The customer is one of the largest financial services companies in India offering a comprehensive range of financial solutions to its clients. Since many of their operating units and divisions handle highly sensitive data both on and off their office premises, data security is fast becoming a key area of concern for them.
The Challenge
The customer wanted to reap the efficiencies, scalability and agility of the cloud to lower their operational costs and serve their end clients better, without sacrificing security or performance. They were looking to build a private cloud and install automation tools to onboard end clients quickly, and also deliver faster services to them.
A Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) approach was the key to achieving their goals. An SDDC would enable the company to turn its new data center into a highly agile, secure, and scalable cloud using its existing hardware, while supporting both current and future applications. A big obstacle to their plan was the immediate need to address several cloud networking and security issues. Many of the company’s core applications were based on legacy technologies that are neither inherently multi-tenant, nor designed for today’s modern cloud infrastructure. The challenge before them was to find products, design applications and solutions for the entire gamut of their clients. However, financial applications frequently don’t mesh with multi-tenancy. Thus, quite often, they had to install hardware at a customer’s location and co-manage it – a tedious and an expensive process. Thus, it was highly desirable for the customer to find a way to do everything from their own data center. They could not wait for immature, proprietary, hardware-defined solutions to address these challenges, and wanted to virtualize their legacy applications and take multi-tenant security into its infrastructure via micro-segmentation.
The Solution
The customer decided to create a cloud-based multi-tenant environment built on VMware vCloud Suite, and deploy VMware NSX to virtualize its network. Galaxy provided consulting services to the client and provided deep insights on NSX features. The customer was familiar with the power of server virtualization, and quickly understood the benefits that network virtualization could bring to them.
VMware NSX virtualizes the network to deliver the entire networking and security model from L2 – L7 in software. The platform decouples the network from the underlying hardware, while taking advantage of the existing network infrastructure without changes to enable new levels of service delivery speed, agility and cost reductions.
VMware NSX also delivers a completely new operational model for networking that breaks through current network barriers and enables data center operators to achieve better agility and improved economics. The NSX platform’s unique policy-based distributed firewalling and L3 routing enable multi-tenancy for the financial services applications that the customer hosts for its end clients.
“Given our work in the financial sector, security is very important to us, and the ability to do micro-segmentation was critical to our selection of VMware NSX,” says their Chief Technology Officer.
They even tried doing the same at the hardware level, but realized soon enough that it was not feasible. The proven success of the NSX platform, and the integration of other industry leaders such as Arista Networks and Palo Alto Networks, helped solidify their decision. In addition to VMware NSX, the customer also deployed VMware vCloud Suite Advanced for compute virtualization and cloud management.
With a small IT staff to run their new data center, IT automation and agility were essential for them to effectively support and secure a multi-tenant environment. vCloud Suite gave them that desired IT automation and IT management agility necessary to scale the business and reduce capital expenditures.
The Benefits
In just about 3-4 weeks, client successfully deployed and integrated all the VMware solutions it selected. The VMware NSX platform allowed them to decouple their data center network from the underlying physical hardware to gain massive scale, while simplifying network design and operations. More importantly, it works seamlessly with the firm’s existing compute and networking infrastructure, applications and security products.
The data center virtualization and standardization achieved results in lower capital expenditures. VMware NSX also enabled the client to implement micro-segmentation based on fine-grained policies to enable security inside and outside of their data center. Client now enjoys superior operational control and increased availability and security. “I like that security follows each virtual machine around,” says their Chief Technology Officer.
VMware empowered them to implement a secure and agile SDDC, and respond more quickly to customers and improve their time-to market. With VMware NSX, they can now deploy applications for multiple customers without needing additional physical infrastructure at a customer site, now or in the future. The VMware NSX platform makes it possible for them to easily remotely provision, manage, orchestrate and securely control their applications.
“We’ve reduced provisioning times for new virtual machines and scale quickly, and we achieved our goal for average cost-per-virtual machine and more manageable costs,” says CTO.
VMware NSX has delivered the operational model of a virtual machine to client’s data center network, transforming the economics of their network and security operations.