Experian is Prepared to Meet Evolving Client Demands Thanks to SUSE Enterprise Storage

For over 125 years, Experian has supported communities and businesses with a range of trusted financial services. The company provides credit score, credit report and credit matching services for the consumer market and marketing services, business information services and fraud and payments tracking solutions for small and medium sized businesses. With 16,000 employees stationed in 37 countries, Experian is committed to mobilizing talent and technology to bring prosperity to consumers, businesses and society at large.

Challenge

The business intelligence business unit at Experian processes and analyses vast data sets from global sources, transforming this data into industry-leading business insights. To ensure that the insights Experian provides are timely and pertinent, it is essential that the company maintain an IT infrastructure with high reliability, strong availability, consistent performance and sufficient capacity

Over recent years, Experian witnessed a rise in data volumes generated by demand for 24/7 services and the ever-increasing digitization of the world economy, both of which placed strain on the company’s IT infrastructure.

Solution

Experian turned to SUSE for help addressing the challenges posed by rapid growth. To provide stable performance in the short term, the company migrated its ZFS file system to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Experian’s move to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provided the company with more time to explore available options for a long-term solution that would protect its existing storage hardware investment and align with the IT team’s budget for future investment.

Howard Samm, Head of Infrastructure for Business Intelligence at Experian, explains: “We spent several weeks exploring all of the options open to us and during our search we came across SUSE’s new storage offering—SUSE Enterprise Storage™. We had previously looked at an earlier incarnation of Ceph, and found it to be somewhat fragile. Knowing that SUSE was now willing to support the technology as part of a commercial offering gave us confidence. After all, we thought, if SUSE expects to turn a profit, they must be confident that the solution is stable!”

Howard Samm continues: “SUSE Enterprise Storage stood out from all of the other vendors we considered and offered everything that we needed,” explains Howard Samm. “As a softwaredefined storage solution, it enabled us to achieve the performance and availability we needed without requiring us to make large ongoing investments in specialized storage hardware.”

Using both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Enterprise Storage, Experian has modernized its IT infrastructure and harnessed the benefits of software-defined storage

Results

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Enterprise Storage at the heart of its IT infrastructure, Experian can overcome the technical challenges posed by high data volumes and is prepared to meet the evolving demands of its clients.

By unleashing the power of software-defined storage, Experian has simplified capacity planning and budgeting.

Experian is now better equipped to provide rapid insights for the businesses it serves and has an enterprise storage platform that it can develop and innovate with ease.

LEARN MORE…..

Link to digital case study: https://www.suse.com/success/stories/experian/

Link to PDF: https://www.suse.com/en-gb/docrep/documents/hkjk4h0g17/experian_cs_ee.pdf