Case Study
Storage rethink creates
more agile business
Objective
Create a more eicient 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 eicient storage
ERS is a specialist
insurance provider.
Over the past three years
it has transformed its
approach to IT, creating
a more agile, eicient
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 dierent 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-oice
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 eicient
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.
Case study
ERS Insurance
Group
Industry
Insurance
Page 3
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 Storage
delivers the performance advantages
of a purpose-built, flash-optimised
architecture without compromising
resiliency, data services, or data mobility.
A flash-optimised architecture reduces the
performance bottlenecks that can choke
hybrid and general-purpose disk arrays.
“My first response was that a flash play
would be more expensive than spinning
disks,” says Shippey. “But when we started
to look closely at deduplication and
compression rates, the cost dierence
was negligible. We did our own PoC
and it was clear we’d get more out of
the available storage.”
HPE was also able to rethink the
consumption model. Historically, ERS has
favoured a capex model, depreciating the
hardware and sweating the value over time.
HPE Financial Services helped create a more
responsive Capacity on Demand option.
This provides ‘burstable’ capacity to
cope with special projects or acquisitions
along with a pay-per-use model. “This
was a unique selling point, and extremely
attractive to our senior management,” says
Shippey. “As a business, we’re more flexible
with this buer. It also gives us a simplified
and optimised capacity planning process.”
Benefit
More agile, more cost eicient
Today, ERS has a new data centre, new
disaster recovery site and no legacy apps.
“We have more o-the-shelf products
and limited custom-built. We have a
small in-house development team and
30-40 co-source SMEs, we then outsource
a certain amount of commodity products,”
says Shippey. “We’ve changed everything
with a plug on it.”
He admits the ERS environment isn’t the
most power-hungry, certainly not viewed
in terms of single apps: “Others might look
at us and say ‘we’re not a big company, we
don’t need flash’. But the beauty of flash is
that I can throw anything at it. When our
apps are compounded, it makes a great deal
of sense.”
Performance improvements (latency is
reduced 500 per cent), mean ERS needs
less rack space at its data centre. This has
a knock-on benefit on power and cooling
costs; Shippey estimates annual savings will
be over £60,000.
Case study
ERS Insurance
Group
Industry
Insurance
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8440c Storage
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7440c Storage
• HPE 3PAR StoreOnce 4900 Backup
• HPE 3PAR StoreOnce 6500 Backup
HPE services
• HPE Financial Services
• HPE Pre-Provisioning Storage Services
“We needed to change how we acquired and paid for IT.
HPE Financial Services acted as a trusted advisor to help
us think through the options. The Capacity on Demand
feature is a major advantage. We’re now able to show the
business what it consumes, in IT terms, which is a real
benefit. This ‘showback’ model helps demonstrate the
value of IT to a particular business function.”
– Jon Shippey, head of IT Operations, Technology Services, ERS Insurance Group
Shippey says, according to the most recent
usage figures, ERS is “saving thousands of
pounds a month” compared to previous
months utilising the same capacity on
spinning disks. Three-year support costs
are expected to be 24 per cent less than
supporting the old F400/V400s. Backup
processes are 20 per cent faster. Call
handling times are 30 per cent faster.
“As an IT team, we’re now a lot quicker to
respond to the business,” says Shippey.
“The Capacity on Demand feature is a
major advantage. We’re now able to show
the business what it consumes, in IT terms,
which is a real benefit. This ‘showback’
model helps demonstrate the value of
IT to a particular business function.”
The storage buer allows for 30 per cent
headroom, accepting a 30 per cent annual
growth for the business. “As we grow, we
scale up,” says Shippey.
“We haven’t always seen HPE as a
one-stop-shop, but we’re increasingly
looking to them. We have some
opportunities around data enrichment,
which we’re speaking to the HPE analytics
people, and we’re looking at duplicating
backups in the cloud. Again, this is an
area in which HPE can help. ERS is small
in enterprise-terms, but we’re getting
invaluable access to the HPE roadmap
and development.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage/3PAR
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© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
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4AA6-6184EEW, June 2016
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