Risk Enterprise Management implemented VMware on NetApp to virtualize their server infrastructure, eliminating 35 physical servers and saving over $120,000 annually in lease and power costs. The new environment accelerated application deployment from 3 weeks to under an hour and improved disaster recovery capabilities. NetApp storage provided high availability, fast backup/recovery, and flexible storage allocation. REM achieved a two-year ROI and eliminated their annual 15-20% rise in IT costs.

1. Success Stories
Risk Enterprise Management
Stays Agile, Slashes Costs
with VMware on NetApp
CUSTOMER PROFILE resources at the end of the claims process—
Risk Enterprise Management Limited (REM) an often-unpredictable time frame that can
provides claims, managed care, and risk range from weeks and months to years.”
management solutions to the property and
REM recognized that its sprawling server
casualty insurance industry. The company
infrastructure with direct-attached storage
employs 400 professionals and delivers
was hampering responsiveness and raising
services globally to Fortune 1000 companies,
costs. Ordering, installing, configuring, and
KEY HIGHLIGHTS program managers, captive managers,
testing a server consumed as much as three
insurers, reinsurers, brokers, and agents
weeks—too long for offices that must start
Industry (source: www.remltd.com).
processing claims within just one or two days
Insurance of an event. Also, leasing costs were exorbi-
THE CHALLENGE
The challenge tant: bringing a new application online gener-
Reduce costs while dramatically improving
Eliminate server sprawl, ensure business ally meant adding a new server that would
business reactivity and resilience
continuity, and reduce costs. stay online for the full three-year lease period,
Responsive service and exceptional control
even if the resource was no longer required.
of customer loss costs help differentiate
The solution
REM from its competitors. But maintaining In 2006, Tompkins’s team was tasked with
Implement VMware® on NetApp® to
the highest levels of efficiency can be difficult updating the company’s infrastructure to
accelerate application/service rollout,
in the face of rising IT costs, expanding improve responsiveness, deploy products
respond rapidly to catastrophic claims
regulatory requirements, and frequent faster, meet compliance regulations, and
events, and achieve cost-efficient B&R.
disaster events. ensure disaster recovery to support 24x7
Benefits operations. Complicating the challenge was
“Responding to a catastrophic claims event
• Gained ability to expand/contract one caveat: reduce IT costs in the process.
can require as much as a 25% ramp in
storage in minutes
personnel and supporting infrastructure,” THE SOLUTION
• Achieved fast backup/recovery
says Brian Tompkins, REM senior manager
for 24x7 operations VMware on NetApp
of IT Infrastructure and Security. “We need
• Saved >$120,000 annual lease Champion Solutions Group, a technology
systems in place quickly to process the
+ power costs solutions provider, spearheaded the efforts
thousands and thousands of claims that
• Realized two-year ROI on virtual to identify the best solution. Champion
arise out of an environmental or natural
infrastructure worked with the REM team to capture
disaster such as a hurricane or tornado.
• Eliminated 20% annual rise in current utilization and load during peak
Equally important to business efficiency
IT costs quarter-end closeout. The results showed
is being able to release or reassign those

2. “Moving to a virtual environment built
on NetApp’s storage has expanded our
ability to put information in people’s hands,
enhanced business reactivity, and made
sure that our infrastructure will support
business needs over time. We’ve also
benefited from Champion’s expertise …
you need technology-savvy partners.”
