Global pharmaceutical company Sanofi is consolidating 26 data centers to only three and has embarked on a planned migration of 4,000 applications as it struggled to cope with the complexity of an IT infrastructure built up through acquisitions.

More than 200 applications out of 4,000 have already been migrated to three new global data centers, avoiding 24 hours of downtime to date and accelerating Sanofi's massive IT consolidation plan.

Accenture helped Sanofi build its new IT infrastructure, complete with three data centers that are now fully interconnected and operate as a global private cloud.

Sebastian Roque, Storage Engineering Manager, Sanofi Group, said: “We are very pleased with EMC’s VPLEX. We can perform migrations between our data centers extremely easily. In fact, we've migrated 200 applications to date to the new data centers without the 24 hours of downtime we would have endured with traditional migration methods. Our massive consolidation of 4,000 total applications would be impossible without VPLEX, and once completed, will have avoided us at least 2-3 weeks of downtime."

"Our storage assets are shared as a single, centrally managed resource on our private cloud infrastructure, regardless of what data center they're located in. Our storage utilization has improved by up to 30%, helping us to maximize the value of our investments while postponing future storage expenditures."

Sanofi said it expects to cut operating costs by 20% when the migration is completed.

“As a result of a major acquisition and steady business growth, Sanofi was struggling to manage its geographically dispersed IT infrastructure that spanned 26 separate sites around the world. Additionally, Sanofi's employees were finding it increasingly difficult to access and share data--a capability that is critical to advancing Sanofi's pharmaceutical research, regulatory approvals and product distribution,” Sanofi said.

Sanofi implemented EMC VPLEX to migrate 4,000 applications to a centrally managed IT infrastructure while consolidating its sprawling 26 data centers to just three, now located in the US, France and Singapore.