Financial Services
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has improved the stability and security of our infrastructure and laid a good foundation for a modern data center. Our collaboration with Nutanix will be a reference for other rural commercial banks to upgrade and transform their IT.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has adopted the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, creating a unified operating environment on four Inspur nodes. Using the solution the bank is solving issues such as system integration, business continuity and performance bottlenecks. Thanks to Nutanix, the operation and maintenance of the bank’s IT is more efficient and effective.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has migrated the first batch of business application systems to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, which is delivering more IT power than the previous infrastructure from a 60 percent smaller hardware footprint. Furthermore, it takes 50 percent less IT management resource to operate the Nutanix solution. The bank will continue to transform and migrate the remaining business applications, scaling out the cluster of four Inspur nodes to maintain performance. Looking ahead, Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank plans to adopt Nutanix Flow to increase security and Nutanix Files to simplify the management of unstructured file data.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank Co., Ltd. (Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank) was launched in 2019. It is a joint-stock commercial bank approved by the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, established through combining rural credit cooperatives Zhengzhou Suburban Association and Zhengzhou Urban Association. Currently, Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank is the largest municipal agricultural commercial bank among 106 rural commercial banks in Henan province. The bank has 1,537 employees and 181 branches, covering Zhengzhou City and its surrounding areas.
The bank’s launch has been the result of continuous industrialization and urbanization of rural areas along with agricultural modernization. These changes have seen China reform the distribution of financial services, prompting the Rural Revitalization Strategy to extend credit opportunities in rural communities.
Soon after launch, Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank saw challenges with its existing IT infrastructure. The bank relied on IT installed five years previously by the Zhengzhou Suburban Association and Zhengzhou Urban Association. It was a three-tier infrastructure, mostly of physical servers with little virtualization.
The scalability of the IT architecture was poor, with little room for storage growth. Data was also siloed, and stability was not up to the required standard. Because many servers had been in service for a long time, they were proving unreliable, adding business continuity to the bank’s list of challenges. Furthermore, the existing disaster recovery (DR) methodology, based on redundant array of disk (RAID) technology, wasn’t sufficiently robust. Finally, the IT team was small and spent too much time on managing the heterogenous environment when their time could have been better spent on development.
After considering all the challenges, the bank decided to transform the infrastructure and build a new, flexible platform to improve operations and support growth. Aims included automating management and accelerating the development of digital services.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank chose Nutanix to transform its legacy architecture. By adopting Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, running on four Inspur nodes, it was able to begin its transformation journey, solving problems of integration, business continuity, performance bottlenecks, management time, and costs.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank is using the Nutanix AHV virtualization platform, avoiding the additional cost of a third-party hypervisor. It is also using Nutanix Prism to manage and operate the compute, storage, and networking resources across the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. As a result, the bank no longer has the complex task of configuring all three separately.
The bank can also easily expand resources for different services and workloads. System migrations and upgrades can be completed without interruption to the business—meeting the bank’s business continuity requirements. Furthermore, the built-in DR ensures data security. For the IT team, it can test failover and recover plans with just a few clicks to continue improving its DR routine.
Greater performance from a 60% smaller footprint
Using Nutanix, Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has transformed its IT and no longer relies on three-tier architecture. Using the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and the current Inspur nodes, the bank has the IT capacity and performance to support its needs for the next 5-8 years.
Not only is the bank’s IT more capable, but the hardware footprint is significantly smaller. It has reduced the number of servers by 60 percent—from 50 to 20—while increasing processing power and storage speed.
Improved service delivery across the business
Despite having a smaller team, the IT department at Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank is providing a more responsive level of service to the business. With Nutanix, the bank can implement new online services fast, and deliver projects in less time. Deployment is simple, greatly improving the efficiency of operations.
Stable performance, easier management
With Nutanix, the bank has overcome issues with stability, inflexibility, low utilization, and significant management costs. The IT team has changed its focus from hardware failures and keeping the lights on to maximizing the performance of the node cluster underpinning the Nutanix cloud.
Complete archiving with simplified backups
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has simplified data protection as a result of the high availability, backup reliability, archiving capacity, and management ease of Nutanix. The enterprise-class redundancy of the Nutanix solution means it can easily integrate the Nutanix cluster with third-party storage backup technology, while scaling out to multiple clusters. It can back up data down to the application layer and to remote DR sites. With the Nutanix technology in place, the bank can meet its medium and long-term development goals, guaranteeing data security.
50% saving on IT management expense
As a result of Nutanix, Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has been able to reallocate IT resource, reducing the infrastructure management team from 5-6 personnel to 2-3 for the entire platform. Those team members no longer working on infrastructure management are focusing on increasing the robustness of the infrastructure as a whole. Furthermore, the bank has reduced the size of the hardware footprint in the data center. Thanks to the Nutanix solution, it has significantly reduced the number of servers.
Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has successfully transferred the first batch of enterprise applications to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. It is now migrating the remaining applications and will scale the Nutanix platform with the business need. To enhance security, the bank is considering Nutanix Flow, which protects applications from internal and external security threats. In addition, the bank is planning to try Nutanix Files, an integrated scale-out storage solution for unstructured data and will also look at other Nutanix products.
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud at Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank has become a reference for the other 105 rural commercial banks in Henan province. Across China too, other rural banks will use the development of Zhengzhou Rural Commercial Bank as a model that they can follow.