Brian Tompkins
Senior Manager IT Infrastructure and Security, Risk Enterprise Management, Ltd.
glaring—and costly—underutilization of BUSINESS BENEFITS Reduced cost and complexity
server resources. From this data, the team Faster reaction to business needs The REM team achieved consolidation goals
was able to clearly see the benefits of The new infrastructure ensures that REM within just four months. Tompkins estimates
moving to a virtual infrastructure based on can deliver critical IT services where and that the elimination of 35 physical servers
VMware. Champion also advocated deploy- when needed. Bringing a server online, a represents approximately $105,000 annual
ing centralized storage to ensure business process that took more than three weeks lease savings and another $15,000 in reduced
continuity and to allow utilization of tools in the past, now takes less than an hour. power costs. The company expects a two-
such as VMotion®, which enables zero- Rapid deployment enables almost immedi- year ROI on the entire virtual infrastructure,
downtime migration of virtual machines. ate response to catastrophic events, even including servers, storage, network upgrades,
during back-to-back disasters. software licensing, installation, training, and
Storage selection was based on three key support costs.
deliverables from NetApp: (1) superior redun- Tompkins says that REM uses NetApp
dancy at the best price point, (2) multiprotocol FlexVol ® technology to rapidly allocate REM has also eliminated the 15% to 20%
support with the ability to leverage standard storage capacity to meet operational needs annual IT-cost escalation that had been the
security models, and (3) manageability. A and streamline new-product testing. “Storage trend for the previous three years. Tompkins
NetApp FAS3020 system in an active-active requirements are not always well defined attributes some of the savings to simpler
controller configuration assures high avail- at the beginning of an engagement or test administration. “Each year we brought on
ability for the REM VMware environment, process. In the past, increasing a volume new servers with direct-attached storage
which includes 40 virtual servers running on was fairly easy, but decreasing it was nearly to support application development and
three physical servers connected using iSCSI impossible. That made it very difficult to testing, handle catastrophic claims events,
to the NetApp FAS3020HA. Simultaneously, effectively manage resources to accom- and address other fluctuating business
NetApp’s system provides CIFS-based NAS modate systems and user requirements. needs. Unfortunately, we were never able to
storage for Windows® end-user clients. For example, when our analysts ran their give those resources back, so we continued
intensive financial modeling processes, to pay leasing and administration costs on
The VMware on NetApp virtualized environ- them. We started this project with two large,
other users experienced problems saving
ment supports critical systems, including fully populated racks in our data center.
files. Today, NetApp’s technology allows
Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Since moving to the VMware on NetApp
us to easily increase or decrease quotas to
Edition with Active Directory, IBM Lotus environment, one rack is completely empty.”
match requirements so that we do not have
Notes, Web applications, and the custom-
to overbuy capacity or risk having users or
ized REM claims management system. A REM maintains a lean and very efficient
applications run out of space.”
Citrix application delivery platform facilitates IT department, which manages the entire
global access to the REM claims manage- corporate infrastructure. “Concerns over
ment system. new staffing requirements were foremost in

3. ESX 3 Server #1
Backbone VLAN
Routable
NetApp 3020C
File Server Cluster
iSCSI VLAN
ESX 3 Server #2 Routable
NetBackup VLAN
Isolated
ESX 3 Server #3
4.4 Terabytes
Lotus Notes Data VLAN Raw Storage
Isolated
VMotion VLAN
Isolated
GSX Server
VM Management VLAN
Routable
Dual Gigabit Trunk
NetBackup™ Physical
Media Servers Alcatel 9600 Core Switch Servers Single Gigabit
Figure 1) VMware and NetApp architecture.
our analysis,” Tompkins stated. “As with from NetApp: (1) NetApp Snapshot™ tech- processes personally identifiable data, the
many new technologies, implementation and nology, to make frequent copies of critical company must be able to meet the stringent
management can require dedicated person- data; (2) NetApp SnapRestore® technology compliance goals of each of its client
nel, reducing the cost benefits. The VMware for within-seconds file or volume recovery; organizations.
and NetApp solution required no additional and (3) an active-active controller configura-
headcount. tion for nondisruptive failover. NetApp’s solution also enabled seamless
transfer of the REM Active Directory security
“Overall,” adds Tompkins, “the new infra- “NetApp helps us to deliver immediate and model without requiring measure-by-measure
structure is decidedly simpler to maintain accurate information to adjustors, partners, translation of security settings. The REM
than our original DAS environment and other and customers,” emphasizes Tompkins. Windows administration team can manage
SAN solutions not from NetApp, which “We’ve experienced no storage-related user CIFS shares on the NetApp system with-
would have required mainframe DASD-class failures since implementing the solution from out having to learn a new platform and without
storage expertise. NetApp’s iSCSI solution NetApp. NetApp’s technology also gives requiring root access to the storage system.
