Financial Solutions Provider Saves Over $200k Annually on Private Cloud Infrastructure with Ensono Envision® Advisor

A leading provider of risk and compliance software solutions, helping clients navigate the complexities of financial disclosure and regulatory compliance. As a prominent player in the financial services industry, this client is committed to delivering high-quality infrastructure services to its internal application teams while maintaining a competitive edge in the market.

The client’s Operations team needed to optimize its VMware Private Cloud infrastructure costs without compromising system availability. Virtual machines were dispersed across numerous VMware datastores, leading to performance and utilization inefficiencies, especially with the dynamic nature of their environment and ongoing decommission activities as virtual machines were consolidated or upgraded to newer systems. Ongoing migrations and legacy physical equipment decommission activity further contributed to data center capacity inefficiency by creating sub-optimal rack layouts.

The client has been an Ensono client and strategic partner since its inception. Over the course of this partnership, Ensono has grown with the client, adapting to its rapidly evolving business needs and market challenges by providing critical IT services via a utility consumption model. Chief among these services is Ensono’s Utility Data Storage (UDS) service, which allows the client to provision and consume high-performance data storage directly from Ensono on an as-needed basis. This helps the client avoid significant capital investment in expensive dedicated storage arrays purchased from a third-party hardware vendor and allows it to manage its high-performance storage needs efficiently and cost-effectively.

Through the Ensono Envision Advisor program, combined with regular insights and analysis provided by the Ensono Technical Advisor program, the client was able to drive further cost optimization and operational efficiencies at both the virtual and physical infrastructure levels. Ensono conducted a thorough analysis of the private cloud datastore and datacenter footprints and found that, by consolidating underutilized smaller datastores into larger ones, we could reduce complexity and improve storage allocation. Using larger VMware datastores gave the client’s virtual machines increased virtual disk performance by taking advantage of higher IOPS per Gigabyte provided by the consolidated storage. Ensono also identified several data center racks for device consolidation, potentially enabling the client to decommission vacant racks.

• Achieved monthly utility data storage savings of $13,880 (Annualized savings $166,560) through VMware datastore and SAN optimization
• Increased VMware datastore IOPS performance hosted on Ensono utility data storage
• Achieved monthly data center rack cost savings of $3900 (Annualized savings $46,800)
• The client realized further cost savings by removal of third-party support after rack consolidation
• 100% infrastructure availability was maintained during the optimization process