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Case Study
Risk Management Solutions delivers an
enterprise-grade customer experience, while
also reducing TCO.
“
“
It costs us 50 percent less with the magic of depreciation and
financing to run our own internal private cloud as opposed to
outsourcing it to a public cloud provider.
-- Paris Georgallis, RMS VP Cloud Operations
Customer Profile Summary
Size: 1200+ employees
Location: Newark, California
Industry: Financial Services Software
A natural catastrophe can destroy billions of dollars of property.
Insurance companies must model this risk to help ensure that they
have the capitalization necessary to underwrite potential claims. Many
major industry players have turned to Risk Management Solutions
(RMS) for assistance. In 2012, the company decided that it needed to
offer its software as a service, thus beginning its journey to the cloud.
Challenges
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Adopting Right Model
Like most enterprises, RMS began its cloud migration with
considerable discussion around the model to use. Debate centered
on whether to rent public cloud space or invest in a private cloud.
The company decided to conduct its initial development cycle and
beta testing on a public cloud, Amazon Web
Services (AWS).
However, as RMS fine-tuned its requirements, three key factors led it
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
to leave Amazon. The first was economics. The company’s calculations
revealed that it cost 50 percent less to operate a private cloud based
on Cisco® technology than to rent public cloud space. Second, RMS
needed to provide a high level of client service. In a shared, public
cloud environment, offering stringent service-level agreements (SLAs)
is impossible. Third, RMS clients were not comfortable with putting their
highly confidential data on a third-party cloud.
With the decision to leave AWS made, RMS turned its attention to its
requirements for deploying a private cloud.
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From the outset, RMS needed the tools, methodologies, and
processes to provision new servers quickly, based on specific
configuration criteria. The IT team often brought four to five racks of
servers online simultaneously. The company wanted to deploy these
new assets, whether physical, virtual, or both, with a few mouse
clicks. RMS also needed a simplified cabling strategy. For instance, IT
wanted to minimize manual provisioning setup times and deploy a
“wire once and walk away” solution to minimize on-going
management overhead. IT also wanted to reduce the amount of
cabling required during setup.
In addition, RMS needed to deliver an exceptional experience to its
customers, which are among the world’s largest insurance companies.
With consumer applications, the difference between a 30- or
50-second latency is tolerable. In the case of the RMS application,
however, latency or unavailability would hinder underwriting or
decision-making and create a serious business problem.
Minimizing Support Issues
Finally, RMS needed the servers it chose to be thoroughly tested and
interoperate effectively with VMware and EMC – its selections for
virtualization and storage. RMS needed all three vendors to work well
from a support perspective to eliminate blaming of others that can
occur in multivendor deployments. With customers around the globe,
RMS also placed a high priority on the capability to resolve support
problems at any time of day. Deploying a white-box cloud solution
would have shifted most of the responsibility to RMS, and the
company would also be required to maintain a parts depot in multiple
locations worldwide.
“
“
I can't say enough about how well the relationship has run and
how happy we are with our Cisco solution both on the compute
side and the network side.
-- Paris Georgallis, RMS VP Cloud Operations
Solution
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© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
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To meet its provisioning requirements, RMS deployed Cisco Unified
Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) service profiles, which extend
the virtual machine abstraction applied to physical servers. With
service profiles, RMS can configure all newly racked servers,
matching service profile templates to desired server configurations.
Service profiles include elements that span the data center
environment, encapsulating server identity, local area network (LAN)
and storage area network (SAN) addressing, I/O configurations,
virtual local area network (VLAN), and quality of service (QoS).
Service profiles are abstracted from the specifics of an individual
server to create a template, defining policies that can be applied to
provision servers consistently, quickly, and without error.
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With only five staff members in operations, RMS quickly dismissed
deploying commodity white boxes on top-of-rack switches.
Although this approach had a lower initial capital cost, it would
ultimately require RMS to manage hundreds of individual, distributed
servers—an arduous task at best, especially with a small team and a
growing deployed infrastructure. For example, in a deployment of
1000 white boxes, RMS would need to log onto 1000 servers to
upgrade their basic input/output system (BIOS) and to install a driver
on every host bus adapter (HBA) card. With Cisco UCS Manager,
RMS could quickly perform these and other management functions
through a central console, generating significant savings and driving
improved return on investment.
In addition, RMS deploys unified structured cabling through Cisco
SingleConnect technology. Once a server is physically racked and
wired by the hosting managed service provider, RMS can run any
network protocol that it chooses, matched with any service profile.
RMS gets measurably better network performance from an
infrastructure based on Cisco Nexus® switches than from a public
cloud provider solution. These switches are important elements of its
80-Gbps backbone network.
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The Cisco partnership with VMware and EMC was another important
part of the solution puzzle. RMS knew that VMware and EMC have
formed a strong partnership with Cisco and also with each other. As
a result, the solutions of all three companies work smoothly together.
Once Cisco UCS servers are deployed, RMS simply installs VMware
vSphere and the system is operational quickly—with all drivers in
place. If RMS had deployed white-box servers and open source
code, the company would have needed to conduct interoperability
testing. With the Cisco solution, the Cisco global support
organization is always available to resolve any issues.
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
Results
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Cisco technology
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The first benefit is financial. While initial acquisition costs may be
higher than those associated with white-box servers, over time the
support structure and ability to do more with less comes into play
and translates into a lower TCO.
Second, RMS’ operations team is now less focused on—and less
concerned about—failures. And when issues arise, the team can
address them quickly, reducing impact on the business.
Third, the RMS client experience is delivered through predictable
performance and availability and without the problems inherent in a
public cloud environment. Consider this scenario: RMS discovered
that its application required more memory than originally
specified—with all blade servers requiring a memory upgrade. The
VMware virtualization layer and Cisco UCS Manager, coupled with
the 80-Gbps backbone, enabled RMS to upgrade all blades in just
seven days without disturbing customer operations.
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To find out more about ISVs deploying their software as a service on
Cisco-based clouds, go here.
Product List
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Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems, Inc.
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Asia Pacific Headquarters
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Singapore
Europe Headquarters
Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
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to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply
a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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