No industry plays it safer with money than finance – after all, they’re literally in the business of making cheddar. And yet, many financial providers are plagued by costly, inefficient and antiquated infrastructures and data centers. These outdated technologies are bad for business and can push financial companies into the dreaded red, when the only color they desire to see is that dollar bill green. One thing’s for sure, though: migrating to vSAN will have financial companies far and wide jubilantly shouting, “show me the money!”
As the industry-leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution, VMware vSAN is the core building block for the software-defined data center. Its goal is to enable companies to evolve without risk, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale to tomorrow. 10,000 customers and counting can testify to vSAN’s business value as the software of choice for HCI. But don’t just take our word for it – let’s take a closer look at how vSAN has helped two financial companies revolutionize their infrastructures.
Discovery Uncovers the Power of vSAN Virtual Storage Infrastructure
Discovery is a shared value insurance company and authorized financial services provider with over 5.1 million customers worldwide. With a wall-to-wall virtualized VMware environment, Discovery began noticing that their IT department could no longer respond quickly enough to business demands because their infrastructure dependencies were affecting their VMware environment’s stability.
“After encountering a series of infrastructure outages that we identified were due to hardware instability, we embarked on a process to identify and find better technologies to help improve our physical and virtual infrastructure stack,” John Marais, virtualization manager at Discovery, said. To reduce their reliance on external hardware and achieve greater control, management and visibility into their infrastructure, Discovery found the solution it was looking for in vSAN.
vSAN mapped the foundation for a new virtualization footprint for Discovery, alleviating their infrastructure dependencies to better architect a virtualized environment. This led to improved performance at the storage, virtualization and application layer, increased scalability and more insight into existing workloads in order for Discovery to better provision storage and meet business demands. The icing on the cake was a lower TCO, as vSAN proved to be a money-saving investment – the best kind of investment from a financial standpoint.
To say that Discovery now harbors true love for vSAN wouldn’t be an overstatement. As Marais puts it, “Discovery is committed to the vSAN technology. What we have seen is that the vSAN roadmap is aggressive and feature-rich, which is a benefit to us as a client. As a business, we have to evolve and make IT more accessible to our customers. We intend to be innovative and bold by using newer technologies, and stay relevant in the business we are in.”
Oney Banque Accord Scales to New Heights with vSAN
Oney Banque Accord supports its retail partners across all sales channels to redefine and optimize customer experiences by leveraging its shared identity as a merchant and banker. The company established a lofty 2020 growth strategy where it committed to enriching and simplifying the customer experience. To do so, Oney needed to improve performance and reduce costs and its dependency on dedicated equipment. Spoiler alert: vSAN was their ace in the hole!
“We previously operated traditional hard disk bays, which with the evolution of our business, proved increasingly costly and complex to administer,” Sylvain Monborgne, support for systems infrastructure and storage at Oney, said. “The market is moving more towards ‘software-defined’ solutions, so we studied different alternatives that would allow us to reduce costs and complexity while maintaining a high level of security. The VMware Virtual SAN solution responds exactly to our needs and is essential to our business continuity plan.”
By harnessing vSAN, Oney was able to implement hyper-converged storage by leveraging existing equipment without a dedicated resource in order to reduce costs, improve performance and security, achieve high availability and scale to meet their business growth goals. vSAN also provided a literal simple plan to Oney for storage operations through a single interface. No longer do they require a third-party storage solution or dedicated storage network.
Where vSAN truly receives its gold marks is in the gains it affords to Oney relating to data security and scalability of their environment. “We have taken a first step toward high availability with the introduction of vSAN. Our data is more secure thanks to a more streamlined solution to administer. Adding or removing storage resources is so simple that we are now equipped to respond efficiently to business needs,” Monborgne notes.
Conclusion
As the testimonials from both Discovery and Oney show, HCI solutions are a valuable, cost-effective investment for financial companies. Implementing them by migrating to vSAN – priceless!
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