was a better value upfront and allows us to us critical recoverability. Just recently, when
leverage existing administrative staff. We our accounting staff discovered a corrupted “Implementing the VMware on NetApp
did not have the luxury of hiring a dedicated database, they were able to recover their infrastructure has given us much-needed
staff to manage storage. financial data in minutes. Without NetApp flexibility to support both current and future
Snapshot technology, they would have lost business needs,” comments Tompkins.
“In addition to being a requirement of the at least four hours of work. “For example, if at some point we decide
project, reducing our IT costs helps us to integrate our applications based on
contribute directly to one of the company’s “By providing better redundancy and faster UNIX ®, we will not have to buy a new storage
driving objectives—to reduce our customers’ backup/recovery, NetApp’s solution lets us platform. We’ve been extremely happy with
total loss costs associated with the manage- offer a larger window of access to applica- the performance and simplicity of iSCSI, but
ment of claims.” tions. That’s essential as we work toward our UNIX team may prefer to use FC—either
maintaining 24x7 operations to support the way, we’ll be able to leverage our existing
Business continuation with reduced needs of Fortune 1000 customers and an NetApp system.
risk of downtime increasingly global business.”
The new infrastructure helps REM minimize “We expect that NetApp’s space-reduction
the risk of information loss or application An architecture investment that keeps on technologies such as thin provisioning and
downtime, even as the business transitions giving: security, flexibility, and longevity deduplication will help us optimize our
to a 24x7 environment. The solution archi- Tompkins points out that NetApp helps REM existing storage usage and reduce expan-
tected by Champion helps maintain business meet recoverability requirements associated sion costs. The space savings will also allow
continuity using three essential technologies with regulatory compliance. Because REM us to more cost-effectively implement data

4. “The new infrastructure is decidedly
simpler to maintain than our original DAS
environment and other SAN solutions not
from NetApp that would have required
mainframe DASD-class storage expertise.
NetApp’s iSCSI solution was a better
value upfront and allows us to leverage
existing administrative staff.”
Brian Tompkins
Senior Manager IT Infrastructure and Security, Risk Enterprise Management, Ltd.
retention policies to match specific claims— NetApp’s technology and VMware servers,
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
for example, while auto claims are generally we’ll be able to very quickly recover our
settled very quickly, workers’ compensation critical infrastructure in a very small footprint.
NetApp Products
claims often require that we maintain online We recently tested the process in-house and
NetApp FAS3020HA system
data for years. proved that we could successfully recover
our VMware and Active Directory environ- NetApp FlexVol and deduplication
“Another reason we have standardized ments in less than two hours. technologies
on NetApp’s solution is that we anticipate NetApp SnapRestore software
taking advantage of NetApp’s replication “Moving to a virtual environment built
technology to implement our own hotsite for on NetApp’s storage has expanded our Protocols
disaster recovery. In the event of a full data ability to put information in people’s hands, NetApp IP (iSCSI) SAN and CIFS
center outage, it will take about 36 hours enhanced our business reactivity, and made
to fully recover our critical systems at an sure that our infrastructure will support Environment
outside recovery facility. As our business business needs over time. We’ve also VMware
expands, we will need a much faster return benefited from the experience and expertise Microsoft Windows Server 2003
to operation, but that level of recovery of Champion Solutions Group. Projects of Enterprise Edition
service would be prohibitively expensive at this magnitude rarely go exactly as planned, IBM Lotus Notes software
a third-party facility. In contrast, if we utilize so you need technology-savvy partners.”
Citrix software
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