Case Study: Insurance

 

Profile:

• Firm is the 7th largest U.S. commercial insurer and the 14th largest U.S. property & casual insurer. They provide insurance protection to more than 1 million businesses and professionals in the U.S. and internationally. Headquartered in a major US city, they have offices throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Client Environment:

• Network latency had been determined to be a major issue due to the heavy use of three tier client server applications. There was disagreement on whether the original plan of a phased relocation would provide the required application response times.
• The environment consisted of:
• Wintel: 375 servers
• Mainframe: 2 enterprise servers
• Unix: 160 servers

The Solution:

• To mitigate the network latency issue, the original phased migration approach was re-worked. The re-worked approach was to move the pre-production environment on one two weekend and the production environment of a single three day weekend.
• To minimize the system outage and maximize the amount of acceptance testing, the amount of physical equipment relocation was minimized. The use of replication technology allowed for more than 12+ hours to allocated to end-user acceptance testing for validating the production move.

Critical Success Factors:

• Adoption of a proven methodology and approach
• Used a collaborative approach with the key vendors rather than directive approach
• Added resources with experience in data center relocations to supplement existing staff