Polish Insurance Broker EIB Adopts 16Gb FC AegisSAN LX F630Q

EIB S.A. is one of the largest insurance brokers in Poland and an expert to protect assets worth more than PLN 100 billion and the health and lives of over 75,000 people.

It has over 130 employees and offices across the country, and keeps creating new solutions of building specialized programs to protect the financial interests of its clients. As an insurance giant, the company keeps a big volume of important and confidential personal data. To be compliant with the government regulations and ISO 27001 standards, while at the same time the legacy storage AMS 200 was no longer meeting the demands due to insufficient speed and capacity. After looking into multiple possible solutions including big brands like EMC, the IT team chose AegisSAN LX F630Q the 16Gb FC SAN to achieve simplified infrastructure and consolidation.

“We’re attracted by the fcQiSOE technology and 16Gb FC interface of AegisSAN LX F630Q. It does provide a perfect balance among cost, reliability, functionality, support and manageability, and we can choose the disks to the solution on our own,” said Bogdan Chechlowski, office manager of computer science, EIB. “This new solution has contributed to a great increase in the efficiency to our infrastructure and now the access speed to the data is blistering. The time to backup data is reduced and the traffic to servers is accelerated greatly. In addition, the tools to verify the drives before adding them to the RAID, the ability to update the software during normal operation, the 16Gb FC interface – all these relieve IT administrators from spending too much time managing systems. Furthermore, the comprehensive data protection features of the disk array also allow us a peaceful mind.“

“We have Hyper-V virtualized platform on the working systems such as Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012. Our main application is the Lotus Domino with implemented CRM system. The AegisSAN LX F630Q system supports comprehensive virtualization technologies and it works very well in the highly virtualized environments,” add Chechlowski.

“AegisSAN LX F630Q delivers rich feature sets to enterprises that require performance most. The 16Gb FC doubles the bandwidth of the array from 8Gb FC models to unleash the potential of a multi-core CPU and SSD-driven applications,” said Bartek Mytniksales manager, Qsan. “The scalability supporting up to 256 HDDs ensures that users of big implements like EIB can seamlessly add drives as their storage requirements grow. We are very delighted AegisSAN LX F630Q helps EIB to refresh storage systems and increase working efficiency.“

Configuration:

Server: Hyper-v platform on Windows Server 2012 Core
HBA: QLogic QLE2560
Switch: Brocade 300
HDD: SAS and SSD in RAID-6
Capacity: 12TB
VM enabled: 20 VMs in server
Applications: Notes Domino, MS Sql, BES, Sametime, etc

AegisSAN LX F630Q model with fcQiSOE (Qsan FC hardware offload engine) technology is performance-boosted by the latest 16Gb FC technology to offer IO/s, three times faster than before, yet remain compatible with existing 4Gb and 8Gb FC.

The AegisSAN LX F630Q series features Xeon processor, dual active controllers, fully modular components as well as built-in software feature sets. Its hardware RAID and multiple paths designs plus the redundant modules offer HA for mission-critical applications. AegisSAN LX F630Q supports both SATA and SAS drives and has 4U 24-bay, 3U 16-bay and 2U 12-Bay form factor options. It supports virtualization technologies including VMware VAAI, Citrix and Hyper-V. In addition, it has value add-ons such as remote replication (QReplica), writable snapshot (QSnap) and battery backup module (BBM).