Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that Central Pacific Bank, a regional commercial bank headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii, has implemented HPE Nimble Storage disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) to support its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), leading to greater performance, efficiency and cost savings.

Central Pacific Bank (CPB) was running out of storage space, and were experiencing infrastructure challenges that made it harder to maintain security and compliance. CPB turned to HPE and local partner Pacxa, to implement a secure, compliant, and seamless solution for their remote employees across their 35 branches.

Implementing HPE Nimble Storage dHCI enabled CPB to provide their remote workforce with the tools needed to continue working effectively, and helped give the bank a competitive edge when the shelter in place guidelines were enacted due to COVID-19. With the help of HPE and Pacxa, the bank implemented 1,000 virtual desktops, while simultaneously rolling out Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 Enterprise throughout the organization. The consolidation of data and computing with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has led to an overall decrease in infrastructure spend, and the IT department now has centralized control and can more easily deploy technology updates and onboard new employees.

"We look for reliability, scalability, cost, performance, security and compliance when deciding on a new technology vendor," said Adrienne Chee, Senior Vice President of Technology Operations, Central Pacific Bank. "We made a substantial investment in HPE because we believe in the technology and are positioning ourselves for long-term growth and adaptation."

"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is elegant and simple, yet high performing and designed for a virtualized environment," continued Chee. "It met our security, compliance, and budget needs."

Thanks to the upgrade, CPB was also able to remain Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) compliant. This was particularly important as the bank moved quickly to service the high volume of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan activity in the early days of the pandemic.

Central Pacific Bank replaced their aging hardware with HPE ProLiant DL360 servers and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, which replicates the HCI experience, while increasing flexibility for faster performance, higher availability, and a lower total cost of ownership for business-critical applications and mixed-workloads. The new HPE technology helped CPB create a more seamless experience for their remote employees, and helped to reduce the number of tickets and complaints for IT staff.

"Pacxa is Hawaii's premier full-service provider of IT solutions, so we only work with leading-edge technologies we are confident will provide our clients the best solutions," said Kelly Ueoka, President, Pacxa, "Thanks to our partnership with HPE, we are able to take on large scale projects because we know that we can lean on HPE to supplement our team's resources and capabilities. When we needed an infrastructure designer to help us produce the architecture for Central Pacific Bank, HPE provided the resources to guide our equipment purchasing and planning, which was absolutely critical to a successful implementation."

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI embeds HPE InfoSight, the industry's most advanced AI for infrastructure, for predictive analytics that diagnose and resolve issues. CPB relies on the analytics provided by HPE InfoSight for insights into utilization, and implement the recommendations HPE InfoSight provides via its recommendation engine. The new upgraded infrastructure from HPE Nimble Storage dHCI allows CPB to work faster and much more efficiently than before, delivering productivity and efficiency benefits for a transformative new VDI environment.

"Thanks to HPE and Pacxa, we can now communicate, collaborate, and work remotely and securely," said Chee. "HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has delivered a reliable platform and we know that everyday our employees are going to have a positive experience. Throughout the process we were able to keep pace with our customers and never miss a beat in terms of meeting their needs."