VMWARE CASE STUDY

Discovery Corporate IT achieves greater control, management and visibility of virtual storage infrastructure with deployment of Virtual SAN CLIENT Discovery Limited When Discovery’s Corporate IT discovered that its infrastructure dependencies were a ecting the stability of INDUSTRY and Health its VMware environment, it turned to VMware’s Virtual SAN solution (VSAN) to alleviate these dependencies and better architect its virtualised environment. KEY CHALLENGES Discovery is a shared value insurance company and authorised fi nancial services Infrastructure dependencies provider, providing both employers and individual clients with Health, Life, Short-term in the company was a ecting insurance and Savings and Investment products. From its head o ce in Johannesburg the stability of the VMware , the company services more than 5.1 million global customers in South environment, Discovery Africa, the UK, US, , , and . also wanted more visibility and control of its storage In 2015 Discovery was named by Fortune The Solution magazine as one of the top 51 companies environment as part of a Discovery is a wall-to-wall virtualised in Fortune’s inaugural Change the World three-year plan to reduce VMware environment. In early 2015 list, Discovery was placed 17th ahead dependencies on third-party Marais and his team began looking for a of established brands like IBM, Nike, suppliers and costly disk solution that would reduce the VMware Unilever, and Starbucks. Most of the arrays. environment’s reliance on external company’s global IT operations are run hardware; provide visibility into the from Johannesburg and the company is environment; reduce complexity as an active member of VMware Customer SOLUTION well as enable the company to deploy Technical Advisory Board (CTAB). Looking to VSAN the company a more scalable infrastructure stack began on a road that would for its VMware environment and the provide it greater visibility of The Challenge applications dependant on it that would its virtualised environment as “After encountering a series of ultimately reduce Total Cost of Ownership well as map the foundations infrastructure outages that we identifi ed (TCO). were due to hardware instability, we for a new virtualisation “Our goal was to get away from third- embarked on a process to identify and footprint, that includes party dependencies in the environment, fi nd better technologies to help improve storage, in the business. so we began looking at a number of the our physical and virtual infrastructure market leaders in this area. While the stack,” states Johan Marais, Virtualisation technology fi t was in many cases right, Manager at Discovery. it didn’t make sense for us to veer away “What we uncovered was that, when from a VMware solution So we looked at there was instability across the traditional VSAN as a solution.” server, storage or SAN environment our To ascertain the viability of the VMware ecosystem would simply not technology in the business the team be available. When this happened we were asked to provide a three-year ROI fi rstly had no control, and secondly it was roadmap where, if using VSAN, it could di cult to determine the root cause of eventually replace all of its VMware based problems due to the complexity of the array infrastructure with VSAN. integrated environments managed within the respective silos,” he adds. Discovery then embarked on being part of the initial VSAN Beta testing, it VMWARE CASE STUDY

BUSINESS BENEFITS completed a test VDI cluster for part for storage. As virtualisation teams we • Greater control of the of its Citrix environment. Based on a need to take these learnings and fully successful outcome, the company quickly understand them so that we can better infrastructure stack to rolled it into a production environment as deploy, use and manage a storage manage its VMware it became commercially available. Today environment. Storage capacity planning environment 50% of the head o ce environment has now falls on our shoulders instead of • Improved performance at the been migrated, and Discovery’s US and being siloed in the storage team. UK operations are now 100% operational storage, virtualisation and “We also need to embrace concepts on VSAN. The South African environment application layer like deduplication, compression and will be migrated over a three-year period software-defi ned storage – all of which • Dramatic simplifi cation of due to the size of the SAN footprint are foreign concepts to a VMware admin. and the fi nancial impact of changing the storage environment How we consume, look after and manage equipment before the end of its lease and improved visibility, these environments from end-to-end is a period. management and automation learning curve,” adds Marais. • The ability to better scale the Business Benefi ts Marais also says that the way in which storage infrastructure storage is now procured has also “The VSAN platform has given us greater changed. In the past when an array was • Flexibility in the choice of control of our infrastructure stack as procured it was for the long term and well as improved management of the hardware for the storage there was incremental growth over time VMware environment. In addition, it has environment – with the new design a orded by VSAN, also provided greater performance and Discovery is able to do quarterly growth • Created a better simplifi cation of the SAN infrastructure, approximations on compute, storage and understanding of existing a orded us freedom when scaling the network because the platform scales workloads and visibility infrastructure as well as fl exibility in our horizontally. “This is a huge positive and it choice of hardware,” states Marais. on how to better provision gives business big gains because you can storage to meet these The roll out was, according to Discovery, shorten the time to provision the storage demands seamless from an integration point of elements on VSAN”.” view. Application performance and He also cites that another key learning storage IO latency has been dramatically VMWARE TECHNOLOGY between the virtualisation and storage decreased and the company has been teams was to understand how they • VMware Virtual SAN – VSAN able to simplify the methodology used balance the renewal of arrays within within vRealize Automation because it the business. “When these come up for natively consumes the VSAN stack. renewal we need to know how much “VSAN has given us fantastic visibility we need to feed the environment – in into our storage IO patterns for every the past we weren’t necessarily aligned. application and this management You need to work closer with storage function now sits in the virtualisation to defi ne hardware refresh cycles. And team. What also makes a huge di erence then you also have to be closer to your is that we are experiencing space savings hardware vendor’s software stack, because VSAN is thin provisioned; this especially RAID controller fi rmware.” assists us greatly in keeping the storage footprint smaller as well as reducing the Features unit cost of supplying a virtual server” “We pretty much use the entire stack, says Marais. it has great features in health check The new VSAN infrastructures also allow capabilities which makes it easy to Discovery to leverage o storage policy manage. We will be taking advantage of based management, giving priority to performance management in the web applications requiring higher workload, client and from an overall monitoring I/O and protection policies. perspective there is native integration with vROPS giving us an overall view Virtualisation Learnings from a VSAN perspective.” According to Marais there are a number of learnings a VMware administrator can Looking ahead benefi t from when moving storage into “Discovery is committed to the VSAN a virtualised environment, particularly technology. What we have seen is that around how storage is managed. the VSAN roadmap is aggressive and feature rich, which is a benefi t to us as “With VSAN we now have visibility into a client. Coming down the line we will key performance indicators and metrics

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be looking at making use of stretched clusters, all fl ash arrays and deduplication and compression will play a big part in reducing our footprint even further from a resource point of view. Over the course of the next two years Discovery will be VSAN only, where it makes sense for us – this equates to about 95% of our virtualisation footprint. We will continue to embrace the new features where needed – and carry on contributing to the evolution of the product.

“For us, embracing VSAN is a component of the Software-Defi ned Data Centre we enable – future considerations for us include Software-Defi ned Networking and automation. It gets us closer to a software-defi ned everything future and forms part of our vision to fully service Global infrastructure for the group.

“As a business we have to evolve and make IT more accessible to our customers. We intend to be innovative and bold by using use newer technologies, and stay relevant in the business we are in,” ends Marais.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2016 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: 16Q3 Discovery UK