Rethinking Storage to Avoid Drowning in Data
Insurance Networking News, August 1, 2009
When bailing out a boat, few would stop to consider the long-term merits of the bucket in hand. In a similar sense, it's hard to fault carriers, who for years have been facing an ever-rising tide of data to store, for valuing expediency over long-term strategy when it comes to storage.
This seems especially true considering that in recent years data storage needs - often the most expensive part of a data center's operations - have been growing rapidly while IT budgets have remained relatively flat. Thus carriers are facing a choice: Either take money from other projects, or learn to store data more efficiently.
Advertisement
Fortunately, constantly improving disk densities and the attendant proliferation of cheaper, network-attached storage (NAS) options have enabled CIOs to swell their storage capabilities without busting the bank. However, at some point, this "throw-more-hardware-at-it" approach begins to yield diminishing returns, and many carriers, especially large ones, are reconsidering their strategy for storage.
"A few years ago, people were wildly adding storage, and we were no exception to that," says Anthony Abbattista, VP, technology solutions, of Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate Insurance Co. "Hardware has become commoditized. The question is: Do you have the software environment and the operations environment to take advantage of it?"
An interesting aspect of storage is that carriers are seemingly being pulled in two directions. One imperative is get more from existing investments by consolidating data, while a competing imperative is to warehouse and widely disseminate data for use in analytics. Chad Hersh, a principal at New York-based Novarica, says the underlying cause for this friction between efficiency and functionality is largely architectural.
"Existing architectures are well designed to store large amounts of data, but not designed to do a lot with that data," he says, noting that the size is but one concern. To be sure, carriers now collect a mishmash of data types, from simple text, to audio recordings with customer service representatives, to pictures and, increasingly, video from claims.
Anthony Abbattista
THE HOLISTIC APPROACH
At Allstate, efforts to rethink storage coincided with a larger architectural initiative to combine the company's data centers over five years. The insurer has consolidated from 13 mainframe data warehouses to just two, including one contained with a new, highly energy-efficiency data center in Rochelle, Ill.
According to Abbattista, this effort to minimize the physical footprint allowed the company to take a "clean slate" approach to storage. "The [old] warehouses followed the structure of the company, not the data."
He says going to a consolidated footprint also made the company more efficient with energy. "The data center migration helped us look not only at storage, but also at processors and virtualization," he says. "It's about better use of resources-it's really easy to just put racks on floors."
This data-centric approach has paid off handsomely, as the company now has 10 times the storage capacity (five to six petabytes) as had just four years ago, while storage expenses have declined 12%. Abbattista says a multi-pronged approach was necessary in order to store more for less.
One obvious alley was take advantage of market conditions by using lots of cheap drives. "Having ever-growing storage needs, we started to go to network attached devices, and that got us part of the way," Abbattista says, but adds that speed and reliability issues around NAS limit its utility to less critical data.
Indeed, Abbattista says the company became aggressive in its efforts to get data into correct tiers of storage in order to reduce total storage cost. Insurers tier data based on the levels of protection or performance required, frequency of use and compliance requirements. For example, mission-critical or frequently accessed data might be assigned to expensive RAID (redundant arrays of independent disks) arrays in tier 1, while other data will be consigned to lower tiers, and less-expensive storage options.
By analyzing workflow and utilizing different tiers of storage, Allstate was able to trim costs. "It forced us to think about business terms and how we we're going to access information," he says. "We realized we were using tier-1 SANs (storage area networks) for some things we should not have been using it for."
For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:
