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The scale of stored data enterprises often contend with is huge, sometimes reaching into multiple petabytes. Cloud migration, storage management, and storing data comes with its own set of challenges, especially when data is continuously growing or even outgrowing its existing storage solution.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how four different enterprises used Cloud Volumes ONTAP to gain tighter control over petabytes of data, particularly while migrating between cloud services or from on-premises data centers.
Use these links to jump down to the individual case studies, or read on for more:
- The Challenges of Petabyte-Scale Storage and Migration for Enterprises
- How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Helps With Petabyte-Scale Data Management
- Make Your Petabyte-Scale Deployment a Success
The Challenges of Petabyte-Scale Storage and Migration for Enterprises
The traditional solutions built to store and manage data aren’t usually built for amounts as big as petabytes, presenting unique challenges for enterprises with massive amounts of data. As enterprise data estates continue to grow, these organizations are faced with a number of challenges: from rising costs and security concerns to new scalability, maintenance, and mobility complications.
How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Helps With Petabyte-Scale Data Management
Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps solve the challenges inherent in PB-scale deployment across hybrid and multicloud data estates. In this section we’ll take a look at several customer success stories to see how the solution looks in action.
Multinational Wireless EDA Company Manages 100 PB in AWS
This Cloud Volumes ONTAP user is an electronic design automation (EDA) company that makes semiconductors, services, and software related to wireless technology. While aiming to continue to innovate and design new chip technology, this enterprise ran into multiple roadblocks related to its data network.
As the design process creates massive amounts of information that needs to be accessed and processed by multiple team members, this enterprise ran into problems with storage systems running low on capacity, data getting out-of-sync, and a distributed infrastructure that was too complex to mirror. As a result, collaboration and progress were impacted.
The company turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP on AWS for help in managing 100 PBs of data and saw significant results. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the company was able to:
- Easily move hundreds of PBs to the cloud using SnapMirror®
- Save on costs and increase scalability for its data-intensive chip designing processes while maintaining support for fully hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Replicate frequently accessed data to the cloud with FlexCache®, eliminating the need to mirror complete data sets and reducing data per workload by 90%, allowing the company to burst to the cloud on demand
- Reduce latency and increase performance with intelligent NVMe caching capabilities, in some cases even outperforming AWS-native services
Willis Towers Watson Manages 1.2 PB of Data in Azure
Willis Towers Watson (WTW) is a global advisory firm dealing in financial advising, risk management, and insurance. With operations in 140 countries and over 45,000 employees, the company needed storage that would allow its data to remain available, secure, and provide a scalable solution. As the company creates risk models and has a 10-year retention policy, WTW was faced with handling huge amounts of data that would see little access over its lifecycle.
WTW didn’t have a system in place to automatically erase data after the required retention period, taking up tons of storage space and leaving the company with limited capacity. Additionally, WTW developed a new cloud-based software offering that required more scalability, availability, data protection, and management than native solutions could offer. WTW turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP to help store and manage the PBs of data it had to deal with, and gained these benefits:
- Significant cost savings and optimized storage using Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s data tiering feature, which automatically transfers infrequently used data between low-cost Azure Blob storage and Azure disks as needed
- SnapMirror for DR replication and SnapVault® for retention helped WTW streamline its backup and disaster recovery processes for PBs of data
- The pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) model enabled WTW to successfully deploy new Cloud Volumes ONTAP instances in 24 hours across multiple cloud regions
- Migrated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) data to the cloud to manage WFH demands
- BlueXP API calls provide cloud automation that helps WTW employees automate routine tasks so they can focus on other important projects
Read more about how Willis Towers Watson unlocked the full potential of cloud storage.
Global Energy Company Manages 3 PB of Data in Google Cloud
This global energy technology company creates products that deal with the transmission of renewable power and is working to move its SAP workloads, which are used by more than 750,000 users in 84 countries, to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
With 3 PB of data to transfer and manage, the company was concerned about data scalability and constant availability. The company turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP for assistance in moving this large quantity of data to the cloud.
After using Cloud Volumes ONTAP to fully migrate its data to Cloud Volumes ONTAP on Google Cloud, the company saw a number of advantages:
- Advanced data protection capabilities for the company’s file services, including high availability, disaster recovery, and backup
- Multiprotocol file access provided the only solution with native SMB protocol support on GCP for enterprise file storage, serving the 80% of the company’s applications that are Windows-based
- Unlimited backups reducing complexity and improving TCO
- Better overall TCO and global availability when compared to native file services and alternative solutions
International Semiconductor Industry Supplier Manages 3.2 PB Data in Azure
As a supplier of photolithography systems for the production of integrated circuits for the semiconductor industry, this company supplies some of the biggest electronics companies in the world. The company was looking for ways to reduce costs and targeted its DR data center in Azure.
With a data set of 3.2 PB, the company needed hybrid manageability to integrate its on-prem workloads to Azure. By leveraging Cloud Volumes ONTAP, this semiconductor supplier was able to achieve its migration goals while keeping costs low. Here’s what it accomplished:
- Cost-effectively store data using object storage in Azure Blob with the help of automatic data tiering
- High-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure
- Replicating HPC data for dev/test as well as training environments
- Data protection with remote secondary copies of workload data
Read more about leveraging Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the EDA sector.
Make Your Petabyte-Scale Deployment a Success
One of the biggest challenges of managing petabytes of data is finding a cost-effective storage solution that protects all of the data and allows easy mobility between environments. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, these four enterprises were not only able to cut costs, but were also able to migrate massive amounts of data while keeping it secure and consistently available.
