Case Study: CannonDesign achieves seamless global collaboration and near-zero downtime with NetApp FlexPod and All Flash FAS

Solving Society’s Greatest Challenges Through Design

CannonDesign, a top-10 innovative architecture firm with a single‑firm, multioffice model spanning 15 global locations, needed reliable, standardized IT to support 24/7 data sharing and high‑performance VDI for design workflows. After suffering missed SLAs and frequent downtime under an outsourced provider, the firm brought IT in‑house and set a six‑month goal to build a robust, easy‑to‑manage datacenter that would deliver consistent user experience worldwide.

CannonDesign deployed a validated FlexPod datacenter with NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AltaVault backing up to Microsoft Azure, and Cisco UCS servers (including NVIDIA M4 blades) to support VDI and rendering. The solution cut the footprint from 45 racks to 13, eliminated planned and unplanned downtime (disaster recovery under 20 minutes), reduced support calls, and sped application access from minutes to seconds—enabling secure, global collaboration and freeing IT to focus on innovation.

CannonDesign

Jason Sinsabaugh

Storage Engineer