Meeting the demands of the digital transformation can seem overwhelming, but one company has recently figured out the secret to simple and natural data center modernization. Let’s take a look at how one industry-leading company managed to break out of the traditional infrastructure cycle and modernize their data center while reducing costs and saving resources!
CINgroup provides innovative software, credit counseling and educational material for bankruptcy attorneys and their clients. With 90% market share, CINgroup is an industry leader whose core businesses relies on data and storage; however, its data center infrastructure was not sufficient for its growing digital business. CINgroup saw success virtualizing nearly 100% of their servers with vSphere. Based on that success, they took the next logical step in modernizing their infrastructure by migrating from a traditional Fibre Channel SAN to VMware vSAN, a software-defined, hyper-converged storage system.
As the software industry matured, CINgroup started offering cloud-based software along with their traditional on-premise software, increasing their need for a hybrid storage system. The company also faced data growth challenges as bankruptcy requirements became more complex and data-intensive. IT challenges rapidly increased due to their outdated infrastructure that was incapable of accommodating their growing data needs.
“Every three to four years, it would be cheaper to buy a new storage array than continue paying maintenance on our old equipment. Performance was also a concern – we needed a more cost effective way to scale while maintaining throughput” claimed Bob Tester, Enterprise Architect, CINgroup.
CINgroup quickly dismissed the idea of buying more spindles as it would not be a sustainable solution. The idea of converting completely to the public cloud was also thrown out as it was deemed far too expensive. After considering the various HCI and storage offerings on the market, vSAN was determined to be best solution by far.
CINgroup successfully deployed two hybrid vSAN storage clusters (4 nodes and 6 nodes) with 90 TB of capacity supporting more than 200 virtual machines. These vSAN environments powered their business-critical applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Cisco Call Manager, and several data warehousing and web applications on the HP Apollo 2000 System.
vSAN significantly reduced company expenses, cutting storage CapEx by an impressive 70%. The company was able to purchase their preferred high-performance servers, upgrade its network to 40 GbE, and replace its production SAN with vSAN under the same budget that was previously allocated to refresh its legacy SAN array. Tester noted, “We were able to introduce commodity flash drives into a hybrid cluster at 90% less cost than using proprietary flash drives from our previous SAN vendor”.
Implementing vSAN provided efficiency and speed that allowed the company to improve their storage latency from 5ms to consistently under 1ms, providing the performance needed under an ever-growing data set.
In the end, vSAN empowered the business to focus more on what really mattered to the company and less on simply “keeping the lights on” and constantly going through the storage refresh cycle. They no longer need employees dedicated to technical support and now they can focus on improving core business competencies. It gave the company the freedom to innovate and explore new functionality, without having to worry about an inefficient data center. With fast, scalable storage and more cloud based functionality, vSAN has given CINgroup the resources it needs to maintain its competitive advantage and strengthen its leadership position in the market.
Read the full case study here.
