Logicalis

Logicalis helps Swinton refresh its storage and disaster recovery regime

The Client

Founded in 1957 and now part of the French company, Mutuelles du Mans Assurances, Swinton Group has grown to become the UK’s largest high street insurance intermediary. With more than 550 branches and over 4000 employees, Swinton has its sights firmly set on becoming the UK’s No 1 personal insurance provider.

The Challenge

As a one-stop source of insurance for everything from customers' homes, cars and caravans to their businesses, holidays and pets, Swinton Insurance is responsible for over two million insurance policies, a large proportion of which are now initiated via the Internet. Such was the rapid growth in its business volumes that the insurer’s IT infrastructure faced unprecedented demands for additional server and storage capacity. It had become clear that tactical solutions were no longer the answer to the problem.

Added to which, Swinton’s existing disaster recovery (DR) process had become a major concern to the company’s management since it was heavily reliant on individual server builds and recovery from tape archives. The breadth of systems and volumes of data also meant that recovery times for key business applications were moving beyond the target window.

“The huge success of our Internet activity meant we were anticipating significant exponential growth,” says Swinton’s Head of IT Infrastructure, Rob Davidson. “As well as experiencing increased data volumes, we also had a greater need to store and analyse data in real time to keep pace with the dynamic nature of our business and to ensure we offer the appropriate discounts at any given time.

“As a result, we were struggling to cope with the dramatic increase in the server population and its associated storage at our Manchester data centre. Much of our equipment was also reaching the end of its life, so we knew we had to make some significant investment decisions. We faced a choice between a costly and disruptive relocation to larger premises or a major overhaul of our hardware infrastructure.”

Deciding on the latter course of action, Davidson and his team set about drafting an IT Infrastructure Strategy, outlining their five-year vision for supporting the company’s business plan. This proposed the consolidation of Swinton’s storage equipment and the virtualisation of its servers to bring about a more agile, scalable and resilient architecture.

After working with two outside consultancies to validate and test their assumptions, the Swinton team next sought a vendor-independent technology consulting partner to help design a storage consolidation and server virtualisation solution, prepare a detailed set of requirements, and work objectively with vendors to select the most appropriate infrastructure.

Of the solution providers short-listed for consideration, Davidson says Logicalis demonstrated the widest range of competencies and expertise in each of the technologies involved. “We selected them as they were clearly prepared to take ownership of delivering a total solution, not just the constituent parts of the project. This effectively eliminated the risk to Swinton of engaging separate companies to deliver networking, storage and servers. It meant we could form a partnership with a single supplier who would fulfil all our requirements.”

Aside from its processing and storage requirements, Davidson says Swinton also needed to rethink its DR policy. “Using a ‘cold’ standby service - which we tested twice a year - we found it was taking longer and longer to recover due to the increased data volumes and complexity of our systems”

The Solution

Of the possible storage solutions proposed by Logicalis, Davidson says NetApp’s mid-range technology offered greatest scope for scheduled replication throughout the day, plus varying tiers of protection for data in relation to its importance.

“We have systems that only require replication every few hours or even once a week - whereas alternative solutions meant everything on the SAN would have to be replicated automatically. The NetApp solution proposed by Logicalis offered us greater control and much more granular functionality.

“Our contract with Logicalis and NetApp was also signed on a ‘sale or return’ basis, whereby Logicalis promised to configure the equipment, then carry out tests based on pre-defined criteria to ensure it performed as expected. This mitigated any risk to Swinton. Being in the business of insurance, we know what risk is all about - this arrangement meant we’d achieve our objectives without needing to resource the capability in-house.”

Once the project plan had been agreed with Logicalis, the proposed systems were lab tested and duly implemented by March 2009, at which point work began on migrating Swinton’s legacy infrastructure to the new platform. Davidson says that during this time, Logicalis and NetApp worked closely together to resolve a number of issues and completed the project by the end of December.

The Outcome

“We have since carried out two end-to-end disaster recovery trials and on both occasions managed to achieve the desired recovery points and recovery times for our critical systems. What’s more, we had previously carried out a survey into our server utilisation and found it to be as low as 5% - representing an inefficient use of power and an insufficient return on our hardware investment. This was because previously our servers tended to be built in silos, with each system requiring its own isolated server.”

Having now virtualised and logically partitioned the company’s servers on the new platform, Davidson says server utilisation had risen to 25%, a level he aims to increase to 60% over time. As a result, he anticipates annual savings of around £28k in electricity costs, plus an equivalent amount in cooling.

“Having now consolidated around 120 servers down to six virtual hosts, we’ve also managed to reclaim around six racks worth of space in the server room,” he says. “Our target for the project was a 15:1 consolidation ratio, but I’m delighted to say we’ve achieved 22:1 without any deterioration in our production services.”

Davidson says he was attracted by the fact that the Logicalis have technical specialists with proven expertise and in-depth knowledge across the entire ICT spectrum, as opposed to simply having a general understanding of the technologies involved. He is also impressed by the thorough groundwork they carried out before embarking on the contract, and their detailed grasp of the requirements.

“As well as working all hours of the day and night to make the lab testing, implementation and DR activation processes so successful, the Logicalis team transferred valuable knowledge to my team - which means we’re now in a good position to run the systems ourselves. At the same time, it’s comforting to know that we now have them behind us as our support team in the future.

“We’re now able to project our storage growth by using reports from the NetApp SAN, which means we’ve got a much better idea of our future investment points,” says Davidson. “We can also add storage in a modular manner, rather than doing ‘forklift upgrades’ as in the past - now we simply add storage as and when we need it.”

When he recently needed some additional storage, Davidson says it took only a day to install. “Back in 2007, we had a similar requirement for one of our core systems and it not only took weeks of planning, but also a whole weekend to install the equivalent amount of kit. The work we’ve done with Logicalis means we’ve greatly improved the processes for adding to our environment.

“I’m also pleased to report that we’ve had no outages or customer affecting issues since completion of the project. The major plus point is our ability now to recover quickly to our new ‘hot’ standby site at Leeds in the unlikely event of a major outage at any point in the future,” Davidson concludes.