Case Study: E-Mail Hosting Provider achieves higher availability and improved customer service with NetApp

E-Mail Hosting Provider Improves Customer Service and Offers Higher Availability with NetApp

This IT services provider delivers e-mail hosting and cloud identity management to large enterprises and was struggling to reduce costs while improving performance and uptime for more than four million Zimbra mailboxes and associated dev/test environments. Growth on a purely physical server and siloed storage infrastructure made it hard to meet customer expectations for speed and availability and to scale without disruptive maintenance windows.

The company consolidated its environment onto VMware virtual machines backed by NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage (FAS3270/FAS3240/FAS3220) using NFS, Flash Pool tiering, and SnapMirror replication to enable nondisruptive operations and workload mobility. The move delivered higher performance and availability for customers, reclaimed about $200,000 per year in developer productivity by eliminating planned downtime, reduced operational overhead to three storage admins for a 4PB environment, and enabled seamless scaling to absorb large data influxes.