Project Description

Profile

This firm is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world, focusing on domestic property and casualty insurance, life insurance and retirement savings, asset management and strategic investments. Over the last 80 years, the company has grown from a small mutual auto insurer owned by policyholders to one of the largest insurance and financial services companies, with more than $135 billion in statutory assets.

Client Environment

The data center environment consisted of a variety of equipment from multiple vendors such as IBM, Sun, HP, CISCO, and EMC.

The Challenge

The primary goal was to consolidate numerous data centers into a single pair. All client impacts needed to be minimized and the usage of holiday weekends was to be avoided. The project team was to develop strategies for the data center relocation that would limit the move windows to off-peak hours only.

This project was required to maximize the use of existing maintenance windows as much as possible.

The Solution

The data center relocation/consolidation process was broken down in to multiple move events based on the lines of business supported, except for the mainframe – which had its own move event and crossed multiple lines of business. Detailed dependence maps were created and the dependencies drove the overall plan.

Critical Success Factors:

  • Adopted a proven methodology and approach
  • Gathered detailed application information
  • Outside relocation specialists where brought in to assist the team
  • Extremely detailed plans drove each move event
  • Leveraged IT best practices to accomplish the relocation/consolidation

If your business is in-need of data center relocation or consolidation services for existing IT in order to maximize efficiencies and budget demands, consider Altus Technologies and our record of success. Contact us to get the conversation started; learn about our other Data Center services while you’re here.