Case Study: Cherokee Nation Businesses achieves agile, standardized shared IT services and $1M savings with NetApp FlexPod

Cherokee Nation Businesses Standardize on FlexPod to Support an Agile, Shared Services Model

Cherokee Nation Businesses (CNB), which manages a wide portfolio of subsidiaries including major entertainment and hospitality operations, needed to consolidate disparate IT environments and support rapid, double‑digit growth while maintaining a lean IT team and 24/7 uptime. The challenge was to move from siloed infrastructures to a centralized shared‑services model that could scale across diverse lines of business.

Working with NetApp and Presidio, CNB standardized on FlexPod (NetApp FAS3240/FAS2240, Cisco UCS/Nexus, VMware) with SnapMirror for disaster recovery, virtualized core systems, and automated management tools. The solution saved about $1M by virtualizing the casino management system, delivered nearly 300% storage efficiency (presenting 350TB with 87TB physical and ~200TB saved by dedupe), enabled five‑nines uptime, let the team manage double the workload with no additional staff, and supported rapid rollouts (five casinos in three days).

Cherokee Nation Businesses

Clay Guthery

Systems Engineer