Fortune 500 Insurance Company
Use Case:
Designing and implementing a new data center and migrating disaster recovery services, while ensuring business continuity on an aggressive timeline.
Client:
The largest customer-owned health insurance carrier in the United States.
Challenge:
The Client was outsourcing their disaster recovery to Global Systems Integrator, which was expensive and involved a substantial level of risk. This Global Systems Integrator handles disaster recovery for many clients and does so on a first-come first served basis, which makes the potential for slow recovery time in the event of a natural disaster significant. To save money and lower the risk of a slow system restoration process, the Client wanted to move disaster recovery in-house.
Concurrently, the Client was developing a new data center. Hence, the migration entailed updating disaster recovery critical applications and enabling technologies that would allow the Client to operate in a dual data center environment. The goal was to reduce the overall complexity of the data center architecture they were using at the time and optimize its infrastructure to better support disaster recovery from its future site.
Solution:
Yash Solutions was tapped to design, plan and implement the new data center and handle the migration of disaster recovery services. Yash began by organizing a standardized method to move the data for all RDBMS. This involved replicating the operating systems, storage and moving databases to new servers for all the applications. After considering application downtime and the time for data movement, Yash decided to use a metro mirror tool to move the data to the new servers.
This moved things along quickly while still maintaining data consistency: Yash moved 168 databases and applications to the new network within six months. This included the initial data move and concurrent testing of applications on both networks — from load and performance testing to the final cutover to the new network. Simultaneously, Yash migrated disaster recovery to the new data center using the universal replication tool Global Mirror and flash copy, which was automated to save time. As a result, recovery time was also minimized: Yash completed the whole project — from design to application migration, DR set up, proper testing and documentation — in 10 months.
Result:
The solution Yash implemented eliminated daily tasks that were mundane, labor-intensive and costly and helped the Client avoid unnecessary investment. The Client now exerts much better control over its infrastructure management functions and enjoys streamlined database management tasks and increased operational efficiency.
Specific gains include:
Increased standardization of servers allowing a higher server-to-admin ratio
Faster and easier issue-management through standardized images
Fewer outages due to errors from manual configuration
Better security compliance with consistent patch levels
Removal of hardware procurement and installation tasks from application implementation
Next level of footprint reduction and operating cost reduction through intelligent allocation and de-allocation of resources
Enhanced systems/network/infrastructure reliability
Full control over the Disaster Recovery Program
Significant capacity for future data center growth
Test environments functionally equivalent to production environments
SLA,configuration and data flow benchmarks similar to those of the Global Systems Integrator
Astandardized, monitored and optimized infrastructure that created a consistent and reliable environment
Advanced tooling that increased proactive monitoring and trend identification in all environments