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Princeton Insurance Increases Flexibility, Strengthens Competitive Edge with Private Cloud

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Princeton Insurance Increases Flexibility, Strengthens Competitive Edge with Private Cloud Success Story Princeton Insurance Increases Flexibility, Strengthens Competitive Edge with Private Cloud Another NetApp solution delivered by: Customer Profile and risk management. Previously, the KEY HIGHLIGHTS Princeton Insurance is the leading company used two different storage Industry medical professional liability insurer platforms. A NetApp FAS3020 system Insurance in New Jersey. The company insures stored digital images of all policy and approximately 16,000 New Jersey pol- claims files. This enabled the company The Challenge icy holders, including physicians, other to differentiate the customer experience Increase business agility by healthcare professionals, and health- because employees could answer cus- delivering IT as a service and care facilities. Since 1976, Princeton tomer questions right away instead of empower small IT team with Insurance has processed more than calling back after they retrieved the efficient management tools. 54,000 medical malpractice cases. The paper file. company attributes its longevity and The Solution Princeton Insurance used another success to outstanding customer ser- Created private cloud using storage system for major business ® vice, business intelligence from 30 NetApp storage and Cisco applications, including business intelli- ™ years of malpractice claims, and a Unified Computing System gence. The company continues to ® highly efficient staff. A team of just 5 IT (Cisco UCS ) with VMware create new data warehouse subsets ® professionals supports the entire infra- vSphere 4. (cubes), mining them for correlations, structure for a 150-person workforce patterns, and anomalies that factor into Benefits that serves 16,000 customers. everything from new product develop- • Accelerated resource provi- ment to financial-reserve management. sioning from weeks to minutes The Challenge • Accomplished data-in-place Princeton Insurance has a track record When the business intelligence platform upgrade of harnessing information technology reached capacity, the IT team reevalu- • Prepared for transition to IT for customer service and operational ated the overall storage strategy. The as a service efficiency. “To stay lean and still be timing was good, because Princeton • Protected investment with effective, we have to embrace innova- Insurance had decided to counter unified support for FC, FCoE, tion,” says Darby O’Neill, vice president “server sprawl” by virtualizing applica- and iSCSI of Technology for Princeton Insurance. tions and housing them on the Cisco Information is the lifeblood of the insur- Unified Computing System platform, ance industry, and Princeton Insurance which combines server, networking, depends on its storage platform for key storage access, and virtualization in a business activities ranging from cus- cohesive system managed as a single tomer service to product development entity. Adopting Cisco UCS would be “We’re an insurance company, not a technology company. Working with three industry leaders, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, is a wise choice for us because they have innovative, flexible, and cost-effective technology.” Darby O’Neill Vice President of IT, Princeton Insurance the first step in the company’s transition dently recommend NetApp storage for servers, including file shares and web to delivering IT as a service. “Our vision Cisco UCS because Cisco created vali- servers. The Cisco UCS 6100 Fabric was to create a secure private cloud dated designs for private clouds using Interconnect connects to the NetApp with shared resources that could be Cisco UCS, NetApp, and VMware,” FAS3140A storage array by way of a quickly provisioned, increasing business says Martin Klein, enterprise account Cisco MDS Multilayer Director 9000 agility while also reducing IT overhead,” manager for H.A. Storage Systems. Series. The fabric interconnect also says O’Neill. connects all server blades to a Cisco NetApp technology complements Cisco Catalyst® 6509 switch over 10 Gigabit The company needed a storage platform UCS, according to Klein. First, NetApp Ethernet. When the company has fin- ® that could house multiple applications MultiStore software enables Princeton ished moving all applications to the and data warehouses, applying different Insurance to logically partition the array Cisco UCS platform, the IT team will access policies to each. The platform to securely house different applications connect the NetApp FAS3140A system had to be easy to manage for the small on the shared platform. Second, multi- directly to Cisco UCS using FCoE, IT team. It needed to interoperate with protocol NetApp storage supports FCoE, eliminating the costs of Fibre Channel ® the existing Microsoft Exchange