Nutanix press office
Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that Nedbank, one of Africa’s largest financial institutions, has used its hyperconverged software and Nutanix Lifecycle Manager (LCM) to improve and facilitate the rapid delivery of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) during the pandemic.
When the initial lockdown stages were introduced, corporate South Africa was forced to mobilise quickly with only a one-week period for preparation before a complete country lockdown. While financial services companies were considered essential services, many of their workers were not. This created the immediate need for companies like Nedbank to embrace mass work from home initiatives, often for thousands of employees. Considering this Nedbank had to scale its end-user computing systems rapidly, a project it needed to manage entirely in-house.
“During the sudden switch to work from home requirement, because of the pandemic, we did not have to increase our infrastructure but rather optimise the way VDI is delivered to new users on the same platform. Using the Nutanix LCM software, we can now maintain and upgrade mission-critical infrastructure during business hours without impacting any of our operations,” said Johan van Tonder, End User Computing senior innovation manager, at Nedbank.
The bank is currently using the Nutanix Acropolis (AOS) software, which integrates its storage, compute, and networking resources into a scalable, secure, resilient, and user-friendly software-defined infrastructure. To support this Nedbank has deployed Nutanix Prism Central to simplify management of the different clusters across separate physical locations all from one a single management console. It provides complete organisational visibility of the distributed environment behind a single pane of glass. For example, getting an in-depth analysis of the VMs and identifying where latency issues in the environment are occurring.
In total, Nedbank has more than 8500 virtual desktops in its 160-node environment, requiring frequent security updates and patches to safeguard the environment and maintain compliance. Such is the efficiency of the Nutanix LCM solution that it only requires a dedicated team of five people to manage it.
“The full remit of Nutanix software solutions we are using coupled with LCM, has fundamentally changed the way Nedbank does its updates. Previously, it was a case of having to schedule overtime on a Saturday night when no users would be accessing the system. Now, our IT team can perform software and firmware updates during peak office hours and not cause any disruptions to the VDI environment or client systems,” added Gawie Steynberg, multi-product specialist at Nedbank.
“The way and speed at which Nedbank approached these challenges is testament to the team’s understanding of the power of a hyperconverged infrastructure software and the downstream operational impact it can have on a business,” said Dom Poloniecki, General Manager, Sales, at Nutanix, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. “Today’s clients don’t want their technology partners to approach their problems with a basket full of new technologies. They want you to dig into the toolbox you have already sold them and find the value they are looking for. By leveraging LCM, Nedbank is doing just that, stretching and truly deriving value from an existing investment.”
