German Car Insurance Direct Line Implements DataCore SANsymphony-V Hypervisor

DataCore Software Corporation announced that German insurance company Direct Line Versicherung AG has implemented its business continuity and disaster recovery architecture on a storage infrastructure built on the DataCore storage hypervisor SANsymphony-V foundation.

The synchronous mirroring functionality of the DataCore solution enables Direct Line to set up a backup and disaster recovery data centre located 40 kilometers away in order to minimise downtime and to ensure recovery in case of a failure at the primary data centre. The combination of a storage hypervisor with server hypervisors provides a fail safe IT infrastructure that virtualises storage hardware with SANsymphony-V and server hardware with VMware vSphere.

"DataCore SANsymphony-V provides Direct Line a cost-effective and efficient business continuity solution supporting high-availability and disaster recovery across multiple sites, without neglecting performance or data protection aspects. The DataCore solution is a strategic component in our daily business," says Heiko Teichmann, managing director at IT service provider Teserco and project manager on behalf of Direct Line Versicherung.

According to a recent German consumer report Stiftung Warentest, the automobile insurance company Direct Line offers an excellent price-performance return to its customers. While many factors are involved, this can also be attributed to demonstrating a cost advantage in its IT infrastructure. In addition to meeting the disaster recovery requirements and flexibility of the central IT services, the storage hypervisor SANsymphony-V provides potential for additional cost savings.

Thanks to its hardware independence and the caching algorithms of the DataCore solution, Direct Line can not only use its existing HP P2000 disk subsystems, but with DataCore also remove the functional or performance limitations that would have prevented them from future use. Today, around 75TB of data are now managed in the main data centre, located in Teltow and at the remote data center in Berlin, which meets the requirements set by the highest data protection category (Tier 4).

In addition to adding data protection and reliability, Direct Line benefits from an efficiency in productivity and flexibility during the year-end, peak business season, which adds an increased spike in business volume and much higher IT-workloads. The ability to work as an active-active operation across both data centres is made possible by SANsymphony-V’s ability to stretch the shared storage across the two sites. This allows the insurance company to move virtual machines and storage resources across different locations on-the-fly and with little effort.