Hallmark Business Connections slashes operational costs by 55 percent

Hallmark Business Connections has selected Nutanix as the infrastructure platform of choice for its next generation datacentre. The company is already realising the benefits of Nutanix’s invisible infrastructure solution and has seen substantial performance and productivity returns. To date, Hallmark Business Connections has implemented a datacentre migration program which will allow it to slash its operational costs by as much as 55 per cent.

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 virtualisation infrastructure for a planned business analytics project. Following impressive proof of concept trials and the subsequent successful implementation of the data analytics project, Hallmark quickly expanded the project’s scope and budget, and now plans to migrate all of its datacentres to Nutanix.

“We rely heavily on in-house applications to support our business and take a DevOps approach favouring 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 at Hallmark Business Connections. “Moving that workload to the Nutanix cluster allowed us to decrease development time considerably, by up to 72 per cent, enabling us to easily meet our target of delivering new system builds up to 12 times a day.”

Now in the second year of a three-year roadmap, Hallmark Business Connections is on track to complete its next generation datacentre 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 disaster recovery 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 datacentre racks. After completing the migration to Nutanix, this footprint will be reduced to just five racks, equating to a 55 per cent reduction in operational costs.

“For businesses currently utilising three-tier architectures across their datacentres, the benefits of Nutanix’s flexibility, scalability and performance are clear,” said Howard Ting, SVP of Marketing at Nutanix. “Hallmark Business Connections is able to realise dramatic productivity gains and estimated operating cost savings because Nutanix takes away the need to aggressively manage the datacentre infrastructure, allowing them to focus on revenue-generating activities.”

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 just two or 90 per cent time savings.