VMware Global Alliances Blog

Seven Corners Inc.
Industry: Travel Insurance
Partners: VMware, Cisco, NetApp, Netech
Challenges addressed: Frequent server outages and implementing a private cloud

Posted by George L Reed II, Seven Corners,
CIO and Pearl Goitia, VMware,
Sr. Customer Reference Manager

When travelers need international health insurance, trip insurance and specialty benefits, they look to Seven Corners, Inc. for protection. When Seven Corners needed to improve the availability, agility and efficiency of its IT infrastructure, it looked to solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware, delivered by Netech Corporation. 

We recently talked with George L. Reed II, Seven Corners CIO, to get his perspective on how he and his team went from wanting a new solution to stop frequent server outages and improve efficiencies to implementing a private cloud that will take Seven Corners to the next-level of self-service IT.

VMware: Can you give us some insight into what you were facing in mid-2010 when you put out your initial request for information?

George L. Reed II: We were still reliably delivering 24/7 services, but much of our technology was approaching end of life, and daily outage and recovery costs were approaching $3,000. We calculated that without new technology by December, we could be facing business-disrupting failures. We needed to quickly design and build out a more reliable infrastructure and look for ways to increase efficiencies that would reduce the time and costs of delivering new services to market and support the company’s eight-year plan for continued double-digit annual growth.

VMware: What did you do first?

Reed: I contacted three integrating partners and asked them prove to me that they understood my problem, then put together a solution from best of breed practitioners and a project plan that would show us up and running in three to five months. Netech, a Midwestern U.S. provider of IP-based integration services and participant in Cisco, NetApp, and VMware partner programs, came in with exactly what we needed—an already validated and proven Cisco UCS, VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and NetApp storage solution that could be implemented quickly and without a lot of maintenance. That was the first step.

VMware: Was speed of implementation for the VMware, Cisco and NetApp solution a factor?

Reed: Yes. Speed to implementation was as critical a factor as scalability. In our business, customers are clamoring for new services and time to market determines which company gets their business—typically the first to deliver wins 60 percent of the revenue. The agility and flexibility we’ve gained from this infrastructure help us deliver products faster, quickly identify and reduce losses on unproductive programs, and rapidly capitalize on successes.

VMware: Did the joint solution deliver immediate results?

Reed: Absolutely. When the infrastructure went live mid-November, Netech helped with our initial physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, including a critical Web server scheduled for testing in the new environment before it was moved into production. Perhaps fortuitously, the failure we thought might happen in December occurred within just minutes of P2Ving our first Web system. When the physical server blue-screened, we were forced to forego testing and move the full production environment onto the new virtual server. It ran perfectly the first time and has worked flawlessly ever since.

VMware:  Since that time, what other results have you been able to achieve?

Reed: The biggest overall gain has been ROI. For example, by successfully reducing daily outages from an average of 12 across our core physical servers to zero, we’re saving at least $750,000 in annual downtime costs. In addition, in our test-driven software development environment that makes use of agile software development, we expect we’ll save more than $200,000 in development costs and take more than three months off delivery time. Since deploying the new shared IT infrastructure, we’ve also experienced other significant benefits, including:

• Spending less time running reports - Aggregate performance reports that used to take up to six hours to complete now run in less than 10 minutes
• Using less storage - With NetApp deduplication technology, we’re using 60 percent less storage, the equivalent of a year’s worth of new capacity
• Gaining more time for new projects - Last year some 80 percent of our IT dollars went into break-fix. In the last three months, that percentage has dropped to 16 percent with recovered resources being applied to new-project work
•  No downtime

We thank George for his time and invite you to learn more about the private cloud solution at Seven Corners.