Cornerstone Home Lending, Inc. standardises on VMware vSphere

In 2013, Cornerstone tested multiple virtualization platforms, including VMware vSphere with Operations Management, to replace its Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 environment. The pilot, conducted April through July 2013, found that VMware vSphere with Operations Management helped deliver the reliability, performance and management qualities the company was seeking for its IT environment. Cornerstone initiated its migration to VMware vSphere with Operations Management in August with the help of Computex, Inc., and completed the project in October 2013.

"We evaluated several virtualization and management platforms after determining our previous platform wasn't going to deliver what we needed in the long run," said Ricky Caldwell, director of Server Operations, Architecture and Infrastructure, Cornerstone Home Lending, Inc. "We selected VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ to deliver greater platform stability, as well as capacity planning for increased visibility into our IT environment, including new IT forecasting capabilities."

Cornerstone Accurately Forecasts IT Needs with VMware vSphere with Operations Management
Founded in 1988, Cornerstone is based in Houston, Texas with 1,200 employees and more than 122 branch offices across the U.S., serving 44 states and Washington, D.C. Cornerstone is a top 10 privately owned mortgage bank in the U.S., funding more than $5 billion in home loans annually. The mortgage banker offers in-house processing, underwriting and funding to ensure that Cornerstone's mortgage advisors deliver competitive, streamlined financing and on-time closings to homebuyers.

Technology plays a key role in automating and processing the high volume of loans Cornerstone generates annually. In 2013, Cornerstone invested heavily in building out a new data center in Houston, unveiling a new disaster recovery site in San Antonio, and upgrading its IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and software. As part of its infrastructure upgrade, Cornerstone reconsidered its virtualization platform - consisting of Microsoft Hyper-V and older releases of VMware vSphere. Following a multi-month evaluation, the company decided to standardize on VMware vSphere with Operations Management.

Since implementing its new environment, Cornerstone has optimized application performance, as well as overall service levels and availability by taking advantage of compute and storage load balancing capabilities of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS) and VMware vSphere Storage DRS™, respectively. Cornerstone's IT staff has also streamlined the management and monitoring of the health, capacity and performance of its virtual environment with improved visibility, delivered by an intuitive operations dashboard.

Additionally, VMware vSphere with Operations Management has enabled Cornerstone's IT administrators to implement capacity planning and proactively address IT issues before they impact the business. Cornerstone's IT staff is using the integrated capacity planning capabilities to right-size its compute and storage resources -- reclaiming wasted IT resources in the process. Beyond maximizing the use of existing compute and storage resources, administrators are also using capacity planning to accurately forecast the need for additional IT resources down the line.

"For the first time ever, we're able to capacity plan, to look ahead and forecast what we're going to need for the next one, three or five years," added Caldwell. "This allows us to act proactively, and gives us the ability to invest in IT the proper way."