Copyright 2014© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved.Copyright 2014© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved. Document # APPREPORT2014005 v7 July 2014Document # APPREPORT2014005 v7 July 2014

Where IT perceptions are reality

Application Report

Insurance Company Future Proofs Data Centers with

HP 10GbE and Gen5 Fibre Channel

Featuring

Document Management

ERP, CRM and Marketing Automation

Video Conferencing and VoIP

HP ProLiant Servers

VMware Server Virtualization

Document # APPREPORT2014005 v7 July, 2014 Page 2 of 6

Insurance

Promises Kept Since 2000 BC Insurance began as a way of reducing the risk to traders, as early as 2000 BC in China and 1750 BC in Babylon. An early form of life insurance dates to Ancient Rome when "burial clubs" covered the cost of members' funeral expenses and assisted survivors financially. Modern life insurance is a contract where the insurer promises to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money in exchange for a premium, upon the death of the insured person. Life-based contracts tend to fall into two major categories: 1) Term and Whole Life insurance that provides a lump sum payment in the event of specified event, and 2) Universal life and variable life policies where the main objective is to facilitate the growth of capital via regular or single premiums. According to Moody's, the U.S. economy will show greater stability in 2014 and 2015. With this, Moody's sees a rise in the demand for life insurance and annuity products. The projected rise in interest rates will especially benefit annuity products with long-term guarantees such as payout annuities and structured settlements; old blocks of individual fixed annuities with high guaranteed rates; universal life insurance policies with interest rate guarantees; long-term disability and long-term care policies.

A Fortune 100 Insurance Company The basis for this application report is a multi-billion insurance company with thousands of agents and millions of customers. The company has hundreds of billions in total assets under management, and tens of billions in surplus.

The foundation of life insurance is the recognition of the value of a

human life and the possibility of indemnification for the loss of that

value. — F. C. Oviatt

Life Insurance

LIMRA's Trends in Life Insurance study shocked people in

2010 when it revealed that life insurance ownership had hit a

50-year low. Here's a look at just how big the life insurance

ownership gap is getting, why consumers aren't purchasing

and a few areas where insurance companies are helping by

meeting, educating and selling.

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Insurance Application Environment

Tens of Thousands of Sales Agents and Millions of Customers The IT organization for the insurance company supports tens of thousands of sales agents who are serving millions of customers spread across all 50 states. The following is an overview of some key applications that most affect data center server I/O.

Document Management At the heart of the business operations are document management applications for processing scanned documents. Digital images of customer insurance contracts make their way from the SAN to many different workstations and individuals before processing is complete.

Financial Modeling The profitability of an insurance company is enhanced by their financial modeling applications designed to make sure the rate-of-return on investments funded by the premiums collected, exceeds claims payouts and other obligations. With new sources of data available every year, and with analytics technology improving in leaps and bounds, financial modeling is one of the fastest growing segments of their application suite. It also puts, by far, the heaviest load on server processors, network bandwidth and storage I/O.

ERP and CRM With sales agents spread across the country, Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), Customer Resource Management (CRM), and office productivity applications are deployed to support Human Resources (HR) activities, marketing automation, and email. CRM and email put the heaviest I/O load on application servers and the SAN.

The need for I/O performance in the future will be driven by

financial modeling and predictive analysis which use unstructured

data that are not stored in traditional database formats. Big Data

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Data Centers

To save on the cost of server hardware, the IT team is planning on

increasing the average number of VMs per server in production from

6 to 10. VM density in the Dev and QA environment is much higher.

VM Density

Unlike many DR sites where a secondary site has older equipment passed on from the primary site, operating data centers as near mirror images of the other

provides the least disruptive path to restoring normal business operations in the event one data center experiences an outage, as well as the best performance

once normal business operations are restored.