and providing the high bandwidth needed to switch ports and cabling. “We cabled ® Microsoft SQL Server application support VMware ESX on Cisco UCS. the Cisco UCS platform for data and ® ® environments, VMware ESX , and the Finally, Princeton Insurance could use the storage connectivity just once and legacy Brocade Fibre Channel switch NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) won’t have to do it again no matter how ™ infrastructure. And it had to support plug-in for VMware vCenter , a free many blade servers we add,” says Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to download, to minimize the number of Nicole Gadbois, director of Network connect directly to the converged net- management points. Operations for Princeton Insurance. work adapter in Cisco UCS, providing the high bandwidth to support VMware H.A. Storage Systems configured the O’Neill adds, “We’re an insurance ESX while eliminating the high costs NetApp FAS3140A system with two company, not a technology company. of Fibre Channel switches and cabling. 450GB disk shelves. One SATA shelf Working with three industry leaders, was repurposed from the existing NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, is a wise The Solution NetApp FAS3020 system and remains choice for us because they have stable, After evaluating both of its existing dedicated to the document imaging innovative, and cost-effective technology.” storage vendors, Princeton Insurance application. The application accesses selected the NetApp FAS3140A system the disk by way of the 4GB Fibre Channel Business Benefits as the converged storage platform for Cisco® MDS 9124 switch. The other Increased Flexibility for a the private cloud. H.A. Storage Systems, disk provides storage resources to the Competitive Advantage Inc., a value-added reseller of data applications housed on Cisco UCS as Princeton Insurance has amassed 30 storage products and services and a well as 25 standalone servers. All of the years of data, providing a wealth of participant in the NetApp Partner virtual servers boot from storage. hidden business intelligence for Program, provided design, deployment, new-product development and risk The Cisco UCS platform currently con- and support services. “We could confi- management. In the past, adding tains 3 blade servers hosting 35 virtual Fiber Channel NetApp FAS3140 Multipathed Cisco 9124 Cisco 6120 Fabric Interconnect Fiber Channel Cisco 9124 Cisco 6120 Fabric Interconnect Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Supporting VMware ESX, Hosting 35 Virtual Servers NetApp MultiStore Fiber Channel NetApp FAS3140 Cisco 6509 VCB Server Multipathed Fiber Channel Disk Shelves SATA Disk Shelf Figure 1) Princeton Insurance storage infrastructure. cubes to the data warehouse for new a small company, everyone has a lot of ESX. To accomplish the cutover, the types of analysis took weeks while the IT responsibility, and we’re conscious of partner presented duplicate LUNs and team scrambled to procure, configure, avoiding burnout,” she says. “The new then used software-based mirroring and test servers and storage. “With architecture helps because we don’t have within Microsoft Windows® to create an NetApp storage and the Cisco UCS to perform maintenance after normal exact copy. Lastly, H.A. Storage sepa- platform, we can provision resources in work hours.” Instead, the team simply rated the software mirroring to begin minutes,” says Gadbois. “Our private moves virtual machines from the blade using the copy on the NetApp system cloud gives us the flexibility to respond server that requires maintenance to instead of the copy on the previous to business opportunities by quickly another available server, which takes just storage system. Users immediately building new data warehouses, support- minutes. The virtual machines continue to noticed faster application performance. ing customer portals, and developing access the NetApp storage from the new data exchanges with insurers or insured.” server, with no additional action from IT. In all, Gadbois regards the private cloud as a competitive advantage, a way for IT As an example of how the NetApp, Standardizing on NetApp storage will to enable industry-leading customer ser- Cisco, and VMware solution increases also help the IT team manage a higher vice and business intelligence. “Years business agility, the IT team was recently volume of data with existing headcount, ago, our company started out with a asked to build a quality-assurance sys- because all NetApp products use a midrange system and shared storage, tem with an application staging area. common interface, the Data ONTAP® later migrating to individual servers with “Using NetApp storage and Cisco UCS, operating system. “We’re using the direct-attached storage,” she says. “The we were able to deploy the QA system same skills for the NetApp FAS3140A NetApp, Cisco, and VMware architecture in a matter of hours, helping our
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