Experian is a global leader in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services. The Ireland-based company supports clients in more than 80 countries.
“Data is our product,” says Robert Abner, Senior Network Engineer, Experian. “We gather information from a variety of sources, and then we analyze, process, and package it for our customers. There’s a lot of data coming in and going out at all times, and our services need to be available at all times.”
This isn’t easy when the services are delivered from dozens of data centers and colocation sites in multiple regions. So Experian launched a global initiative to standardize network architecture and adopt a consistent approach to how data is transported and how applications are managed. It also wanted network automation, including the ability to make changes universally instead of one switch, one data center, one region at a time.
Experian deployed Cisco ACI with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers as the foundational elements of its data center initiative. It also implemented ACI’s multi-site functions. “Using ACI Multipod, we’ve been able to logically connect multiple sites within the US, the UK, and Brazil, which allows them to be managed as one big data center in each of those regions,” Abner says.