Health insurer from Luxembourg

Security and the availability of data play a crucial role for globally active companies. The requirement of an internationally active health insurer to set up a redundant IT infrastructure provided the impetus for a new storage solution. The high-availability solution had to be designed in such a way that a second site could be connected. A fast restart in the event of a disaster recovery without data loss rounded off the requirements profile.

Added value for the customer

Management Summary

Insurance companies are subject to particularly high security standards when it comes to data storage. In addition to protection against data loss, failure protection is one of the most important requirements for the IT infrastructure. Conventional data protection in the form of a backup is not sufficient to guarantee permanent business continuity, as it often takes too long to restore information. In order to maintain constant access to data, a high-availability strategy with a cross-location storage network and transparent failover had to be implemented.

The challenge

The customer is an international health insurer with around 250 employees and is based in Luxembourg. Due to its rapid growth, it is imperative for the customer to be able to rely on its storage and backup environment as the stable backbone of its IT infrastructure. The resulting high demands on the security and availability of data could no longer be met by the existing infrastructure, and the storage network was already reaching its capacity limits. To find a solution, the customer relied on its long-standing IT partner, IT-HAUS GmbH . The entire storage system was to be replaced to ensure IT-controlled production operations. System performance and a fail-safe design were decisive factors in the selection of a new solution. In addition, stability had to be improved and a genuine high-availability cluster with active/active storage had to be found. The aim was to optimize data security and availability and to speed up processes. The company's entire data stocks had to be kept synchronized across two locations in order to optimize the service level in the storage environment. The second data center was located in an additional site a few kilometers away from the main site.

Solution

The specialists at IT-HAUS implemented a cross-location storage network with transparent failover. To this end, they installed a highly available storage solution from Dell, consisting of a VPLEX Metro cluster network and two unified storage systems with a new dual fabric SAN. The solution was implemented in two separate locations. With the VPLEX storage virtualization solution, the customer has a very robust and redundant cluster that allows simplified storage management and uninterrupted data mobility between two synchronously connected unified storage clusters. Optimized for virtual applications, the unified storage system enables significantly better performance through the use of SSD drives. The existing 16 HP blade servers were upgraded with HP 8Gb Fibre Channel host bus adapters and a total of four HP blades were added to the existing HP blade chassis to convert the previously iSCSI-based environment to fiber and provide additional virtualization services. Two MDS 8/12c SAN switches, also from HP, complete the system. A so-called quorum server provides additional security. This is a stand-alone system that is independent of the rest of the cluster and provides a special service to which starting nodes report. In the event of an error or startup, this service checks registered nodes and can therefore provide information on which nodes are ready for operation. An existing HP server at the main site serves as the quorum server, which was expanded with four 16GB RAM bars and equipped with an additional processor at IT-HAUS . In the course of this project, IT-HAUS was also tasked with renewing the customer's network infrastructure, which had previously been based on HP. Four Cisco Nexus switches (two per site) specially designed for fiber-based storage solutions were integrated into the storage area network. The renewed SAN not only increases the redundancy of the entire system, it also ensures the best possible system performance. A new Dell data domain backup solution supplements the existing tape library, increases the speed of data backup and reduces the workload for IT staff when backing up data on a daily and monthly basis.

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