About VIST Financial Corp.
VIST Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: VIST), formerly Leesport Financial Corp, is a diversified financial services company headquartered in Wyomissing, PA, offering banking, insurance, investments, wealth management, and title insurance services throughout Berks, Southern Schuylkill, Montgomery, Delaware and Philadelphia Counties.
Challenge
As a diversified financial services company, VIST Financial has hundreds of different applications for the various parts of its business. Downtime costs can easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ensuring that its data center runs not only reliably and securely, but also cost-effectively, is a top priority for the company's IT staff.
Managing user information across all applications is a daunting task for the IT staff, as is maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and GLB. VIST Financial needed to simplify user management across its enterprise and increase security by providing the right users with access to the right information.
Managing desktops across 24 locations was also challenging, particularly as some locations are more than a two-hour drive away. The company's small IT staff was spending too much time on the road installing applications and troubleshooting individual machines. Centralized desktop management would reduce travel time and keep the IT staff more productive.
"We wanted to move to an open-source platform because it would free us from being tied to a single vendor and would reduce licensing costs," said Ralf Heidger, Head of the SH/T department, which has maintained the PHOENIX development since its foundation in 2001.
Novell Solution
Working with Bracy Designs, a Novell business partner, VIST Financial selected SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server with built-in Xen virtualization, along with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack, to improve the hardware utilization, availability and performance in its data center. The company also selected Novell Identity Manager and Novell ZENworks® to streamline identity and resource management.
"Xen virtualization was the best option for us and has saved us tens of thousands of dollars in hardware costs," said Jack McLaine, VP of IT at VIST Financial Corp. "Using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen virtualization, along with the paravirtualized drivers in the Driver Pack, we now have greater flexibility, with no degradation in performance."
Using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with integrated Xen virtualization, VIST Financial has consolidated 10 servers in its data center to date. With virtual servers requiring less rack space, the company has also reduced its power and cooling costs.
"We still keep finding more uses for Xen virtualization as the servers we planned for the project still haven't reached their limits," said Chris Bracy, president of Bracy Designs. "We have plans to consolidate another 30 servers which will result in an incredible cost savings."
VIST Financial automated identity management by using Novell Identity Manager to synchronize identity information across Novell eDirectory™, Microsoft Active Directory and applications in its Citrix farm. As a result, the IT staff can now provision new users in 15 minutes, rather than two hours. Users now have faster access to the right applications with a single user ID and password.
"We needed an identity management solution that would work in our mixed environment," said McLaine. "Novell Identity Manager automatically updates user identities and passwords across directories and applications, saving us endless hours of manual updating."
With Novell ZENworks, VIST Financial has centralized desktop and server management, which has dramatically reduced IT travel time. The IT staff can now deliver applications and patches to workstations from a central location. Using remote control, the IT staff can also troubleshoot workstations without traveling to individual machines.
"Implementing Novell ZENworks is the best thing I ever did," said McLaine. "It's fantastic and a huge time saver. Now we can spend time managing our infrastructure, rather than traveling to all our offices. Novell ZENworks easily paid for itself in the first year."
The policy management features of Novell ZENworks allow VIST Financial to standardize desktops and maintain the desktop security required to comply with federal regulations. Novell ZENworks Asset Management allows the IT staff to automatically manage its inventory, taking the guesswork out of licensing compliance. With Novell ZENworks Patch Management, the IT staff has turned off automatic Microsoft updates and can now select and schedule patches to deliver.
"There really is no equivalent product to Novell ZENworks on the market" said Bracy. "Like other Novell solutions, Novell ZENworks works great, runs without problems, reduces costs and comes with outstanding Novell support."
Results
With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen virtualization, VIST Financial has improved server performance and plans to consolidate up to 90 percent of the servers in its data center, for a savings of around $50,000 in hardware and downtime costs.
Streamlining identity management with Novell Identity Manager has helped VIST Financial improve security and better comply with regulatory requirements, while reducing user administration time by 75 percent. By centralizing desktop management with Novell ZENworks, the company has reduced IT travel time and costs by 95 percent.
"Novell allows us to secure our environment while automating user management, desktop management and patch management," said McLaine. "We've also been able to do it all while reducing our costs and administration time."