Case Studies
ISU Insurance Group - (San Francisco, CA)
Business Problem: 
The ISU Insurance Group, which is the 4th largest insurance broker in the United States, started offering solutions for businesses in the banking and medical industries. T.J. Ryan, the CEO of ISU expressed the need to make sure ISU’s current server environment was able to meet the stringent data protection and business continuity requirements of these industries. Bay Computing Group, who manages ISU’s Server and Networking infrastructure, put together an analysis of its current server environment and made recommendations that were also based upon Mr. Ryan’s request that the new solutions be able to provide superior service to ISU’s end-users and clients for the next 5-years.
Technical Challange:
At ISU’s current pace, they were replacing a server every year with a vast majority of its servers about to come to end of life within the current year. The current servers were not ready for the expected data growth, they were not adequate for the upcoming software application upgrades needed and they did not have the redundancies in place that were so vital to the business.
Utilizing Bay Computing Group’s COMPLETE DataProtect DRP service, ISU’s server environment would have been able to be fully operational within 24-48 hours in the event a disaster prevented access to their servers that are located at their headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Bay Computing Group wanted to shorten this recovery time and ensured part of the recommendations made would allow them to accomplish this important objective.
Solution: COMPLETE Care, COMPLETE DataProtect & COMPLETE Consulting
Based upon our intimate knowledge of ISU’s technical environment and ISU’s business goals and objectives, Bay Computing Group recommended that ISU move its physical server environment to a virtual server environment utilizing the benefits of implementing a Storage Area Network. Our analysis concluded that along with providing the needed capabilities required to meet the mentioned regulations, ISU would also save money over the next five years by implementing a virtual server and SAN environment as opposed to the current way ISU was upgrading and replacing its servers.
Under the leadership of Ross Price, Bay Computing Group’s dedicated IT Manager for ISU, the Project Team implemented a new virtual server and storage environment using a Dell EqualLogic Storage Area Network, VMware’s Infrastructure solution suite and redundant custom Dell virtual host servers. Utilizing our proven methodology, Bay Computing Group migrated all of ISU’s physical servers to the virtual environment ahead of schedule and with nearly zero downtime for ISU’s end-users and customers. After the migration was complete, Bay Computing Group then setup replication of ISU’s virtual environment to our own virtual environment located in a SAS 70 Type II certified datacenter located in Phoenix, Arizona.
Benefits:
Without the need to make any major hardware purchases for the next 5 years, the solution implemented improves the complete recovery time of ISU’s virtual server environment to under 1 hour and improves the uptime of ISU’s server environment to 99.99%. With all of the redundancies implemented at every layer, including the server hardware implemented, network switching solutions implemented, redundancies built into the EqualLogic SAN and VMware Infrastructure Suite, ISU is now able to exceed the data protection and business continuity requirements for various financial and medical compliance regulations.
Hardware and software used in the project:
- Dell EqualLogic PS5000e Storage Area Network
- VMware Infrastructure 3.5 with Virtual Center Management
- Dell PowerEdge R805 Virtual Ready Servers
- Dell PowerConnect 5424 iSCSI Optimized Switches
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
About The ISU Insurance Group
The ISU Network is an organization exclusively for independent insurance agents that offers a cohesive national database of insurance knowledge. The Power of Independence and the Strength of Unity allows ISU's members to effectively solve your insurance and financial risk management problems, such as price, coverage, satisfactory claims settlements, security and peace of mind.
For more information: http://www.isugroup.com