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Domestic and General

 

GAIN INSIGHTS & SAVE MONEY WITH DATA STORAGE

Domestic & General needs quick access to millions of records to provide accurate and up-to-date warranties and protection plans for customers, often across multiple appliances and across numerous countries.

The goal was to have a single, centralised point for customer data that is accurate.

With this, the business would be able to improve the speed it processed data and provide improved customer service while reducing expenditure on multiple hardware and software contracts.

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improvement in month-end reporting times

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saved in reporting run times, an average of 30%

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improvement in speed for overnight direct debit collection

challenge

As the business grew rapidly, different databases of customers’ information had been created across multiple locations, and now they needed to improve and further increase its storage capabilities.

As Domestic & General’s hardware and software contracts were coming to an end, they decided to review what other products were on the market to help meet their new storage needs to bring the different databases together to form a single ‘golden copy’ database.

SOLUTION

Domestic & General were already using IBM V7000 storage with SSD for their IBM i and AIX systems, so the decision needed to be taken whether to expand this or move to new technology.

After conducting a requirements survey, Tectrade recommended installing an IBM V9000 Flash array with over 170TB of storage for the production and high availability data centers across multiple European countries.

This had to be seamlessly integrated into Domestic & General’s live systems with migrations of the AIX and IBM i systems from the existing V7000s to the V9000s.

IBM storage

Tectrade’s expertise in migrating storage to IBM FlashSystem V9000 was invaluable. We have taken a huge step forward in storage capacity, I/O performance and resourcing strategic projects.

Ian Ward, Senior Infrastructure Manager – Domestic & General

outcomes

The massive boost in storage performance has greatly enhanced the response of core system with a 30% reduction in reporting run times – an average saving of around 14 hours per run.

In addition, the direct debit overnight processes – which have heavy input/output demands – have seen a 300% improvement.

Month-end reporting cycles are also 64% faster.

With no major change in operational expenditure, there has been a significant reduction in rack space and the cost of data center power.

The V9000 also has substantial scope to support future business growth.

 

 

data storage

About our client

Domestic and General

Domestic & General is a leading provider of specialist warranties and protection plans for home appliances, boilers and consumer electronics.

The business insures over 16 million people across 14 countries.