Back It Up

USAgencies is a nonstandard auto insurer, so operating in a nonstandard manner shouldn't be unexpected. Licensed to insure motorists in Illinois, Alabama, and Louisiana, the carrier fashions itself as a call center that happens to sell insurance, according to Shawn Gregory, systems services manager. "We are very focused on making sure we give our clients quick assistance to any need they may have," he says.

But rather than build a centralized call center, the carrier opted for a distributed operation. "We wanted a presence in a lot of areas," Gregory states. The carrier operates 93 branch offices with a VoIP system connected to every representative's desk. The majority of call center personnel is comprised of licensed agents. If an agent is licensed in all three of the carrier's states and can speak Spanish and English, that agent can be in almost every queue USAgencies has, he explains, adding, those who are not licensed have limited access until they are licensed.

USAgencies also has a server in every office, so with about 100 servers throughout the company, storage problems were bound to pop up. The carrier felt it needed a central storage solution. "We started consolidating data to a SAN [storage area network], and we invested in a NAS [network attached storage], as well," says Gregory. "We went to a NAS to offload all the file-sharing services. We wanted something more specialized to better handle the workload. We knew we needed something stable and robust."

USAgencies turned to CDW, a provider of technology and services, to help it solve its storage problems. Gregory was confident of CDW's ability to help solve the problems. "We weren't 100 percent certain of what product we wanted to go with," he says. "We knew we could go to CDW and say these are the three [server] vendors we want to look at. CDW engaged one of its storage specialists to help us out. The specialist knew each platform well and could give us the pros and the cons of the platforms."

The biggest challenge USAgencies faced was migrating the data from its fragmented environment to a central environment, reports Gregory. CDW provided advice on how the carrier could go about it. "CDW held our hand until we were comfortable with the technologies," he says.

The lion's share of the work fell on USAgencies' internal developers because they had to modify existing software. CDW and hardware provider EMC working together gave the carrier suggestions on how to migrate terabytes of information from all the different systems to the SAN. "We moved the data pretty cleanly, but we initially left the data in both places. Once the software was cut over to the SAN, we started deleting the data on those fragmented servers," says Gregory. "We were comfortable at that point because we knew we had a good solution."

Gregory notes there was only one hiccup. "We asked for a [NAS] that would be compatible with our distributed file system [DFS]," he says. The carrier uses domain-level DFS. "The NAS unit didn't work with domain-level DFS," he says. "We had to make some modifications, including bringing a Windows server online to be a parent folder, and we made that work. But that's the only thing in the entire process I didn't think was perfect."

The biggest benefit the SAN has given the carrier is the ability to shrink the backup window dramatically. "We were trying to back up a pretty significant amount of data," says Gregory. "We had a mandate to do a full backup of every server every night, which is a hefty task." With the SAN, USAgencies was able to perform NDMP (network data management protocols) backups, allowing the carrier to back up a large amount of data quickly.

With the previous Windows file system backup, the file was backed up and an index was written, explains Gregory. This is what pushed the time for the carrier's backup to about a week. "NDMP creates a snapshot and grabs the indexes of all the files in that snapshot, which takes less than an hour, and does a block-level backup," he says. "It doesn't care about indexing the file. It has shrunk our backup window from a week to about six hours."

The carrier was new to SAN and NAS technology, so it relied on CDW to help make the best decision. "It got to the point where we told [CDW] what end result we wanted and to come back with a price tag and a design for us," says Gregory. "We asked CDW to design both systems [NAS and SAN] and price them out. CDW took care of all the legwork. It came back with fully designed systems, and we decided to go with a server from EMC. CDW engaged all the correct people to get our system implemented correctly."