INX Got Virtual DR Hosting Service Contract for Island Insurance Companies

INX, Inc. has received a $300,000 contract to deliver its Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service for the IT environment of Island Insurance.

Island Insurance Company, Ltd. (Island), Hawaii’s largest locally owned and managed property and casualty insurance carrier, has selected INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service (VRS) as its disaster recovery solution. Island has been protecting Hawaii’s families and businesses for 70 years, which necessitates that Island be able to bring its own data center back on line very quickly in the event of a disaster. The disaster recovery design challenge in Hawaii is that only one utility grid powers the island and the telecommunications infrastructure is very interdependent. A larger-scale catastrophe could possibly render any disaster recovery effort in Hawaii ineffective.

While Island has maintained a physical-based DR facility for some time on the mainland, the company was facing significant capital cost increases in order to keep it current. Island faced the difficult possibility of quickly flying IT staff to the mainland to activate the system in the event of a catastrophe. Island consequently turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service (VRS) in order to provide a disaster recovery (DR) service based upon a VMware virtualization environment. As a prelude to the VRS implementation, INX helped Island complete the virtualization of its production data center. As a result, Island was able to consolidate six racks of computer equipment down to one, decreasing space requirements and power usage. The battery backup in the production environment now lasts for two hours versus only thirty minutes prior to virtualization. VMware’s high-availability feature also means that downtime from server failure is now eliminated.

"Working with INX has been very cost-effective," said Jeff Fabry, CIO of Island Insurance Companies. "INX utilized our existing equipment wherever possible in virtualizing our production environment which minimized our capital expenditures. We saved enough money by virtualizing our production environment to more than offset INX monthly fees for hosting our DR site. In addition, we no longer face the possibility of having to send IT staff to the mainland to activate the DR environment as the management is handled by INX staff on a 24 X 7 basis."

The disaster recovery system that INX designed replicates the Island datacenter through the Internet not only stored data, but the servers themselves, which are now software. INX utilized technologies from both Data Domain and FalconStor to accomplish very efficient replication. And because Island utilizes a NetApp SAN, INX may replicate this unit directly to a NetApp SAN at the DR site in order to further lower the recovery time on select applications. INX’s VRS also includes virtual desktops so that in the event of a disaster, Island Insurance employees can access their desktops, applications and data from anywhere they can get to a browser.

Mark Hilz, President of INX, commented: "We are pleased to extend our hosted virtual DR service to Hawaii. Our ability to leverage equipment and staffing expertise among clients in different geographical regions means that we can provide organizations such as Island Insurance with an extremely effective and well-managed DR solution at a cost much lower than they can obtain internally."