Industry
Lease and Finance
Challenges
- Require speedy response to deliver new desktops and mission-critical systems environments due to the business integration
- Ensure BCP for protection against natural disasters and pandemics
- Evolving work from home culture and business demands require flexibility and scalability
- Legacy architecture has limitations in performance and scalability
Solutions
Nutanix Cloud Platform
- Nutanix AOS
- Nutanix Prism
Applications
- Leasing, installments, loans, and other front-office applications
- Deposits/withdrawals, accounting, and other mission-critical systems
- Citrix Virtual Apps-based application virtualization
- Windows 10 virtual desktops for approximately 3,000 employees
BENEFITS
- Increased business agility
- Enable business continuity and modernization of mission-critical systems
- Significantly reduced system operation man-hours
- Do not require specialist skillsets for maintenance
- IT team can devote more time to business-critical matter
Legacy infrastructure requires meticulous design, but Nutanix Cloud Platform enables us to expand our system flexibly. Being able to scale a system so easily and so much faster than before is a huge benefit. As a result, we were able to devote much more time to business-critical items which require more consideration such as laying the groundwork for work from home and business integration.
— Shinichiro Kitano, IT Management Department, Mitsubishi HC Capital Inc.
CHALLENGES
Established in April 2021 through the business integration of Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance and Hitachi Capital, Mitsubishi HC Capital leveraged the experience and knowledge of both companies to go beyond traditional leasing business and pursue cutting-edge asset business opportunities throughout the world. The Mitsubishi HC Capital Group focuses on “Social Infrastructure & Life,” “Environment & Energy,” “Mobility,” “Sales Finance,” and “Global Assets."
"Due to the business integration of the former Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance and the former Hitachi Capital, the work to use the PC environment of both companies has increased, and it was urgent to develop a system environment that could accommodate work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. We needed to expand the desktop environment of the former Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance, which had been equipped with VDI environment,” explains Shinichiro Kitano from IT Management Department.
SOLUTION
The company’s experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake made the former Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance realize the importance of deploying a client environment as a business continuity measure that would enable company operations to be maintained outside of the company in the event of a major disaster or pandemic. When the company decided to migrate to a virtual desktop environment and modernize its mission-critical systems in conjunction with transition to Windows 10, the company chose Nutanix Cloud Platform for its superior scalability and operability.
"We had a private cloud environment with legacy infrastructure, and were aware of its limitations in terms of both performance and scalability,” says Kitano. “We decided to use Nutanix based on a third-party report that gave it a higher rating than the solutions of other companies. We are also excited about the future potential for cost savings with Nutanix AHV,” said Kitano.
Nutanix is currently being used at Mitsubishi HC Capital to run the mission-critical systems supporting both the front and back office operations of the company’s corporate finance business, and has a Windows 10 virtual desktop environment running Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and various other applications used by the company’s 3,000 employees both at the office and for work from home.
CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
Due to restrictions on attendance at work caused by COVID-19, employees at the company have been forced to telework. As a result, the number of concurrent users of VDI environment increased, and the load on the system increased, making it necessary to expand the environment. However, since the former Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance had already implemented Nutanix, the company was able to expand quickly and flexibly. Based on this experience, the company decided to use Nutanix to expand its VDI environment that was urgently needed to do so after the business integration.
“With Nutanix’s highly scalable private cloud infrastructure, the company has been able to reduce the number of man-hours needed to operate and maintain its systems, making it possible for us without specialist knowledge to operate and maintain them. With legacy infrastructure, we needed to update server, storage, and other firmware individually, but now we only need to keep Nutanix AOS regularly updated. That’s a major benefit,” says Kitano.
“When the company was using legacy infrastructure, the company used to have to devote considerable time to redesigning architecture based on demand forecasts and performance considerations, but Nutanix enables the company to scale out easily just by adding systems. There were many matters other than infrastructure that we had to pay attention to, including communication tool enhancement to support working from home, and Nutanix gave us the time we needed to focus on such areas,” says Kitano. “We’ve created an environment that can be easily expanded whenever changes in the business environment demand such adjustments.”
As an application engineer, Kitano says that he had only limited knowledge regarding infrastructure management, but notes that the Nutanix Prism user interface enables him to intuitively understand the system status at a glance. He adds that his colleagues responsible for operating the system have reported favorably that the ability to scale out as part of everyday operations minimizes impacts on the existing environment.
NEXT STEPS
Mitsubishi HC Capital is currently using Nutanix Cloud Platform as private cloud infrastructure for its core systems and VDI environment, but its systems still contain legacy infrastructure positioned as 2nd generation private cloud infrastructure.
Moving forward, the company plans to develop a hybrid cloud infrastructure including public cloud with the aim of driving digital transformation. “Because a hybrid environment entails traffic between public and private clouds, we are looking into using Nutanix Flow microsegmentation and other solutions together with Nutanix AHV for integrated management,” says Kitano. “And since some of our overseas subsidiaries are using Microsoft Azure as IaaS, we’re also looking into using Nutanix Clusters on Azure.”
