Moved to tIers
In the cases of these insurers, smarter
information management is a key part
of the efficiency equation. Core to this
strategy is a tiered storage approach,
which consists of keeping current data
on centralized platforms that are imme-
diately accessible to their business users,
while moving older data to more cost-
effective hardware with longer latency
times. “We’ve done a lot of work around
storage and storage area networks
(SANs), and trying to push more things
from tier-one storage,” says Rod Brown,
director of the mission critical group at
Nationwide. “In the process, we’ve been
able to reduce our costs, and make
things easier to manage. There is also far
less energy consumption in tier-two or
tier-four storage.”
Allstate’s IT teams have also been
tackling the issue of inefficient storage
head-on in recent years. “When I first
got here, we were the largest consumers
of tier-one SAN you probably ever met,”
says Anthony Abbattista, VP of technol-
ogy solutions for Allstate. “We started a
tiered storage strategy based on cost.
Right now, we probably have about 10
to 12 times the storage on the floor,
spinning storage, disks, than we had
four and half years ago. But our data
storage costs have dropped by about
10% to 15%.”
Adopting a similar strategy, Aflac
has been able to double the data stor-
age capacity within its new data center
with no additional increase in costs.
“We just increased our storage capacity
by 100%, but have not increased our
power consumption within the data
center,” says Pat Ryal, VP of technology
services for Aflac. “We have three tiers
of storage. We use highly efficient,
quick-response systems to meet near-
term demand, and archived systems
that may result in a little bit of a delay
in retrieving data.”
Less Is More
These same insurers have recently built
or are in the process of building new,
smarter data centers, not to add more
physical facilities, but to consolidate
their large inventories. As a result, these
companies are cutting costs and energy
consumption.
Nationwide’s New Albany data
center, for example, is part of the
company’s dramatic consolidation
from 28 to three data centers. The
company currently operates out of
two consolidated data centers, with
the third, greener New Albany center
starting to come online this year.
Much of this process was possible
through virtualization of the compa-
ny’s IT systems—Brown reports that
up to 50% of Nationwide’s resources
are now virtualized. The consolidation
“saved us quite a bit of money, and
also makes us more energy efficient
and greener,” he says. “We’ve been
able to leverage our equipment into
two smaller spaces.”
GoInG vIrtuaL
Virtualization is also helping enable Allstate to scale down from four data centers to two, which includes its recently
opened Rochelle data center. Abbattista
says most systems within the data center
are virtualized servers running Windows
and Unix-based applications, which
consumes far less energy and floor space
than its previous stable of mainframes.
“We did work in virtualization, and
we also did work in developing comput-
ing farms with a general-purpose shared
infrastructure to get like-minded func-
tions running together,” Abbattista re-
lates. “We took out 70% of our database
servers by going to a shared infrastruc-
ture. Instead of each application or devel-
opment group saying, ‘hey I need to talk
to my database server,’ we said, ‘here’s a
standard offering, and oh, by the way, its
reliable, its clustered, it has the right
backup and availability characteristics,
and it’s not going to cost you more.”
As a result of this consolidation and
virtualization, Allstate’s new data center
ended up being only half the original
size planned, he adds. Allstate was also
planning to close its two older data cen-
ters by June of this year.
At Aflac, a migration to virtual tape
storage—versus tape-based systems—
has resulted in significantly reduced
space requirements at the company’s
new data center. “We’ve dramatically
decreased our storage requirements
over the last year,” Ryal says. “We dramatically increased our floor space
within the data center because we were
able to remove physical tape.” As an
added green benefit, tapes no longer
In March 2010, Allstate’s Rochelle, Ill., facility was awarded LEED Gold certification.
