When RIAS planned to consolidate and secure their data in order to minimise risk, they required a technological solution that was unfailing, fast and able to keep pace with their rapid growth. They turned to IT provider Blue Chip to assist.
>> The Client
RIAS is the market leading insurance provider for the Over 50s. Since their launch in 1992, RIAS has become one of the fastest growing insurance intermediaries providing home, car and travel insurance to nearly a million customers.
With ever expanding volumes of critical data, RIAS had reached a point where their storage requirements had outgrown their existing infrastructure in terms of space, reliability and performance. RIAS looked to Blue Chip to design, plan and implement a new Storage Area Network (SAN).
>> Solution
The Blue Chip storage solution was built on three EMC CX4-120 CLARiiON SANs. The three SANs are housed separately in two RIAS buildings, with the third SAN in a managed DR facility. The SANs have increased storage volumes - up to 10TB; provide real-time replication of critical information across the three sites using Vizioncore's vReplicator and native database replication; run on high performance Fibre Channel hard drives and delivers 99.999% uptime.
All data was migrated from the existing storage array including, Exchange and Oracle data and VMware virtual machines. The virtual infrastructure was also upgraded to VMware vSphere 4.
>> Success and Company Benefit
The new SANs have provided improved data protection and business continuity for RIAS.
Andy Hopkins, IT Infrastructure Manager at RIAS comments "The planning, thoroughness and professional approach of all the Blue Chip staff meant that such a critical project was completed successfully without any problems"
Advanced Resource Managers (ARM) approached leading ICT reseller Blue Chip to help them address their business continuity issues and leverage new technologies to maintain their position as one of the fastest growing and successful recruitment companies in the UK.”
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