Project Description
Profile
CNA is the 7th largest U.S. commercial insurer and the 13th largest U.S. property & casualty insurer. They provide insurance protection to more than 1 million businesses and professionals in the U.S. and internationally. Headquartered in Chicago, CNA has offices throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Client Environment
The environment consisted of:
Wintel: 375 servers
Mainframe: 2 enterprise servers
Unix: 160 servers
The Challenge
Network latency had been determined to be a major issue due to the heavy use of three-tier client server applications. There was disagreement on whether the original plan of a phased data center migration would provide the required application response times.
The Solution
To mitigate the network latency issue, the original, phased data center migration approach was re-worked. The re-worked approach was to move the pre-production environment on one two-day weekend and the production environment on a single three-day weekend.
To minimize the system outage and to maximize the amount of acceptance testing, the amount of physical equipment relocation was minimized. The use of replication technology allowed for more than 12+ hours to be allocated to end-user acceptance testing for validating the production move.
Critical Success factors
- Adoption of a proven methodology and approach
- Used a collaborative approach with the key vendors rather than directive approach
- Added resources with experience in data center relocations to supplement existing staff
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