Great Eastern Life Assurance

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CASE STUDY – FINANCIAL INDUSTRY

SAN System Implementation for Great Eastern Life Assurance

Great Eastern Life Assurance is the largest asset based life insurance company in Singapore and Malaysia, with about S$37 billion in assets. With a combined 2.4 million policyholders on both sides of the Causeway, the company’s data storage needs are huge – and growing rapidly. The insurer recently upgraded its existing storage area network (SAN) infrastructure to the Fujitsu Eternus6000 SAN system.

The Project

For the past three years, Great Eastern relied on the EMC 8530 SAN system to meet their storage needs. When the maintenance coverage ended in the middle of 2005, the insurer decided to upgrade their storage infrastructure to cater for projected increases in consumption while maintaining a low total cost of ownership.

The reasons were apparent: With a large customer database, the company already generates huge amount of data in its day-to-day operations. Given the company’s plans to aggressively grow its clientele, the existing storage solution will not provide the required capacity or scalability to meet future storage needs in a cost-effective manner.

Thus, Great Eastern began searching for a SAN system that fulfilled the following criteria:

• be technologically superior to the EMC 8530
• exhibit characteristics of availability, reliability and scalability
• pose negligible risk when migrating data from the EMC 8530

After reviewing proposals from major storage vendors, the insurer appointed Fujitsu Asia to implement the Eternus6000 SAN system as a replacement for the EMC 8530.

Eternus Storage Solution

“Fujitsu proposed the Eternus6000 system because of its industry-leading performance, as seen from publicly available benchmarking results. Besides being a high-performance system, the Eternus6000 also provides excellent reliability due to its dynamic volume change technology, which provides ample headroom for growth while minimising system downtime for the end-user,” said Chun Wai Kok, AVP of Fujitsu Asia.

The proposed Eternus6000 SAN system incorporates many advanced features to ensure system reliability, examples of which include:

• fully redundant, hot-swappable components
• a high-availability multi-controller configuration
• a high-reliability, high-performance fibre switch to isolate faulty drives automatically
• a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) to ensure data access even during a disk failure, for speed and fault tolerance
• provisions for path failover

The storage capacity of the Eternus6000 can be expanded up to 90TB, or six times the 15TB maximum capacity of the EMC 8530. In addition, the Eternus6000 supports dynamic volume change and RAID migration which, coupled with its high reliability, allows the storage system to operate round-the-clock.

Fujitsu also proposed the Softek Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) software for migrating data from the EMC8530 to the Eternus6000, for various reasons.

Firstly, TDMF is a vendor- and platform-independent solution that allows low-risk data migration even if the old and new SAN systems employ different file systems or volume management algorithms. Secondly, data migration can be done in real time while remaining transparent to the end-user, and can be executed in the background with minimal impact on the rest of the insurer’s IT infrastructure. Thirdly, the integrity of the migrated data inside the secondary array can be verified before the final acceptance.

Customer Satisfaction

The Eternus6000 was implemented during the second half of this year and Fujitsu is currently performing data migration using TDMF. Great Eastern has not experienced any problems with the system to date, and does not foresee any problems with the ongoing migration exercise.