A Global Financial Services Provider

A global financial services provider wanted to simplify the management of their NAS and file server infrastructure, so file migrations would be totally transparent to users. After understanding their requirements and data center assets in detail, Corporate Technologies IT Strategy Group recommended NAS virtualization, and undertook a technology analysis project to determine which specific vendor/product would best meet client needs.

Our assessment included high-level architecture discussions with eight vendors, three of whom had NAS virtualization products worthy of further investigation. We tested each of the three products in our Technology Lab, replicating customer-specific platforms for both clients and file servers. Products were rated on a ten-point scale against their ability to satisfy each of many customer requirements. We also stress-tested each product to evaluate its performance in a real-world deployment, to make sure that the product we recommended would work properly in our client’s actual environment.

At the conclusion of our analysis, the product we recommended clearly bettered all others in its performance—providing our client transparent file migration and ease-of-infrastructure management. This NAS virtualization product has been adopted worldwide, and is currently deployed in our client’s top-five major data centers.

Fact: We analyzed eight NAS virtualization products—extensively

replication-testing three in our Lab—then recommended

the one that best met client requirements for transparent file migration.