Hallmark Business Connections Opts for Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Hallmark Business Connections, Inc. has selected Nutanix as the infrastructure platform for its next generation datacenter.

The company is already realizing the benefits of Nutanix’s invisible infrastructure solution and has seen substantial performance and productivity returns. To date, Hallmark Business Connections has implemented a data center migration program which will allow it to slash its operational costs by as much as 55%.

As the business-to-business arm of Hallmark Cards, Hallmark Business Connections focuses on the delivery of reward and incentive programs for employees and customers of Fortune 500 companies located across the US. The company first evaluated hyperconverged offerings as a scalable, yet affordable, solution that would not compromise its existing three-tier compute, storage and virtualization infrastructure for a planned business analytics project. Following proof of concept trials and the subsequent implementation of the data analytics project, Hallmark expanded the project’s scope and budget, and plans to migrate all of its datacenters to Nutanix.

“We rely heavily on in-house applications to support our business and take a DevOps approach favoring continuous integration builds. With a traditional architecture, developing and deploying new production builds took 1-2 hours,” said Bob Dussault, director of infrastructure and information security officer, Hallmark Business Connections. “Moving that workload to the Nutanix cluster allowed us to decrease development time considerably, by up to 72%, enabling us to easily meet our target of delivering new system builds up to 12 times a day.“

In the second year of a three-year roadmap, Hallmark Business Connections is on track to complete its next generation datacenter by the end of 2016. The company expects to move all customer-facing workloads to the Nutanix platform within the next few months, and an offsite DR cluster, based in a separate facility in Chicago, will be up and running later this year.

Currently, Hallmark’s development and production infrastructure operates across 11 datacenter racks. After completing the migration to Nutanix, this footprint will be reduced to five racks, equating to a 55% reduction in operational costs.

“Nearly two years ago, Hallmark Business Connections bet on Nutanix, buying in to the promise of our flexibility, scalability and performance,” said Sudheesh Nair, SVP of worldwide sales and BD, Nutanix. “As they realize dramatic productivity gains and estimated operating cost savings, and begin implementing Nutanix across their entire datacenter environment, we’re humbled by that bet and proud to work with such a strong partner.“

Other key factors in Hallmark’s migration to Nutanix include the ease of integration with the company’s existing infrastructure, the hypervisor agnostic nature of the Nutanix approach and the potential productivity gains of eliminating the need for separate storage management. Migrating to Nutanix is expected to reduce engineer workloads from an estimated 20 hours a week to two or 90% time savings.