argentina,” details Edgardo. “At that point, our team knew that we needed to simplify the deployment of our IT solutions and make them available more quickly by partnering with a company that could provide us with those resources.”
Amid the challenge to modernize the company’s IT infrastructure, ICBC began analyzing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions on the market as early as 2018.
When the opportunity to make the technological change presented itself in 2019, they began searching for a technology partner that would allow them to measure and estimate the savings in platform deployment time and the ease of operation, while taking into account the learning curve of operating the solution. Finding the right partner was extremely vital considering any failure or service interruption negatively impacts ICBC’s availability and reputation among customers.
The team decided upon Nutanix after an internal evaluation process on different technology providers of HCI solutions with the consulting support of Gartner and ICBC Casa Matriz in China.
“Nutanix was the most innovative solution,” explains Edgardo. “They are a pioneer in hyperconvergence, and we saw that other banks were already starting to use Nutanix both throughout Argentina and in our region.”
Currently, ICBC has eight (8) clusters for different solutions managed by the Nutanix Prism tool to give the organization a centralized view of infrastructure status. They are also conducting proof of concept with Nutanix Files and Objects as a storage solution for different needs with very promising results.
“Within the Nutanix clusters, we run all kinds of applications based on Windows and Linux, standard and powered virtual servers, and desktops for specific cases, such as DevOps developers or trading/dealing desk users. We use VMware hypervisor and Lenovo ThinkAgile HX5521 and HX3321 as our server platforms,” shares Edgardo.
As the first case of adoption of Nutanix HCI technology for ICBC as a whole, the successful implementation of the solution was a major milestone for ICBC.
Once the Nutanix solution was implemented and stable, ICBC started using the tool LCM (Life Cycle Management) to automate the process of applying patches and updates to the solution for both Nutanix and VMware components. They also added Nutanix to the automation plan they had been promoting from IT on all platforms.
“The biggest impact that the Nutanix solution had at first was in the availability of the infrastructure at the time of implementation,” says Edgardo. “In our case, we had to manage the installation and implementation of the Nutanix solution in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. A standard solution with restrictions on circulation, number of components, and human interaction would have been much more complex or almost impossible to advance quickly.”
Despite restrictions posed by the pandemic, the Nutanix Resident Service team helped assess, prioritize, and establish a plan for remediating all the issues found in the Nutanix environment for ICBC. By working together, Nutanix and ICBC overcame any issues which helped the IT team gain confidence in Nutanix becoming an extended member of their team.
The ICBC team also had a positive experience with Nutanix customer support with response times proportional to the reported problem and active involvement from the platform team in the support process.
Over time, Edgardo and his team also found that the Nutanix solutions improved start-up times and reduced planned downtime of service for applying patches to infrastructure and regularly scheduled maintenance. ICBC’s end customers have benefitted from improved time to market and availability of services since Nutanix implementation.
One of the biggest challenges was the virtualization of the money desk, which needed to provide faster implementation times and improved performance and availability of the desktops, so that users could work with the same machine both at the office and from home. This project was successfully implemented in 2021 and achieved an excellent result for the end user.
Additionally, Edgardo and his team began testing with Nutanix Files for critical processes, and were pleasantly surprised to achieve reduction deployment time and improvements in file processing and transmission times. It provides the possibility of reducing storage use and taking advantage of free space in Nutanix clusters moving forward.
ICBC plans to expand their use of Nutanix in the future as they grow their on-premises infrastructure and expand resources for clusters. They are also evaluating hybrid cloud solutions such as NC2 formerly known as Nutanix Clusters.
“During 2023, we will be adding 37 nodes for growth of various platforms, including DMZ, dedicated clusters for Linux servers, and Openshift nodes. We also plan to start testing with the Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) to take advantage of Nutanix alliances with solutions such as Citrix and Openshift, which form a fundamental part of our infrastructure.”
“As part of this growth, we are planning for our docker and container platform—mainly RedHat OpenShift, which supports all of the bank's DevOps developments—to be supported by the Nutanix HCI solution, in all its environments, from laboratory and development to QA and Production,” concludes Edgardo.