INDUSTRY WATCH
SINCE WE INSTALLED THE SYSTEM , WE HAVE EXPERIENCED ZERO DOWNTIME , THANKS TO THE TRIPLE REDUNDANCY OFFERED BY INFINIDAT .
Data storage is an ongoing challenge for any business in the era of Digital Transformation . Clientèle Life , part of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange ( JSE ) -listed Clientèle Limited Group , is a well-known company in the South African market . It has been offering affordable funeral cover , health , legal and life insurance for the past 25 years , with convenient , easy to understand products . As part of the insurance and financial services sector , data is a heavily regulated commodity for Clientèle Life . When it comes to meeting compliance objectives as well as performance requirements , the data platform is of the utmost importance .
The challenge
Clientèle Life ’ s existing data storage solution was reaching end of support . In addition , its foray into hyperconverged storage had not produced the performance benefits that it had anticipated . In order to address this issue , it would have required the costly addition of new compute nodes . This presented an opportunity to find a solution that would better cater to its current and future needs .
Its requirements included a three-tier architecture , high-availability , high-performance and support for the virtualised environment as well as excellent replication capabilities . Above all , Clientèle Life needed the flexibility to scale on short notice without impacting daily business operations .
“ In the past , we needed to upgrade our solution every three years to meet performance , capacity and availability requirements . This became costly and therefore required a more robust solution . This is where Infinidat came into the picture with its reputable solution , augmented by a unique elastic price model . The model allows us to access additional storage instantly while only paying for what we use ,” said Riaan Moller , Storage and VMware Environment Manager , Clientèle Life .
The solution
Infinidat supplied Clientèle Life with two InfiniBox F4230 storage arrays for synchronous replication between its production and DR data centres . The units have a total capacity of 1 Petabyte ( PB ), of which they are currently using 600 Terabytes ( TB ) across both environments . Through intelligent software algorithms , the InfiniBox storage arrays use commodity hardware to offer the highest performance at a disruptive price .
Pricing is completely transparent and all necessary licensing and functionality are included up front .
In addition to supplying and implementing the physical solution , Infinidat provided full training on the system . Consequently , two engineers at Clientèle Life are now certified . This allowed the team to gain an in-depth understanding of their system to maintain and run it independently with the ongoing support of Infinidat at a global level .
Clientèle Life runs a 96 % virtualised environment with more than 350 virtual servers hosted on eight production and six Disaster Recovery ( DR ) VMware hosts . The entire company , ranging from telephony systems to its Structured Query Language ( SQL ) database relies on backend storage , making highavailability critical to its business operations .
This solution has not only met Clientèle Life ’ s data storage requirements from a cost efficiency and performance perspective , but also provided the organisation with a competitive advantage . To make sure these benefits are maintained , Infinidat provides local support and offers proactive monitoring to ensure constant uptime and availability .
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