Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Modernized DR Leveraging Faction and VMware Cloud on AWS

Faction, Inc. announced that property and casualty insurance carrier Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance (PLM) has modernized its DR leveraging Faction and VMware Cloud on AWS.

PLM has increased scalability and resiliency while lowering cost. The new case study, Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Stays Lean with DR in the Cloud, is available at the company website.

In the insurance business, extended downtime or data loss is not an option-insurers must provide reliable services under any circumstances. But staying prepared day to day can be time-consuming and expensive. PLM turned to Faction to enhance their DR plans and migrated their DR site to VMware Cloud on AWS. This is the most recent step in the 6-year partnership between PLM and Faction, which has provided managed services and co-location as PLM reduced its physical footprint.

“VMware and Faction have paved the way for us to continue moving our workloads to the cloud. We aim to have a distributed IT environment across multiple private and public clouds-which ultimately keeps our operations more secure and available,” said BJ Gardner, lead systems architect, PLM. “We used to run everything on premises, but as we reduced our physical footprint, we needed a partner that could provide co-location and managed services. Faction was a good fit for us because they provided highly personal service and really became a part of our team.“

By working with Faction to move its DR site to VMware Cloud on AWS,
PLM saw benefits, including:

PLM’s lean IT team offloading several tasks, including maintenance of physical hosts and manual backups;
Gaining near-limitless scalability to handle growing workloads, such as the document imaging system, which requires extensive storage capacity;
Generating substantial cost savings, with DR costs going down by nearly 20%; and
Streamlining of internal responsibilities and automating manual procedures in the event of a disaster.

To achieve the costs savings while maintaining high levels of availability, PLM leveraged the company’s Cloud Control Volumes solution for VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware Cloud on AWS extends on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware SDDC running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) elastic, bare-metal infrastructure. The service is based on VMware Cloud Foundation which delivers hyperconverged compute, networking and storage with integrated management, making it for enterprise workloads. For storage intensive workloads, the firm’s Cloud Control Volumes provide a low latency, high throughput storage platform, connected to VMware Cloud on AWS, allowing customers to reduce their overall cost of their environments by deploying and scaling storage independent of compute.

Resource:
Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Stays Lean with DR in the Cloud‘

Read also:
Sean Charnock CEO, Faction
Founder and original CEO Luke Norris moving to executive chairman and chief strategy officer
May 16, 2019 | Press Release
Faction Joined Dell EMC Select Partner Program
With storage and DRaaS solutions for multi-cloud
May 10, 2019 | Press Release
Faction Secures $14 Million
To broaden hybrid DR-as-a-service across public clouds
April 4, 2019 | Press Release