HPE L7D48AAE Product Data Sheet

Case Study

Storage rethink creates
more agile business

Objective

Create a more eicient storage
infrastructure to support digital
transformation of the business

Approach

Discussed options with HPE, long
term server and storage supplier,
before conducting Proof of Concept

IT Matters

• Improved storage performance cuts
backup times by 20 per cent

• Increased storage density leads to
reduction of data centre power and
cooling costs by £60,000/annum

Business Matters

• Creates opex funding model, saving
vital capex for strategic projects

• Deepened relationship with strategic
IT supplier, leading to discussions on
big data and cloud

platform for ERS

HPE StoreServ and Capacity on Demand lay
groundwork for more eicient storage

ERS is a specialist
insurance provider.
Over the past three years
it has transformed its
approach to IT, creating
a more agile, eicient
business. Hewlett Packard
Enterprise Storage
is central to this
new flexibility.

Challenge

Transforming IT to support a new
business strategy

ERS is a specialist motor insurer. It dates
from 1946, with the business formed as
Equity Motor Policies, a Lloyd’s syndicate.
The company has since had a number
of owners. The latest, Aquiline, a New
York-based venture capital firm, acquired
the business in 2013.

“The acquisition has clarified a new,
streamlined business strategy,” says Jon
Shippey, head of IT Operations, Technology
Services, ERS Insurance Group. “We’ve
taken a dierent approach. We’re now
focused entirely on being a broker-based
insurance for the motor sector.”

Case study

ERS Insurance
Group

“Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a great reputation for service and reliability,

particularly for anything hardware-related. HPE was always going to be the
first choice. What I like about HPE today is that they’re becoming far more
customer-focused. They’re comfortable operating in a consultative capacity.”

– Jon Shippey, head of IT Operations, Technology Services, ERS Insurance Group

Industry

Insurance

Page 2

The corporate refocus has run alongside
a major re-platforming of the back-oice
systems. “We’ve looked at every aspect
of the IT delivery model,” says Shippey.
“Over the last three years we’ve undergone
a digital transformation and removed all
legacy applications.”

The transformation is geared towards
creating a more agile, cost eicient
organisation. “A cleaner infrastructure,
cleaner app estate, more modularised,” says
Shippey. “Simple enough on paper, harder to
achieve in practice.”

One of the challenges was storage. Shippey
says, with so much attention focused on
new claims and policy applications and data
migration, he initially underestimated the
importance of storage. “As we migrated
we started to see performance issues
with some apps. We thought the issues
were app-related, turns out they were
storage-related. We were starting to
run out of capacity.”

Solution

Reliable storage with capacity
on demand

ERS has been an HPE 3PAR customer for
years. “We’ve had no issues with 3PAR,”
says Shippey. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise
has a great reputation for service and
reliability, particularly for anything
hardware-related. HPE was always going
to be the first choice. What I like about
HPE today is that it is becoming far more
customer-focused. It’s comfortable operating
in a consultative capacity.”

The HPE solution was to replace the legacy
storage arrays with a new HPE 3PAR
StoreServ 8440c 4-node, 223.4 TiB all-flash
array, in production. Alongside this, it would
upgrade the existing 7440c with all-flash,
giving a 4-node 237.3 TiB array for disaster
recovery. For backup, an HPE StoreOnce
4900 box (221TB usable) and an HPE
StoreOnce 6500 box (362TB usable), one for
the primary DC and one for DR.