Clientèle Life Selects Infinidat

Clientèle Life Assurance Company Limited has selected Infinidat Ltd to provide two InfiniBox F4230 appliances to replace legacy storage solution.

It is part of the Clientèle Limited Group, a diversified financial services group listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).

The company has offered affordable funeral cover, health, legal and life insurance to the market for the past 25 years, with convenient, easy to understand products. Furthermore, the group has been rated in the top 50 companies for sustainable growth and return on shareholder interests on the JSE.

As part of the insurance and financial services sector, storage is of importance, for daily operations and client services abd also compliance obligations.

Challenge and an opportunity
Clientèle Life’s existing storage solution was reaching end of support. In addition, their foray into hyperconverged storage had not produced the anticipated performance benefits. In order to address this issue, it would have required the costly addition of new compute nodes. This presented an opportunity to find a solution that would better cater to their current and future needs.

Their requirements included a tier-3 architecture, HA and support for the virtualised environment as well as replication capabilities. Above all, the user needed flexibility to allow the solution to scale at short notice without impacting daily business operations.

“We run a 96% virtualised environment, with more than 350 virtual servers hosted on 8 production and 6 DR VMware hosts. Our entire company, from telephony systems to our SQL database, relies on our back-end storage, making HA critical to our business operations. In the past, we needed to upgrade our solution every 3 years to meet performance, capacity and availability requirements. This became costly and we therefore required a more robust solution. This is where Infinidat came into the picture with its reputable solution, augmented by a unique elastic price model. The model also allows us to have additional storage instantly available whilst only paying for what we use,” explained Riaan Moller, storage and VMware environment manager, Clientèle Life.

Solution
Infinidat supplied Clientèle Life with 2 InfiniBox F4230 appliances, for synchronous replication between its production and DR data centres. The units have a total capacity of 1PB, of which they are currently using 600TB across both environments. Through software algorithms, the appliances use commodity hardware to offer  performance at an affordable price. In addition, pricing is transparent and all necessary licensing and functionality is included up front.

“This solution has not only met Clientèle Life’s storage requirements from a cost efficiency and performance perspective but it has also provided them with a competitive advantage. To make sure these benefits are maintained, Infinidat provides local support and offers proactive monitoring to ensure constant uptime and availability,” said Hayden Sadler, country manager, South Africa, Infinidat.

Project and implementation
In January 2020, the appliances were officially installed and by mid-March all of Clientèle Life’s data had been migrated. The project was completed shortly before South Africa entered lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Consequently, the system has been in production since the end of March with multiple 10GbE links for replication.

“Thankfully we were able to complete our migration in time. The remote access capabilities of InfiniBox were an important part of keeping our back-end systems up and running,” said Keith Fagan, infrastructure services manager, Clientèle Life.

In addition, Infinidat provided training on the system – 2 engineers are certified. This was another consideration, as it allowed the team to gain in-depth understanding of their system in order to maintain and run it independently.

Benefits
The InfiniBox appliances deliver performance and 100% availability. This is critical, as the end user stores ant amount of data that needs to be available at all times.

“Since we installed the system, we have experienced zero downtime, thanks to the triple redundancy offered by Infinidat. This also facilitates us to replace or upgrade storage components without impacting production systems, which on our previous storage arrays would have required downtime. It gives us greater flexibility and has allowed us to future-proof our storage solution, since our capacity can grow alongside our ever-growing business and data requirements,” said Moller.

In addition to these benefits, Clientèle Life has seen a 40% improvement on database consistency checks since migrating the SQL environment onto the solution. The previous system performed asynchronous replication, whereas Infinidat offers synchronous capabilities that result in performance enhancements. This ensures data is backed up and recoverable at all times, bolstering data security.

“The technology has met and exceeded our expectations; it simply does what it is supposed to without intervention. It has given Clientèle Life an even higher degree of confidence with regards to our technology and storage infrastructure. We are assured that our data is secure and can be recovered at all times. Additionally, we have an excellent relationship with Infinidat who provide proactive management and support. Our Infinidat solution is delivering a ROI through savings, enabling us to do more with fewer resources,” Moller concluded.

Based on Clientèle Life’s need to future proof its storage, the requirements for an increase in capacity is not a case of ‘if‘ but ‘when.‘