Australian financial services leader Suncorp has consolidated its storage environment and implemented an IT as a service model based on the Dynamic Data Centre concept developed by NetApp.

The overhaul has allowed Suncorp to standardise the management of its storage environment, enabling greater storage efficiencies and improving service levels across its business.

Jeff Smith, Group Executive Business Technology of Suncorp said, “We decided it was time to consolidate and standardise our storage environment with NetApp as our annual storage growth was unsustainable.”

Suncorp is deploying NetApp FAS6070, FAS6080 and FAS6030 systems, VMware and NetApp storage virtualization technologies for its storage, network and hosting infrastructure.

The NetApp implementation has allowed Suncorp to reduce its data centres from three locations to two, with the pre-production and production data centres linked by IP-SAN. Suncorp is one of the first customers in the world to virtualise its core and aggregation layers with Cisco Nexus 7000 switches.

Mr Smith said, “We worked with NetApp to create a best practice design for our storage infrastructure through the use of virtualisation. By implementing NetApp, Cisco and VMware technology, we have increased our storage efficiency, introduced greater flexibility and reduced our total IT costs.

"We have also improved our ability to develop and bring new product and service applications to market and respond to customer demands quickly.”