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Case Study • • 2 minute read

Reinsurance Firm Consolidates NetApp Storage Environment for Data Center Relocation

WWT provides insights into existing storage footprint to optimize and accelerate move to colocation architecture.

In this case study

 Challenge

A large Reinsurance Firm was executing a data center strategy. The effort included migrating a data center, selecting a colocation facility and formalizing a cloud strategy. Making informed primary storage decisions was critical to moving forward with future-state architectures.

Without a strong enterprise architecture team to steer competing projects, the organization was struggling to gain momentum. With so many technology decisions in play, they needed a way to quickly gain visibility across their current infrastructure environment and determine the ideal primary storage solution for their overall data center strategy and move to a colocation facility.

 Solution

WWT conducted a Data Insights Workshop, examining the organization's NetApp environment. Our Data Insights tool correlated data across 12 NetApp systems and 17,000 data points. Within two days of installing the tool into the organization's environment, WWT's data center specialists were able to present a highly visual and interactive report that detailed:

  1. Capacity
  2. Performance
  3. Data reduction
  4. Workload profile

Importantly, the data revealed that the organization could consolidate their 12 NetApp systems into three for their move to a colocation facility while maintaining current levels of performance and hooks into all dependent systems.

Thanks to WWT, data center leadership at the organization received the assurance they needed to move forward with the purchase two NetApp all-flash systems with NVMe and three NetApp StorageGRID systems.  

Example output from WWT's Data Insights Tool.
Example output from a WWT Data Insights Workshop. 

 Results

  • Asset optimization: 4:1 consolidation of storage arrays.
  • Cost savings: A consolidated storage footprint saves on power, cooling, floor space, and storage maintenance and management costs.
  • Accelerated decision-making: Data infrastructure analysis proved NetApp was best solution for future needs.
  • Risk avoidance: Assessment of existing data revealed how competing primary storage solutions would break needed integrations and drive unnecessary costs.

Technologies