Case Study: Northwestern Mutual achieves 40% higher storage performance and 35% smaller server footprint with Dell Technologies

Standardizing financial operations with modern data center infrastructure

Northwestern Mutual faced growing IT infrastructure sprawl, aging hardware and software, and rising costs across its data centers. The firm partnered with Dell Technologies to simplify and standardize its environment, deploying solutions including Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell PowerMax storage, VxRail, iDRAC and Dell CloudIQ to modernize performance, integration and sustainability.

Dell Technologies implemented PowerEdge and PowerMax pods with VxRail/VMware integration and CloudIQ monitoring, delivering measurable gains: storage performance improved ~40%, the new platform now supports about 80% of the firm’s core infrastructure, server footprint shrank ~35% (from ~460 to ~300), data migration time and resources fell by ~50%, data reduction reached up to 4:1, and critical application response times moved from multiple seconds to about 60–100 ms—cutting time to fulfill customer requests from weeks to days or hours.

Northwestern Mutual

Adel Bekhiet

Sr. Director, Infrastructure and Cloud Services