Ingosstrakh, one of Russia’s leading insurers, has migrated 90% of its business-critical data to Violin’s Flash Storage Platform (FSP) 7700. As a result, Ingosstrakh has achieved significant performance improvements in its analytics and business transaction processes, while reducing opex and capex, giving it a distinct edge over its competition. Data is the life-blood of the insurance industry and insurers like Ingosstrakh rely on large amounts of data to help them determine the potential risks of each policy holder. With the recent explosion of data made available to insurers, they now have to manage and process big data in near real time from a growing number of different sources. Inevitably this means that sooner or later disk scalability becomes a real challenge. Ingosstrakh decided to act to optimise its systems both to prevent future issues and to improve the efficiency of data handling. By implementing Violin’s FSP 7700 Ingosstrakh was able to boost the performance of its Oracle OLAP reporting systems by more than 1.5 times, and achieved a four-fold reduction in support requests.
“Ingosstrakh has set the bar for its sector by implementing flash storage in their data centre” commented Maxim Zubarev, Violin Memory country manager Russia/CIS/Ukraine. “With the enormous performance improvements Ingosstrakh has achieved, it now has the capacity to do additional data processing with the ability to offer better customer support and more advanced services. Ingosstrakh is a true illustration of the benefits an all-flash data centre can bring to enterprises in the financial and insurance industry. Ingosstrakh has the most advanced data storage infrastructure in Russia, and its competitors will need to embrace the value of all-flash to keep pace.
Viktor Kuzmenko, head of systems administration, Ingosstrakh commented: “Violin Flash Storage Platforms combine ease of deployment, reliability, and unsurpassed performance, enabling our company to face the future with confidence. Flash technology, such as the FSP, allowed us to collapse multiple tiers of storage into one, dramatically lowering our data centre costs for storage. The choice to go with Violin was an obvious one, as it allowed us to replace nearly all of our legacy disk array architectures and software to be best prepared for our digital future.”
Ingosstrakh’s implementation has also delivered significant benefits in terms of opex with a smaller physical footprint and lower power consumption. Given that Violin’s FSP connects using standard protocols, Ingosstrakh also did not need to make significant changes to its data center architecture, and with this ease of implementation, data center engineers have more time to focus on other value-add tasks.
Following the success of the initial implementation in its Oracle OLAP reporting system, Ingosstrakh also migrated data from its core OLTP business system to Violin’s Flash Storage Platform. Subsequent analysis illustrated that Ingosstrakh could entirely phase out disk-based systems used in the storage of business-critical data.