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Inside the Data Centers

Rack and Blade Servers Powered by HP The company's data center model leverages a number of data centers, large data centers configured to be near mirror images of each other for seamless disaster recovery (DR) that are interconnected with 10GbE links to expedite data replication, and support voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing traffic and a number of smaller satellite sites ranging in size from computer rooms to small data centers. At the heart of the insurance company’s state-of-the-art data centers are over 2,500 HP ProLiant rack servers and HP ProLiant blade servers. The IT team is planning to increase VM density from 6 to 10 VMs per server for server clusters used to host 1,400 VMware ESX guests. So for efficient server deployment, and to support greater VM density, the IT team defined high-performance, high-availability standard server configurations for virtual server hosts. For rack mount servers, the standard configuration includes dual 10GbE ports and dual 16Gb Fibre Channel ports using HP CN1100E 10Gb CNAs and HP StoreFabric SN1100E 16Gb FC HBAs, respectively. For blade servers, the standard configuration included HP FlexFabric 10GbE 2-port 554M Adapters and HP-LPe1605 16Gb Fibre Channel Mezzanine HBAs. Equipped with HP ProLiant server clusters and redundant 10GbE and 16Gb Fibre Channel connectivity, the data centers provide a responsive and reliable environment for the employees, sales agents, and customers using the company’s business-critical applications.

The company took out its own insurance policy by bringing

10GbE and 16Gb Fibre Channel out to the edge of the data

centers.

Data Center Insurance

Forming the backbone of the company's compute environment are HP ProLiant servers configured with redundant, high-performance HP network

adapters from Emulex.

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The Results

Positioned for Steady Growth

The performance and availability of the data centers were meeting defined service levels before a recent infrastructure refresh. By implementing the latest generation of HP server technology and high performance networks, the IT organization positioned the company to stay ahead of the steady growth of their bandwidth-hungry Digital Imaging, VoIP and video conferencing applications–as well as extremely I/O-intensive analytics applications–for the duration of the useful life expectancy of the equipment.

Proactive Approach Helps Company Avoid Downtime and Performance Issues

For large financial institutions, including insurance companies, it’s more expensive to react to downtime and poor customer satisfaction due to performance issues, than to proactively deploy the infrastructure needed to stay ahead of the growth curve. In this case, the recent data center refresh activities provide the headroom needed to meet the performance service levels required for the duration of the useful life expectancy of the equipment.

40Gb Server Connectivity on the Horizon

The sheer volume of data and I/O from cluster servers that form the compute “grid” for financial modeling, are increasing at a rate that some segments of the network may need to be upgraded within the useful life expectancy. The supporting IT organization is contemplating the need for 40Gb technology within the next few years in the core network and for grid server connectivity.

Waiting for SDN that is Integrated, Tested and Supported

The company is watching the emergence of software defined networking products with great interest. The preference at this time is towards a commercialized version of this open-source technology that is fully integrated, tested and supported with their current technology.

Lessons Learned

The company wanted to share the following lessons learned while refreshing their data center infrastructure. Involve key vendors to leverage their experience implementing the new products and technology with

other IT organizations. Have a clear ROI for the new products. Don’t just implement expensive new technology because “it’s

there.” Plan and pilot before you implement new technology.

Gen 5 Fibre Channel is purpose-built, data center network infrastructure

for storage that provides reliability, scalability and up to 16 Gbps

performance. Gen 5

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Resources

Related Links Life Insurance

HP ProLiant DL380 Gen8 Server

HP CN1100E 10GbE CNAs

HP StoreFabric SN1100E 16Gb FC HBAs

HP-LPe1605 16Gb FC Mezzanine HBA

HP FlexFabric 10GbE 2-port 554M Adapter

Emulex Gen 5 Fibre Channel

IT Brand Pulse

About the Author

Frank Berry is founder and senior analyst for IT Brand Pulse, a trusted source of data

and analysis about IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking. As for-

mer vice president of product marketing and corporate marketing for QLogic, and vice

president of worldwide marketing for the automated tape library (ATL) division of

Quantum, Mr. Berry has over 30 years experience in the development and marketing

of IT infrastructure. If you have any questions or comments about this report, contact

frank.berry@itbrandpulse.com.