Pacific Life Insurance Company

Transcription

1 Pacific Life Insurance Company Pacific Life Turns Compliance into Business Advantage SOLUTION SNAPSHOT Applications: SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, KVS, FileNet EMC Software: EMCControlCenter (SAN Manager, StorageScope ), EMC SRDF /A, EMC PowerPath, Centera Replicator EMC Storage Infrastructure: 100 terabytes of EMC storage, including EMC Symmetrix DMX, CLARiiON CX Fibre Channel and ATA, EMC CLARiiON Disk Library, EMCCentera Compliance Edition Plus, EMC Celerra networkattached storage EMC Services: EMC design and implementation services Production Environment: HP and Windows servers Profile: Pacific Life Insurance Company is a Fortune 500 provider of insurance and diversified financial services and counts more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies as clients. Challenge: With the regulatory environment becoming more complex and stringent, Pacific Life needed to ease the burden of complying with current regulations while empowering the company to address those of the future. Business Value: With EMC Centera Compliance Edition Plus, Pacific Life has been able to: Save hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs formerly associated with compliance efforts. Avoid losses due to IT projects thrown off schedule when engineers are diverted to compliance efforts. Eliminate the costs associated with Pacific Life s former tape archiving method. Enhance end-user satisfaction through rapid, online access to archived information. Reduce the cost and time of backup and restore as fixed content is removed from production storage to content-addressed storage and production data is backed up to disk instead of tape. Deploy Centera as an integral part of its ILM environment, enabling the company to match the performance and cost of storage systems to the needs of each application.

2 Anyone who has seen a house burn down is an obvious candidate for home insurance. Likewise, an IT professional who has completed the labor-intensive task of restoring millions of archived s from tape will want insurance, but in the form of an online archiving solution that ensures information is well-protected and accessible. In 2004, Pacific Life Insurance Company, a Fortune 500 provider of life and health insurance products and financial services, faced the challenge of restoring years of archived e- mails for hundreds of users when it needed to comply with a routine audit under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 17a-4 regulation. The enormous time and expense the audit took drove Pacific Life to implement EMC Centera Compliance Edition Plus, an online content-addressed storage (CAS) solution. With EMC Centera, Pacific Life has turned an obligation to comply with industry and government regulations into a business advantage. By using Centera instead of tape for archiving old s and other types of information, the company can now confidently and easily satisfy regulations, such as SEC 17a-4, Sarbanes-Oxley, and NASD Moreover, it has drastically reduced equipment and media costs and essentially eliminated the time and cost associated with restoring archived documents. In addition, Centera is an essential element of Pacific Life s information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. By archiving s that were formerly stored on higher-end EMC storage, Pacific Life has been able to closely align application requirements with diverse storage tiers and lower costs. Now that Pacific Life has moved production data from more expensive storage to Centera, the solution has also facilitated a backup, recovery, and archiving strategy that has dramatically reduced the amount of data that needs to be stored on production systems and then backed up. Because of Centera and ILM, Pacific Life has more time and money to focus on its strategic priorities of continually improving customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Centera gave us the lowest TCO due to dramatically reduced storage acquisition costs and nearly zero management expense. Yet, it still provided performance that was comparable to disk-based enterprise storage systems. Tom LaVoie Windows Operations Manager, Pacific Life Weeks of staff time devoted to restoring data in a tape environment SEC 17a-4 calls for certain records to be kept for a minimum of three years in an easily accessible place. The IT group at Pacific Life found backup tapes to be anything but easily accessible for this purpose. To comply with the SEC 17a-4 audit in 2004, the IT staff needed to invest in more storage and server technology, and significant IT staffing resources. Ryan Child, Pacific Life s Windows Network Engineer, explained, We set up a lab and purchased and installed five Exchange servers and a terabyte of new storage specifically for the audit. After four weeks, we were still trying to restore backed up data onto the Exchange servers. Tom LaVoie, Pacific Life s Windows Operations Manager, added, Once we got the data restored, we then had to find the correct mailboxes. We would search Monday s data only to find out what we were looking for wasn t there and we d go on to Tuesday s. It took additional weeks after the initial restoration to recover the mailboxes we wanted.

3 After this painful experience, Pacific Life evaluated non-tape, regulation-compliant archiving solutions that would allow them to set up retention periods for different classes of data, and after the required aging period, permanently delete that data. Ultimately, EMC Centera emerged as the best choice for Pacific Life. Centera gave us the lowest TCO due to dramatically reduced storage acquisition costs and nearly zero management expense, said LaVoie. Yet, it still provided performance that was comparable to disk-based enterprise storage systems. Up and running in two days Pacific Life hired EMC Professional Services to design and implement the contentaddressed storage solution based on Centera and KVS software to manage the archiving of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and search and retrieval of archived . EMC Professional Services helped us deliver the product to the business on time and within budget, said LaVoie. In only two days, we migrated our content to Centera and everything was online. The entire implementation was perfect. Moreover, my staff was able to interface with EMC engineers and get valuable Centera training. LaVoie explained that EMC Services role helped other aspects of the IT operation as well. My engineers stayed on track with their own projects instead of spending a week or two implementing the hardware. EMC Services saved us money because our other projects and daily deliverables were not delayed by this undertaking. We know the authenticity of what we ve stored [on Centera] is guaranteed, and it cannot be deleted until its retention period has passed. Sharon Pacheco Chief Compliance Officer, Pacific Life Dramatic cost savings result With each month since purchasing and installing Centera, the return on that investment has grown. Pacific Life has decreased its need to invest in tape libraries, tape media, and offsite storage for tape. Significant additional savings resulted from the dramatic reduction in time the IT staff needed to devote to managing tape assets and responding to compliance requests. Prior to installing Centera, Pacific Life estimates it lost $50,000 to $100,000 per audit response due to delayed rollout of revenue-generating applications and lost productivity. On top of that, the cost of three engineers spending a minimum of four weeks setting up to recover data could amount to another $42,000 in labor costs. If not enough storage space was available, Pacific Life may have needed to spend $100,000 to purchase one terabyte of storage for its high-end storage area network. For Centera, the same terabyte capacity is roughly one-third the cost. If Pacific Life had Centera in place for the 2004 audit request they would have saved $162,000, conservatively. This total savings is based on adding the $50,000 project loss, $42,000 in personnel costs, and the $70,000 in additional storage costs over Centera. The benefits of our Centera solution keep on accruing, LaVoie noted. We get better capacity utilization so we need less storage space, and we re reducing tape media costs. It s also an extraordinarily easy system to manage. Our Centera just keeps on running with hardly any intervention.

