A series of outages hitting Aviva’s ageing IT infrastructure has led the insurance company to invest €3 million in a data centre refresh.
Network firm Triangle was tasked by Aviva to build a dark fibre data centre network and SAN fabric in order to provide better connectivity in a smaller footprint.
Thanks to costs reduction on energy and cooling, Aviva has put the savings from this Dublin data centre refresh at €500,000 for this year alone, predicting a further €800,000 savings in 2016.
Aviva has also virtualised estate into six hosted VMware solutions and adopted IBM’s FlashSystem technology to store data.
Sean Bellamy, Head of Infrastructure at Aviva said: "Our Data Centre in Ireland runs in combination with part of our UK data centre.
"We have achieved a significant reduction in footprint and we have been able to use the saved floor space for another purpose. This is real estate in the centre of Dublin, which is very expensive so it is a fantastic saving.
"We’ve also achieved significant energy savings because our electricity use has reduced by about three quarters and the cooling is significantly reduced as well which is great from an environment point of view."
Ian Farnan, TSS Infrastructure Manager at Aviva, said: "Storage was another challenge for us with three huge storage units.
"These have been replaced with a three tier solution based on IBM FlashSystem technology coupled with an IBM V7000 clustered system containing both SAS and NL-SAS tiers".
