Case Study: Empire Life achieves 16:1 datacenter footprint reduction and 50–65% IT cost savings with Nutanix web-scale infrastructure

Empire Life Moves from Mainframe to Web-Scale

Empire Life, a Canadian life and investment insurer founded in 1923, faced rising costs and operational risk from an aging mainframe and large SAN backend. The IT team needed a more cost-effective, scalable platform to support mission‑critical financial workloads, reduce datacenter footprint, and modernize disaster recovery while enabling hybrid-cloud initiatives.

Empire Life migrated production, development, testing, and VDI workloads to Nutanix’s web‑scale hyper‑converged platform, deploying 13 nodes/100TB in under half a day. Results included a 16:1 reduction in rack space (192U to 12U), 50–65% lower IT infrastructure costs, four‑times the IOPS with much lower latency, an estimated 40% immediate performance gain, and RTOs cut from 48 hours to minutes at roughly one‑third the prior DR cost, with simpler management and easy scalability.

Empire Life

Jeff Babcock

IT Technical Infrastructure Manager