Case Study: ICON plc achieves unified global storage and major cost savings with NetApp FlexPod

NetApp FlexPod Enables Global Storage Unity for ICON

ICON plc is a global clinical development services provider to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, with about 11,000 employees in 38 countries and a bespoke ICONIK platform that aggregates study data. Rapid growth — from roughly 200 TB to nearly 6 PB of data — and an organically grown, locally fragmented storage estate led to outages, costly administration and difficulty sharing files across sites, prompting a consolidation when a greenfield U.S. data centre was added.

ICON implemented NetApp FlexPod (clustered Data ONTAP) across its U.S. and Ireland data centres with Island Networks, migrating legacy arrays and rolling out Citrix services. The change cut capital and operational costs, simplified management, and delivered measurable gains: ~25% smaller storage footprint, server build times down ~75% (four hours to one), ~62U rack space reclaimed, about $100k saved by virtualizing an existing array, and scalable, uninterrupted service enabling IT-as-a-service for the business.

ICON plc

Shawn Foran

Senior Manager of Core IT Operations