Insurance company improves disaster recovery time with virtualization, replication

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer | Jun 25, 2009

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Here is the story of one midmarket company that vastly improved the recovery times in its disaster recovery plans by replacing tape backups with virtualization and replication -- solving the bare-metal recovery problem of its 70-box Windows server farm in the process.

It is also the story of an IT executive in an industry so accustomed to managing risk (insurance) that he was able to get approval for an expenditure that was 'a bit shocking' (approximately $900,000) by laying out what IT could and could not do and leaving it to the business to calculate the cost.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company Inc. is a midsized business with an oversized need for speedy and reliable disaster recovery processes. Based in Raleigh, the property and casualty insurer operates in all 100 counties of the Tar Heel state. It has 650 employees at its home office, another 2,100 people spread out over the counties and direct written premiums of just less than $900 million a year.

'Our goal is to cover business-critical functions within 48 hours of a disaster declaration,' said Steve Zeidman, information systems division manager.

Cash flow is king at insurance companies, Zeidman said. The ability to mail bills, to verify coverage for claims processors, to take loss notices from customers and to pay claims relies on digital processes. The IT infrastructure is multi-tiered: a mainframe and a large Windows farm with data centralized at the home office. For years, the disaster recovery plans involved backing up and recovering data from tapes, using Tivoli Storage Manager. Then about two years ago, the insurer began to reassess those capabilities because recovery times were too slow.

Bare metal recovery problems, tape too time-consuming

With its time-tested backup procedures, the mainframe was a known quantity. IT could confidently assure the business that it would be back up within 24 hours of an outage, with 24 hours' worth of data lost. The 70 Windows servers were another story, Zeidman recalls.

'We found out the server farm was essentially unrecoverable. It would have taken weeks to recover it, if we had continued along with the methods we were using,' he said.

Bare-metal recovery was a problem, Zeidman said, referring to the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. Some configurations require that the hardware configuration used for restoring the data be identical to the hardware configuration used for the backup -- a steep climb even when the servers are the same make.