Aspire Accelerates Hybrid-Cloud Transition for Global Pharmaceutical
Industry: Pharmaceutical
Practice Area: Data Center
With 17,000 employees in over 100 countries, this global pharmaceutical company is committed to working with physicians, healthcare providers and patients to deliver innovative and meaningful treatments that help people around the world live longer, healthier lives. The company markets a portfolio of leading brands and best-in-class products for the central nervous system, eye care, medical aesthetics and dermatology, gastroenterology, women’s health, urology and anti-infective therapeutic categories.
Challenge: Sizing up the cloud
The client wanted to accelerate their expansion to the public cloud in order to support a new research & development initiative. Their goal was to run 70% of their workloads in the public cloud by 2021.
Solution: Better control of workloads
Aspire took a consultative approach to understanding the client’s existing workloads, compute and storage resource requirements, and the overall goals for the initiative. Leveraging Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM), the Aspire team modeled what-if scenarios based on the client’s real-time environment to analyze the performance and accurately forecast capacity needs. The proof of concept uncovered excessive over-provisioning of on-premise infrastructure resources and unused storage volumes in Azure and AWS for which they were being billed monthly. The findings revealed an overall overpayment for public cloud use of approximately 27%.
By investing in CWOM, the client was able to automate workload placement, scaling, and capacity to assure performance while maximizing efficiency. Based on policy, they could also automatically scale down Microsoft Azure virtual machines or Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances, storage tiers, and database tiers, reducing costs without impacting performance. CWOM contributed to an overall 73% cost reduction in the migration costs from their private data center to the cloud.
Results: Business outcomes achieved with CWOM
- Lowered cost of ensuring application performance on premise by reducing overprovisioned infrastructure by 86%
- Provided visibility into and lowered public cloud spend by almost 30%
- Enabled the client’s differentiated R&D program by accelerating the migration from legacy on premise applications to public cloud
The client was able to quickly plan migrations of their private workloads to the cloud and enable automated placing and sizing decisions for their workloads across their hybrid cloud. Additionally, the client integrated CWOM with ServiceNow, enabling end-to-end automation for workload sizing and placement.