4 Maximizing the value of existing storage infrastructure EMC Centera is just one part of Pacific Life s EMC tiered storage infrastructure. By employing an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, Pacific Life is able to match the performance and cost of diverse storage systems to the needs of each application. At the high end, Pacific Life uses EMC Symmetrix systems to store production data for Microsoft Exchange, clustered Microsoft SQL Server applications, and other applications requiring fast I/O performance. EMC CLARiiON CX Fibre Channel and ATA disk, and EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) comprise the mid tier, hosting production data for web servers, file servers, FTP data repositories, logging of security events, and other applications. Production data is backed up on CLARiiON Disk Library (CDL) and s are archived to the EMC Centera. We get a huge bang for the buck with ILM, LaVoie said. We re not spending a lot of cash to deliver a high-performance solution to applications that don t need it. When our brokers need to find an old , for example, the performance difference whether we store it on Centera or Symmetrix is simply not noticed. So, in certain environments, Centera is the obvious choice. Because Pacific Life archives s approximately 20 terabytes worth onto EMC Centera, Pacific Life has reduced the amount of active production data it stores on Symmetrix and needs to back up. Said Child, With Centera and the CLARiiON Disk Library, we now have a truly integrated backup, recovery, and archiving strategy. By moving our older Exchange s to Centera, the demand on our tier-1 Exchange storage has decreased by 40 percent. We ve freed up capacity and we re saving money on high-performance storage. It s like night and day, comparing what we have now to our former system. At any time we can search the archive and find in seconds what took weeks to get to before. Tom LaVoie Windows Operations Manager, Pacific Life The time it takes to back up our production Exchange systems has been reduced from 26 to 12 hours because we have significantly less production data to back up and backing up to CLARiiON Disk Library is altogether faster and more efficient than tape. And the nice thing is we can manage our entire EMC infrastructure from a single console using EMC ControlCenter software. Protecting data until deletion is safe Cost savings is only one facet of the value the Centera solution has provided to Pacific Life. Reducing risk has also been of enormous importance. Pacific Life s Centera Compliance Edition Plus has sophisticated authenticity features and a default retention period of infinity, ensuring that nothing earmarked for saving slips between the cracks and is accidentally deleted. Sharon Pacheco, Pacific Life s Chief Compliance Officer, said, We know the authenticity of what we ve stored is guaranteed and it cannot be deleted until its retention period has passed.

5 LaVoie added, It s like night and day, comparing what we have now to our former system. At any time, we can search the archive and find in seconds what took weeks to get to before. From the IT maintenance perspective, as well, the difference is equally dramatic. Once the legal department was trained on using the new archiving system, explained Child, IT stepped out of the picture. Legal tells us what retention periods to set, but otherwise that s it. The solution takes care of archiving the , and handling Legal s searches and reporting. Our maintenance is minimal since Centera takes care of itself. Centera plays a major role in compliance for Pacific Life, not just for current regulations, but also in anticipation of future rulings. As a company, our goal is to stay ahead of the compliance curve, explained Pacheco. Centera helps us do that. Reducing the management burden With a self-healing, redundant architecture, Centera ensures archived data is always available. Centera stores one primary copy of an original object regardless of how many people have saved the same file. In addition, Centera stores its own mirror copy of each object and routinely checks data and disk integrity as part of its self-maintenance routines. In a year, there has only been one problem with our entire Centera infrastructure, Child said. Once, the Centera automatically put in a call to EMC customer service and an engineer, replacement storage node in hand, arrived quickly. He swapped the new storage node for the old and Centera took over from there. There was no data loss, as everything is redundant, and no downtime. To provide another level of protection, EMC Services helped Pacific Life deploy a Centera business continuity solution. Using EMC Centera Replicator software, data written to the Centera at the primary data center is immediately copied to the Centera at the company s disaster recovery site 22 miles away. With Centera s resilient architecture, long-distance replication, and an integrated backup, recovery, and archiving strategy, Pacific Life is assured that its data is always available. The demand for compliance drives better storage practices Pacific Life sees Centera expanding its role as it becomes the repository for images of fixed content, such as insurance policies and other types of shared information. The company also plans to store its Dictaphone voice recording archive, also subject to regulatory audit, on Centera to vastly reduce the time it takes to retrieve archived audiotapes. The more we use Centera, the more we see its applicability to a broad range of applications, said LaVoie. As we move additional fixed-content to Centera, whether it is from tape or high-end storage, the ramifications for lower IT costs and better data accessibility will ramp up even faster. EMC Corporation Hopkinton Massachusetts In North America EMC 2,EMC, EMC ControlCenter, Celerra, CLARiiON, PowerPath, SRDF, Symmetrix, and where information lives are registered trademarks and Centera, SAN Manager, StorageScope, and Symmetrix DMX are trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 8/05 Customer Focus H1758