Project Description

Profile

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

Client Environment

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

The Challenge

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

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

The Solution

A data center relocation plan was developed that broke the application inventory down in to multiple move events.  Each event focused on a particular line of business.  The sole exception was applications supported by the mainframe.  The mainframe had its own move event and that event crossed multiple lines of business.  Detailed dependencies maps were created for each event. A data relocation plan was developed for each event to handle the identified dependencies.

Critical Success factors

  • Adopted a proven data center relocation methodology and approach
  • Detailed application information was gathered
  • Outside relocation specialists where brought in to assist
  • Extremely detailed plans drove each move event
  • Leveraged IT best practices in accomplishing the data center relocation

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