Storage case study: Canopius

Canopius has migrated to an iSCSI SAN

Insurer Canopius implemented a new storage infrastructure to improve business continuity and cut storage costs as the company’s reliance on email and the internet increased.

“Business-to-business communications across the internet, for example processing claims, has grown and is key to our business, so we wanted better business continuity, while 18 months ago our business continuity provider’s data vaulting charges increased as data volumes expanded. These two factors pushed us into considering our storage options,” says Brent Gebbie, Canopius’ IT manager.

The company decided to migrate from an HP Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN), which was near full capacity, to an iSCSI SAN from LeftHand Networks, which meant saving money on fibre, cards and switches as it uses the Canopius network to transfer data.

The migration project relied on Double-Take software recommended by data availability specialist CWL Systems to ensure an efficient switchover. “Using Double-Take meant the project took days instead of weeks to complete,” says Gebbie.

Instead of relying on tape backups, Double-Take continuously replicates all company data from the live environment to virtual servers at Canopius’ hosted disaster recovery environment, which are attached to the recycled Fibre Channel SAN.

The result is that Canopius, which is regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has strengthened compliance regarding data recovery.

“The FSA requires us to perform two full business continuity invocations each year as we must be able to recover data within a ‘reasonable’ time. Recovery time in the event of a full site failure has been cut from several days to about 45 minutes,” says Gebbie.

Performing individual invocations for tests or to install an upgrade on Canopius’ live environment is also much quicker and cheaper.

“Under the old system, for example, our Microsoft Exchange environment took 23 hours to recover. Now it takes just 14 minutes,” says Gebbie.

He calculates that Canopius will save £180,000 with the new infrastructure. “By taking data storage out of a third party’s vaults into our own environment and managing storage ourselves, we only have to pay for our physical rack space in our offsite disaster recovery environment,” says Gebbie.