D2L manages petabytes of data, delivers reliable data access using NetApp solution from AWS Marketplace

In this post, I will share a recent story about how a customer successfully migrated critical applications to the AWS Cloud to provide reliable, continuous access to data.

D2L is a Canadian learning company founded in 1999. It offers web-based applications to its customers, who are primarily people searching for new ways to learn online. As more customers use the company’s online applications, D2L is finding it more critical than ever to ensure its systems never go down. “We need to make sure our product is always going to work,” says Mike Maloney, vice president of SaaS, security, and IT for D2L. Additionally, D2L students were always seeking more engaging learning content. However, delivering innovative content was difficult because D2L hosted many of its applications in an on-premises data center that required too much hands-on management.

D2L addressed its challenges by moving dozens of educational applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, a project that was successful enough to convince the company to move its entire application portfolio to AWS. As D2L prepared for this migration, though, it was concerned about the risks of moving high volumes of critical data. “It’s risky work to move petabytes of data and not lose it,” states Maloney. D2L reduced the risk by turning to their longtime technology provider NetApp, an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). D2L used NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP (formerly ONTAP Cloud) for AWS, data management software that provides protection, visibility, and control for your cloud-based workloads on AWS. D2L procured the solution quickly and easily from AWS Marketplace.

D2L securely migrated data from its data center to AWS and used NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP to ultimately manage multiple petabytes of application data. Relying on the NetApp solution’s deduplication features, D2L lowered the number of files it had to migrate and experienced a 20–60 percent space savings for certain workloads.

D2L can now ensure high availability for their online learning applications. “Our data is always available for learners. We also minimized any disruption to our customers during the migration because of both AWS and Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS,” Maloney says. The organization has also given more time back to its IT team, so they can allocate more resources to new feature development. “Moving to AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP lets us focus on our core business while leveraging the breadth of what AWS and its partner ecosystem can bring to the table to help us,” says Maloney. And with the scalability of the AWS Cloud, D2L is equipped to support even more students. “Using AWS, we can now grow our business with a relatively flat headcount,” says Maloney. “Overall, we have the platform to scale our business tenfold from where we are now.”

Read the full case study.

NetApp is an APN Technology Partner with solutions available in AWS Marketplace.