Nutanix, a leader in hybrid and multicloud computing, has announced that Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, the largest privately held mortgage company in the U.S., is implementing Nutanix to improve its virtual desktop infrastructure as well as simplify and automate infrastructure management to support the company’s goal of delivering best-in-class customer service.
To deliver on their goal, Fairway needed to provide employees with the fastest, best and easiest-to-use applications which could often be a challenge with its old IT infrastructure. The small team of admins was often required to work weekends to keep up with the hands-on management and time-consuming upgrades. With more than 8,600 employees they knew they needed a new IT infrastructure that could support their growing workload and simplify operations.
“Nutanix makes it much easier to narrow down the source of any performance issues,” said Jarod Hallmark, VP of IT Infrastructure at Fairway. “At Fairway, we don’t have the luxury of having a separate ops team that spends all day focusing on system and application performance. With the centralized management we get with Prism, our team can now spend their time creating new applications, not just monitoring existing ones.”
The company considered several technology options but selected Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure to power its private cloud environment thanks to the management simplicity and one-click upgrades that would allow the company to do more with its existing IT staff.
Fairway now has approximately 250 Nutanix nodes across three different sites supporting their VDI workloads, infrastructure and application development environments, MS Exchange, MS SQL, custom file servers, web servers, Active Directory and DNS servers.
To further simplify and automate operations, the company also selected Prism operation’s tier (Pro), Nutanix’s IT infrastructure AIOps solution, as well as Calm, Nutanix’s automation solution. Prism enables them to perform automated optimization, proactive remediation and operational automation, meaning the IT team can now spend only 10% of their time maintaining their infrastructure.
Additionally, Nutanix Calm helps Fairway deliver new applications much faster and provision additional capacity quickly. Virtual machine deployment used to take an hour, but with Calm it now takes Fairway approximately 5-10 minutes thanks to native application orchestration, lifecycle management and self-service operations.
“It is crucial that IT infrastructures help to enable organizations instead of hinder their potential. At Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, their environment could not support their growing needs and applications,” said Aaditya Sood, VP and GM of Calm, Nutanix. “Since implementing Nutanix, Fairway has benefited from faster application development and easier access to applications improving employee productivity and the customer experience.”
In the future, Fairway is looking at expanding the number of workloads that run on Nutanix.
Intelligent CIO asked Jarod Hallmark, VP of IT Infrastructure at Fairway, further questions to find out more about the solutions.
Can you talk us through the main reasons why you selected Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure?
We were looking for something easily scalable. Something that didn’t require a lot of management, since we had a small staff. A hyperconverged solution was a no-brainer for this purpose. Gone were the days of independently managing a SAN and all the complexity, connectivity, support and maintenance that goes along with it. This was a huge win for the company, while helping the IT team keep up with demand.
How has Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure succeeded in allowing you to boost the performance of your private cloud environment?
It has done a great job of bringing the storage closer to the compute. By keeping discs on the servers hosting the VMs we have lower latency, more resiliency and faster scaling.
How useful have its management simplicity and one-click upgrades been?
Having a single go to place for all the hardware management, updates, capacity planning, monitoring, alerting and automation has been a huge help when working on initial configurations, looking at metrics and especially upgrades.
Can you explain the major benefits Prism Pro has brought to you?
Prism Pro is the single go to place for all the hardware management, updates, capacity planning, monitoring, alerting and automation. It has been a huge help when working on initial configurations, looking at metrics and especially upgrades.
Can you explain the advantages Calm has brought to you?
Calm is very powerful. We are actually not using it to its full potential but it has been a great way for us to deploy new VMs quickly.
How have the Nutanix solutions boosted employee productivity and the customer experience?
Nutanix allows us to focus on other things that aren’t Nutanix. There is some management like any system, but we don’t spend as much time touching multiple systems to perform routine tasks or troubleshoot issues. This gives our employees more time to provide great customer service. The performance we receive from Nutanix also contributes to that experience.
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