Insurance Brokerage Uses Nutanix for VDI Rollout to Migrate to Windows 7 with Repurposed PCs
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Nutanix Complete Cluster
- VMware View
- VMware ThinApp
Tech Stack
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Citrix XenApp
- Windows 7
Implementation Scale
- Departmental Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Control
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
DeWitt Stern is a privately-held, New York-based insurance brokerage and risk management firm specializing in entertainment & media, business, personal, employee and fine arts insurance. A forward-thinking company, DeWitt prides itself in staying ahead of its competitors through the use of innovative new technologies.
The Challenge
As the DeWitt IT organization began looking at options to support remote employees, cost and performance were big concerns for them. Initially, VDI was not even a consideration due to the infrastructure cost implication. The team was considering investing in an 8-10U Fibre Channel SAN with two hosts and 15TB data storage. The team gauged that this infrastructure would not have been feasible to support VDI because of performance issues from the shared Fibre Channel switches, limited redundancy and long ROI for the capital investment. Reproducing its existing production infrastructure to support VDI was too cost-prohibitive, estimated at $150,000 with only minimal redundancy.
The Solution
When the team was introduced to the Nutanix solution, it realized that the solution would offer an all-in-one VDI solution that wouldn’t require the big capital investment it had originally calculated. In fact, the Nutanix solution would end up costing nearly half of the comparable configuration of 4 servers, FC SAN capacity and networking that DeWitt Stern would have had to purchase. For the clients, DeWitt Stern repurposed the existing three-year-old workstations with a Windows 7-embedded thin OS, ThinDesktop for locking down access to this OS, and the VMware View Client. The single Nutanix box provides all the compute, storage, and networking required for the virtual desktops. All the performance management is done in the background and there is plenty of IOPS to spare for future desktops. The plans are for 100 users on a single, 4-node Nutanix box for the time being, with the addition of laptop users in the near future.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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