Most large organizations are looking to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to support their increasingly complex technical environments. However, it can be an overwhelming change for IT teams and decision makers to work through.

One Global Health Services Company was struggling with this common HCI decision. The organization’s aging environment consisted of disparate network, storage and compute systems that caused frequent outages.

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An easy path to HCI

These separate systems created an uncoordinated lifecycle and unwieldy management processes, which were expensive to operate and maintain. Infrastructure outages began to impact their end customers: individual users, large corporations and government agencies that turned to them for a complete portfolio of health services, from insurance plans to pharmacy benefits.

Realizing the impact this had on business, the organization attempted to evaluate HCI solutions, but they had never experienced a compelling business event that warranted the amount of resources needed to perform this scale of testing and implementation on their own. IT decision makers were hesitant to implement a change due to the systems’ intricacy.

Without the staff or bandwidth to conduct a thorough independent evaluation, they turned to WWT to help cut their time to decision and ultimately, the market.

Selecting and testing the HCI solution

The customer had four main objectives in evaluating HCI solutions:

simplify the support experience;
reduce operating costs;
simplify hardware lifecycles; and
increase the speed of innovation.

We first engaged in multiple workshop sessions to showcase HCI vendors that could meet the customer’s requirements and business problems. Through discussions with our HCI and industry experts, the customer determined that a NetApp solution was the best choice for their needs.

To validate their choice, we completed a full buildout the NetApp HCI solution on-demand with personnel from the customer (support engineers, automation engineers, architects and senior managers), which showcased the simplicity of the architecture.

Learn more about NetApp HCI.

A comprehensive deployment

We provided assistance at every step of the transformation, even performing high-level operational training on two separate occasions, as well as delivering critical post-sales support when the customer attempted to integrate the solution into their ACI environment.

During deployment, the customer began to backtrack, as they realized uncertainty around integration with their Cisco ACI layer. We were then able to help validate integration, independent of NetApp requirements, and propelled the project forward when deployment was stalled.

Increased efficiency and decreased complexity

This organization realized the opportunity of leveraging every aspect of WWT’s service portfolio, from pre-sales consulting and system integration testing to user training and post-sales support.

HCI experts within our engineering group use the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to guide organizations through identifying objectives and matching solution capabilities with their goals, as well as with existing infrastructure. And with staff uniquely trained on NetApp HCI setup and deployment, we can greatly simply onsite deployment for our customers.

Our role as a trusted advisor and technical expert around HCI allowed this change to take place quickly and easily in this customer’s environment. They are now seeing a drastic increase in storage efficiency due to deduplication and realized a 2:1 reduction in the number of servers needed to support their environment.

Do you have questions on what HCI can do for your infrastructure? Schedule a lab with our experts.

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