Nutanix helps Valmark Financial Group reduce datacenter footprint and improve recovery times with Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service
Overview
Valmark Financial Group is an independent broker-dealer and life insurance and financial services company. For nearly sixty years, the company has offered innovative and collaborative solutions to meet its clients’ needs.
Valmark depends on its network infrastructure to support back office functions such as trading and account opening to power its business. The team was looking to simplify their existing architecture to help enhance administrative efficiencies.
To streamline its IT operations and improve its disaster recovery responsiveness, Valmark deployed a solution based on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) together with HYCU data recovery and backup.
The integrated solution gives the team increased testing capabilities to ensure systems remain available in the event of a disaster.
Key Results
| Improved compliance and reliability | Maximized resources |
Responsive support |
|---|---|---|
| Dependable disaster recovery keeps client-facing applications available nonstop |
Easy to manage HCI environment lets IT staff be more efficient and solve issues fast |
The system can easily be managed and adapted with confidence |
The support experience has been my biggest takeaway from the Nutanix initiative. I’ve developed personal relationships with people at Nutanix, and if we run across a difficult issue, I can simply send them an email and they can connect me to the right person. We never had that before.
Challenge
Valmark serves more than 100 members, including insurance organizations and multi-disciplinary wealth management and CPA firms. To deliver the individualized attention these clients expect, Valmark depends on its data center applications, and the infrastructure that supports them.
“Our infrastructure supports transactions like portfolio trades for independent financial advisors,” explains Jim Kolk, Manager, Infrastructure and Services at Valmark. “We have a centralized data center in our Akron, Ohio office, where the majority of our technology lives, and a small sister location in St. Paul, Minnesota. Our team also supports a lot of our applications, SQL servers, websites, and services for our customers from our in-house development group.”
With a strategy of continuous improvement, the organization is constantly seeking opportunities to maximize the resiliency of its environment, and empower its IT team to do more.
“We are mandatorily required to have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan,” said Geoff Moore, Chief Information Officer at Valmark. “We were running a traditional virtualized solution stack, with a separate hardware manufacturer. We also had a separate disaster recovery site as well as separate switching, so it was relatively complicated.”
Moore and his team wanted to find a complete, hyperconverged solution for its data center and DR needs that was simple to install, and easy to support and manage.
Solution
After considering a variety of solutions, Valmark chose Nutanix based on its simplicity and strong market reputation.
“We looked at Nutanix, and noticed that their NPS score was 92, which definitely gave us a positive impression, and encouraged us to give them a try.”
Valmark deployed a Nutanix HCI along with Nutanix DRaaS. The fully integrated DR-to-cloud solution lets Valmark protect its key applications and data in its environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure. Nutanix DRaaS is also fully managed by an extended team of Nutanix experts who help Valmark support its DR strategy.
Valmark also purchased HYCU, a purpose-built application and data protection solution for Nutanix. HYCU lets Valmark maintain the simplicity of its single HCI solution, integrating natively with the Nutanix platform and AHV hypervisor, for trouble-free backup and recovery.
“Deployment was incredibly easy,” said Ryan Volcansek, Systems Administrator at Valmark. “Compared to our previous backup and virtualized platform, HYCU and Nutanix work together to offer clear, simplified integration. It was so easy to set up and make changes.”
Customer Outcome
With dependable DR in place, the Valmark IT team can sleep more comfortably at night. If an issue should arise, the single, converged platform makes it faster and easier to chase down the source of the problem.
“Our infrastructure supports a variety of services, including our document imaging system, content management system, and SQL databases for third-party feeds and reporting,” said Moore.
Nutanix lets IT track down root causes within minutes. This fast response can mean the difference between a positive client experience and a negative one.
Like most organizations, Valmark is constantly working to improve performance and services. The flexible Nutanix platform, backed by its expert support team, lets the company scale and evolve its infrastructure as needs change.
“It’s really easy to update our VMs compared to before,” said Volcansek. “If one of our stakeholders tells me that we need more RAM or storage on a system, we can easily add it, without a reboot. the ability to not have to fully restart to make a simple change especially if you just need to like throw an extra disc on there or something.
Next Steps
With its data center infrastructure and disaster recovery working smoothly, Valmark is looking forward to continued collaboration with the Nutanix support team, as it continues to build a more compliant, customer-centric organization.