Case Study: Discovery achieves greater control and visibility of virtual storage with VMware VSAN

Discovery achieves greater control, management and visibility with vSAN

Discovery Limited, a Johannesburg‑based shared‑value insurer serving over 5.1 million customers globally, faced recurring infrastructure outages and limited visibility into its VMware environment. Hardware instability and siloed server, storage and SAN systems made root‑cause analysis difficult and tied the company to costly third‑party arrays, so Discovery set out to reduce external dependencies and gain finer control of its virtualised storage.

Discovery adopted VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), testing in beta before rolling into production; today US and UK operations are fully on VSAN and 50% of head‑office has migrated, with the rest planned over three years. The move delivered greater control and visibility of storage I/O, reduced latency and simplified the SAN, enabled policy‑based management, thin provisioning and horizontal scaling, and improved performance and TCO while positioning the company to move roughly 95% of its virtual footprint to VSAN.

Discovery

Johan Marais

Virtualisation Manager