Real-Time Data Compression for Insurance Companies

Few, if any, industries generate or rely on data as much as the insurance industry. Insurance companies maximize profits by minimizing risk. Data has to be available when actuaries need it or when claim decisions need to be made quickly - however, creating a single, global repository of primary storage data is as impractical as it is inefficient.

So how do you deal with exponential data growth where users often demand five 9's data accessibility at a time when you are forced to cut costs? Virtualization is now a best practice. But virtualization itself is not enough. Real-time data compression can help.

Here are four ways IBM Storwize appliances help insurance companies gain efficiencies in storage optimization and cost reduction:

Compresses data in real time without performance degradation.
Increases your NAS disk capacity by up to 80 percent.
Increases the efficiency of your secondary data operations like backup, replication and deduplication by applying IBM Storwize's patented Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) technology in primary storage operations.
Enhances the ROI of your virtualization investments by reducing virtual machine workload and sprawl.

Field Findings:

Helphire deployed a VMWare virtualization solution consisting of 288 virtual machines running on 33 ESX servers powered by a NetApp FAS3050. The company then tasked IBM Storwize to help them control network storage infrastructure costs even further by delaying the need for more disks without any performance degradation. Helphire's use of Storwize appliances allowed them to recover more than 65 percent of their existing storage capacity. It also enabled them to migrate their entire VMware estate from VMFS to compressed NFS on NetApp filers for expanded performance gains.

Learn more about the HelpHire case study, or watch one of the IBM Storwize videos to get details about how real-time data compression optimizes storage without compromising on performance.