Leading UK investment management company, JM Finn, achieved tangible benefits – accelerated performance; operational savings; and improved efficiency – after migrating its legacy data centres to Nutanix Cloud Platform. Jon Cosson, Head of IT and CISO at JM Finn, offers insight into how this took place and the results.
Business need
With a clear focus on the provision of high quality investment management services to a diverse client base, JM Finn was keen to embrace cloud computing as part of transformation plans to make the company’s IT more agile, cost effective and easier to manage.
Challenge
Since its inception in 1946, JM Finn has grown steadily to boast both a multi-million-pound investment portfolio and enviable reputation for individual client-focused financial investment services recognised among the best in the world. Together with the expertise and professionalism of its staff, IT has played a key role in fostering this reputation and Jon Cosson, Head of IT and CISO at JM Finn, was keen to continue the process by taking full advantage of the latest cloud developments as part of wider business reorganisation plans.
“Following a decision to move our HQ to new modern offices in Moorgate and relocating our data centres outside of London, it made sense to look carefully at what we could do to improve not only performance, but the scalability, availability and ease of management of our data centres. Public cloud was an option and will have a key role in the future, but for now we felt we could get the same benefits from a private cloud with the added benefit of greater certainty when it came to operational costs and our carbon footprint.”
Solution
Choosing a suitable platform was relatively straightforward as Cosson and his team had previously used the Nutanix Cloud Platform to first replace a key legacy storage resource then rapidly host a company-wide EUC application to support working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Having successfully switched a workforce of over 300 onto remote working in under a week we knew just what the Nutanix Cloud Platform was capable of doing and how easy it was to manage. Added to which it offered us hypervisor neutrality which meant we had the option to simply migrate most of our existing VMware VMs rather than immediately switch everything over to the AHV hypervisor.
“Over just two weekends we relocated both our primary and secondary data centres, but that’s not all,” said Jon Cosson, Head of IT and CISO JM Finn. “By migrating all of our legacy servers and applications to the Nutanix Cloud Platform we were able to reduce the overall rack footprint by 75% and realise tangible benefits in terms of operational costs and environmental impact.”
Customer outcome
Following an extensive needs analysis, Cosson and the team came up with a design which has enabled JM Finn to slim down its data centre infrastructure from 24 to just six equipment racks. An impressive 75% reduction with major implications for both power and cooling requirements as well as the company’s long-term carbon footprint.
The required equipment was quickly ordered and installed first in a brand-new primary data centre in Bury St Edmunds and then at a secondary site in Winchester to provide additional backup and Disaster Recovery capabilities. Once working, migration was scheduled to take place over successive bank holiday weekends to mitigate against any disruption, although, in practice the process proved trouble free.
“It all went remarkably smoothly,” said Cosson. “There was no loss of service and no complaints which has to be a first for a project like this which could so easily have gone off the rails and caused real headaches for the business. It’s hats off to Nutanix and its partners for making it so seamless and we’re very pleased with the results and the high level of support both during and after the process.”
Performance gains have been widely reported and running costs significantly lowered which, according to Cosson has made the CFO very happy. He has also been able to halve the number of staff needed to support the new infrastructure with those displaced moved into other roles to find ways of better exploiting the new technology.
Next steps
Looking ahead, Cosson is keen to take full advantage of the company’s new private cloud to further drive down operational costs and maximise the value of the company’s investment. Alongside ongoing work to identify workloads suitable for moving to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor several projects are planned, including the migration of legacy IBM systems over the next few months.
“We’re still running a lot of older IBM kit and will be virtualising applications hosted on these systems to run on AHV in Q1 next year,” he explained. “We’re also bringing a cloud-based customer portal in-house as well as looking at other ways of leveraging our private cloud as part of our ongoing Digital Transformation programme.”