Customer
A highly recognised insurer and reinsurer based in London, renowned for their expertise in Casualty, Marine, and Property lines, along with other specialist areas.
Background
The client predominantly relies on in-house infrastructure housed within their data centre for the majority of their business applications. A small portion of their applications run on IaaS/SaaS from the cloud. Therefore, maintaining the stability and performance of their compute estate is crucial for their operations.
Problem
- Outdated technology: The existing 5-year-old infrastructure was struggling to deliver the necessary performance.
- Stability issues: The ageing design was causing further instability.
- High costs: Significant expenditure on extended support, maintenance, and staff time for managing issues.
- Risk: Potential financial and reputational damage from infrastructure-related downtime.
Additional Challenges
- Unplanned replacement: The need to replace infrastructure not originally budgeted for.
- Cost justification: Demonstrating the financial benefits and justifying the expenditure to the board.
- Timely replacement: Ensuring the new solution was in place before existing support expired.
Solution
- Innovation Centre Visit: Explored various solution options, including obvious, less obvious, and complementary offerings.
- Performance Analytics: Deployed performance analytics to gather key data and benchmarks for designing a new solution.
- Solution Options: Provided three different solution options for consideration.
- Commercial Proposition: Developed a commercial proposition that aligned with the client’s budget, needs, and timeline.
- Board Presentation: Supported the presentation and positioning of the commercial proposal for board approval.
Results
- Enhanced Performance: Significant improvement in technology performance.
- Cost Savings: Achieved approximately 50% cost savings by leveraging vendor EOQ (End of Quarter) timelines.
- Timely Delivery: Met all delivery timelines.
- Futureproofing: Implemented a solution that ensures long-term performance and reliability.
- Operational Savings: Reduced power consumption leading to monthly savings of over £1,000.
Customer Statement
“With the Synergy system nearing end of life and support expiring in 2024, the new HPE Server solution was designed to deliver much greater memory capacity for our demanding on-premise workloads (such as SQL, Actuarial, and Pricing systems), reduce power consumption and costs, lower our carbon footprint, and reclaim necessary rack space. The system has achieved all of these aims.”