China’s Ping An Insurance Deploys IBM SVC

IBM Corporation announced that Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (Ping An), a large private insurer in the country, has implemented an IBM software defined storage solution to help it speed data collection from one month to one hour, improving its ability to meet new regulatory requirements such as the annual audit and industrial data analysis.

With IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) storage virtualization software, a component of IBM’s Software Defined Storage portfolio, Ping An was able to virtually integrate more than 1PB of data from a variety of storage systems including the IBM XIV Gen3, as well as systems from EMC and Hitachi.

As a key partner of China Insurance Regulatory Commission, Ping An is required to provide a variety of analytics data to the organization in support of its development of the country’s insurance industry. With the new virtualized storage environment, Ping An was able to aggregate its growing data volumes in one hour instead of one month and accomplish data migrations with just a few instructions. In addition, the solution has delivered fast service times for Ping An’s critical projects.

“In recent years, due to the wide range and variety of the insurance business, Ping An’s IT infrastructure has faced huge challenges, particularly concerning the testing system that is required to retrieve dynamic data at any time,” said Wang Qingping, assistant chief engineer, Ping An. “Using IBM technology, we have improved operational efficiency, optimized our storage and achieved dramatic cost efficiencies.“

In addition to using SVC for its testing system and internal application development, Ping An leveraged SVC for a cloud computing project, as well.

“Companies around the globe are dealing with a data deluge and looking for ways to strategically manage and exploit the insights of that big data for competitive advantage,” said Jamie Thomas, GM storage and software defined systems, IBM. “Our software defined storage approach provides clients quick access to global data to enable business critical decision-making.“

Software Defined Storage redefines data management
SVC provides virtualization for fast reliable data movement across heterogeneous storage systems. A key feature of SVC is real-time compression, which compresses data on the fly for up to five-times more active storage capacity. SVC is part of IBM’s software defined storage solution, which also includes code name Elastic Storage, software that manages data locally and globally, providing breakthrough speed in data access, easy administration and the ability to scale technology infrastructures quickly and cost-effectively.