Overview Ensures Reliable Data Accessibility Addresses Disaster
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CASE STUDY: ADMIRAL GROUP PLC Admiral Group plc Industry: Insurance BUsiNess ChaLLENge Headquarters: Cardiff, Wales Replace aging optical libraries with an accessible and Customers: 1.75 million in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy reliable, long-term storage Solution Components: IBM® Content Manager for iSeries® and System Storage™ DR550; system compatible with IBM Genus StorageView™ Alternative Storage Manager Content Manager for iSeries. Overview Ensures Reliable Data The ResULts Admiral Group plc, through its subsidiary Accessibility • Live data storage and company EUI Limited, sells private Admiral’s aging optical jukeboxes caused migration after only a four- insurance and ancillary products to the data retrieval headaches for users. day implementation. public through several brands. Its five sites Failures at least two to three times a week • Selection of IBM System in the U.K. and three sites in Europe serve prevented agents from accessing policy Storage DR550 to replace 1.75 million total customers. To comply and claims documentation until IT staff failing optical libraries. with data retention regulations, Admiral rebooted the jukeboxes. Admiral also had must store all documentation related to more volumes than slots in their optical • A modular storage solution insurance policies and claims for six years libraries. This required staff to manually with: and 21 years, respectively. With about mount external platters whenever agents – continuous uptime three million images captured annually, needed data. – fast retrieval speeds Admiral’s long-term storage system is a – network-attached StorageView and the DR550 now provide critical operational component. connectivity a reliable storage solution for Admiral. – disaster recovery Admiral uses IBM Content Manager Plus, Admiral gains network connectivity, – media security for iSeries to manage its customers’ which significantly improves document – high availability data. However, Content Manager can retrieval times. only use optical libraries for secondary storage. Admiral needed to replace its aging and unreliable jukeboxes. Steve Addresses Disaster Recovery Carnell, lead analyst programmer, says Requirements they considered updating to modern Without network-attach capabilities, jukeboxes, but ultimately chose the IBM Admiral’s old optical libraries did not System Storage DR550 as it better fit offer any disaster recovery options for their needs to retrieve and retain large the company. StorageView’s dual write quantities of information. capability allows the iSeries servers to The use of the DR550 with Content write to both of Admiral’s DR550 systems. Manager for iSeries isn’t possible without The DR550 can sit anywhere on the an alternative storage manager. Genus network for easy failover to the standby StorageView extends Content Manager’s system. storage options to the DR550 and all The DR550 is also a more dependable IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager-supported long-term archival system than optical systems. libraries and eliminates loss of data due to missing or corrupt platters. The DR550’s GENUS TECHNOLOGIES 6600 France Avenue S., Suite 425, Minneapolis, MN 55435 952.844.2626 www.genusllc.com disk system enables data management AboUT GENUS on multiple tiers of storage. Admiral can TechNOLogies choose the right storage mix for its archive Genus Technologies repository while still providing appropriate designs and implements access. pre-packaged and custom solutions built on IBM Provides Fast Implementation and Kofax technologies and Easy Migration that simplify the capture, storage, management Implementation of StorageView is fast. and delivery of all types of Genus arrived in Cardiff on a Monday, content. and Admiral was storing and migrating live data to its DR550s by Thursday. From lower volume corporate content to higher “It was quite interesting and exciting volume transactional data, to see the implementation happen Genus addresses the entire so quickly,” says Carnell. “You expect range of your enterprise’s something like that to take ages, and it content management was actually very smooth.” needs. Admiral is migrating 700 volumes of data, each containing more than 10,000 objects. The company’s goal is to retire its optical libraries. “Once we’ve finished migrating, the whole [data storage and retrieval] For more information process is operator free,” says Carnell. about Genus Technologies “We don’t need to think about it. The and its industry solutions, system does it for us, and that will make life a lot easier.” call 952.844.2626 or e-mail [email protected]. IBM, iSeries and Tivoli are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation. StorageView is a trademark of Genus Technologies. All trademarks are owned by their respective companies in the United States, and/or other countries. GENUS TECHNOLOGIES 6600 France Avenue S., Suite 425, Minneapolis, MN 55435 952.844.2626 www.genusllc.com.