UK Autonet Insurance Services Implementing NetApp

Customer Profile:

Autonet Insurance Services Ltd is one of the UK’s largest insurance brokers and
is the country’s largest independently-owned broker in the van insurance field
alone. The firm has a strong web and e-commerce position, which
necessitates constant uptime and flexibility in dealing with busy periods.

Challenge:
For Nik Potts, the growing company’s busy Head of IT,
the problem was simple; he was trying to get along with an ICT and
storage infrastructure that wasn’t designed for the enterprise market.
As a result, he says, the firm "had many issues" that were starting to take up
too much of his team’s valuable time; though core customer data was never at
risk, a lot of effort was going into keeping the storage up to scratch – and
perhaps most seriously, he was spending more money than he felt was needed.

"I was provisioning five to ten servers per year at
£5k a time and it was clear that that money could have been used far more
efficiently," he recalls. "We’d ended up with 30 servers or so and felt that a
virtual refresh could solve a lot of these maintenance and cost issues,
hopefully in one go."

As a financial services company Potts was also
conscious of meeting FSA and other regulatory measures around data – a need
equally matched by his Managing Director’s demands that the firm be
continuously available to meet growing customer service needs and requirements.

Solution:

Starting in 2009, Potts led a move to virtualization
to better manage his infrastructure needs, and deal with what he characterises
as "sprawl, data growth and no disaster recovery".

Working with NetApp implementation partner LIMA
Networks, Potts has achieved benefits by a move to a virtualized
environment built on NetApp technology; curbed server refresh and purchasing
drains, a whole new business continuity regime almost overnight and much better
scope for contingency planning.

Autonet’s new structure is built on the VMware ESXi
platform and the NetApp 2040 in-house SAN with an off-site NetApp 2020 disaster
recovery option.

Business benefits:
Potts had originally wanted to move to a new
infrastructure in 2009 but any serious migration was put on hold; a sustained
growth required immediate business support and relocation of the business to a
new state of the art call centre. In mid-2010, he weighed up
technology solutions in the marketplace and made a decision that NetApp met his
specific needs the closest.

"I am very pleased with that decision," he now says.
"The implementation went ahead remarkably quickly, over just a four day period
last October, and since go-live services have been delivered to just the
standard I need them to be."

What would he say
is the single biggest positive of
the move?
"I feel a giant
weight has been taken off my mind. I’ve
genuinely been better able to sleep at night. I know I now have a very reliable
data storage function matched by a full disaster recovery capability."
And what about all that server purchasing? "In 2008 to
2009 I bought 12; since LIMA
Networks installed NetApp, that’s gone down to two,” he enthuses."Of our 30
servers half were candidates for virtualization and we’ve now got 12 of them
fully configured that way."

"This has given me genuine flexibility and 90% cost
savings; I’d whole heartedly recommend NetApp to other firms as a result," he
says.

Solution components:

NetApp products: NetApp FAS2040-R5, Snap manager for Exchange, Snap Mirror for replication to secondary FAS
Protocols: IP replication over Virtual LAN (20M), iSCSI
Environment: 500 seat call centre, 5 million plus customer enquiries per month
Core server platforms Microsoft 2005/2008 R2: AD, SQL, Exchange, DHCP, DNS etc
Partner: LIMA Networks