Company: Mutual insurance group (confidential)

Sector

Banking, insurance

Activity

One of France’s leading providers of health and personal protection insurance for individuals and businesses.

The project at a glance

A mutual insurance group with relatively new but inconsistent storage infrastructure (racks made by different manufacturers) embarked on a rethink of its storage strategy. Its aim was to make its infrastructure more reliable and more efficient, and to reduce the environmental footprint of its datacenter.

Hardis Group designed an IBM FlashSystem architecture for the client, using FlashCore Modules (FCMs) with an active/passive configuration and asynchronous replication between the primary and secondary racks, located around 20 km apart. 

The project was based on an ultra-densification model: consolidating 3 rack units into a 2U configuration comprising 24 Flash storage modules with a combined capacity of 800 tebibytes. With 1.5 TB of RAM, latency of 0.6 ms, and a commitment from IBM of 240,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), the new infrastructure has reduced processing times by 35-40% on average—and by up to 90% for some applications.

One notable feature of the project, which ran over four months, was its use of the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) storage system—a technology that, among other features, enables data migration without a backup/restore step, thereby eliminating system downtime. Once deployed, SVC also supports end-to-end infrastructure management from a single interface. It is also highly scalable, meaning it can evolve in line with future requirements.

Project objectives

  • Transition to a uniform, secure storage architecture.
  • Optimize the storage infrastructure for greater performance and reliability.
  • Reduce the environmental footprint of the datacenter (through ultra-densification).

Work performed

  • Review the existing architecture and help the client prepare the statement of requirements.
  • Design the target storage architecture.
  • Deploy the infrastructure at two sites (primary and backup).
  • Interface with other information system environments.
  • Migrate the data without system downtime.

Benefits

  • Processing times reduced by 35-40% on average, and by up to 90% for some applications.
  • Datacenter space, wiring requirements and electricity use all reduced thanks to ultra-densification.
  • Data migrated without system downtime.
  • Uniform storage infrastructure and single management interface.

 

Any project?