Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Who Is Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania?
Intesa Sanpaolo Bank is the Romanian subsidiary of Intesa Sanpaolo Group, one of the top banking groups in Europe, with a significant ESG commitment, a world-class position in Social Impact, and strong focus on climate.
Intesa Sanpaolo has a strategic international presence, with over 950 branches and 7 million customers, comprising subsidiaries operating in commercial banking in 12 countries in Central Eastern Europe and Middle Eastern and North African areas, and an international network of specialists in support of corporate customers across 25 countries, in particular in the Middle East and North Africa, and in those areas where Italian companies are most active.
Headquartered in Bucharest and operating a network of 35 branches, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank offers banking products and services to individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large corporations across Romania.
The Challenge
To grow its business and strengthen economic development in Romania, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania has put digitalization at the top of its agenda. When the COVID-19 pandemic prevented staff from working in its offices and branches, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania aimed to accelerate internal adoption of digital channels.
Gabriel Faur, Deputy General Manager and COO, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania, underlined: “Our goal was to enable hybrid working securely, fast. A quick move to remote working was important to maintain a high quality of customer service, at a time when demand for digital banking services skyrocketed.”
To empower employees to deliver critical services to internal customers in a more agile manner, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania decided to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
“We aimed to ensure that employees could work from home effectively and securely, and we identified VDI as the optimal way to achieve that goal.”—Gabriel Faur, Deputy General Manager and COO, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania
Reimagining IT
Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania worked closely with trusted technology partner ETA2U and the group IT team in Italy to find the right VDI solution. After in-depth discussions, the bank selected VMware Horizon as its strategic VDI software platform, running on a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) based on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series.
“We’ve worked with ETA2U on IT infrastructure projects for 15 years. The ETA2U team is knowledgeable, reliable, and trustworthy, and the deployment went smoothly. It’s why we choose to work with them time after time.”—Gabriel Faur, Deputy General Manager and COO, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania
The bank worked with ETA2U to deploy ten Lenovo ThinkAgile 1U Certified Nodes, powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, at its Bucharest headquarters. The platform delivers a single pool of virtualized compute and storage resources to support both VDI and business application workloads. The bank deployed an additional five-node cluster at a second site for disaster recovery (DR).
To further enhance data protection, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania implemented a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 server, powered by 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, as a dedicated backup server.
Hardware
- Lenovo ThinkAgile VX 1U Certified Node powered by 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 powered by 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
Software
- VMware Horizon
- VMware vSAN
Services
- Lenovo Warranty Upgrade Services
Results
Today, the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX platform supports almost 600 VDI users, 95% of the bank’s employees, enabling them to work effectively anywhere—whether from head office, in branch, or at home.
Each user’s desktop or a laptop is configured as a thin client, while VDI workloads run in the bank’s data center. The new solution has boosted typical application performance by a factor of two, enabling employees to work more productively.
- Supports 600 VDI users
- Enables employees to work productively from anywhere
- Doubles application performance
- Saves hours of manual work for the IT team
“The VDI solution helps us to be agile and to keep up with the pace of business,” says Faur. “Thanks to the Lenovo solution, employees could continue working throughout the pandemic. Crucially, we can provide services to internal customers faster and resolve issues more efficiently. Employee workstations are now simply clones of a golden image, which is much easier to manage and saves hours of work when troubleshooting issues and updating applications. There is a very high level of standardization, and we have much greater control.”
Looking ahead, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania plans to replace its diverse and aging fleet of employee devices with thin clients, reducing the long-term operational cost of its IT estate.
“With Lenovo technology underpinning our VDI solution, we have more time and resources to focus on what really matters: supporting the business and its customers and advancing the bank’s digital transformation initiatives.”—Gabriel Faur, Deputy General Manager and COO, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania
Why Lenovo?
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series came recommended by the ETA2U team, who had previous experience using Lenovo technology to support VDI deployments.
“We evaluated several technical proposals, some based on traditional infrastructure and some on HCI,” recalls Faur. “After consulting with our parent company, we concluded that HCI fit best with the group’s technology strategy due to its inherent scalability and easier integration with the cloud.”
Partner Perspective: ETA2U
According to Marcel Serban, Branch Manager, ETA2U, “The technical complexity of the deployment brought some challenges, but we had Lenovo on hand for support. Overall, the deployment went very smoothly. We and, most importantly, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Romania are very happy with the result.”