Case Study: Thomson Reuters achieves 50× more searchable data and 2× faster results with NetApp

Thomson Reuters Unleashes New Products with a Shared IT Infrastructure Built on NetApp

Thomson Reuters, a global leader in professional information, needed to cut IT spend while building a flexible, scalable, and highly available shared infrastructure to support ambitious legal-research innovation. Facing massive data volumes (about 16 PB) and aggressive performance and uptime targets, the company required a platform that would let developers rapidly provision resources and deliver a next-generation search experience for law firms.

Thomson Reuters built a shared IT and private-cloud foundation on NetApp storage with VMware and Cisco networking, enabling rapid deployment, automated scale testing, and on-the-fly scalability. The result was the successful launch of WestlawNext—non-literal search across roughly 5 billion documents with ~2.5s average response (searching 50× more data and returning results 2× faster), 99.99% availability, first-year adoption above forecasts, avoidance of an estimated $65M new data-center cost, and about 25% lower power consumption.

Thomson Reuters

Cary Felbab

Vice President, Technology