ANZIIF - Infrastructure and Consolidation Project
Overview
The Australia and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF) is the leading provider of education, training and professional development services to the insurance and financial services industry in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region.
With more than 15,500 members across 30 countries ANZIIF required a fast, highly available network infrastructure globally.
Situation Analysis
Kiandra’s audit uncovered that ANZIIF had a range of ageing infrastructure with multiple failure points.
During previous infrastructure refresh cycles, ANZIIF had segmented each service or application to its own dedicated physical server and direct attached storage units. This strategy caused a large amount of server sprawl (17 physical servers and 6 direct attached storage units). With this approach, an entire server refresh would require ANZIIF to purchase 17 dedicated servers. From both a logistics and availability point of view, staggering the removal and installation of the servers would be an arduous and costly task.
Kiandra determined that this strategy was unsustainable from both a cost and utilisation perspective. Managing the spread and location of critical company data in the event of a disaster situation would also see a substantial blow out in restoration time.
Kiandra Solution
The Kiandra solution provides a balance of proven and cutting edge technology and professional services to deliver real value and competitive advantage to ANZIIF. The new solution replaced ANZIIF’s legacy infrastructure with a combination of VMware, NetApp and Citrix platforms.
Combining these proven platforms with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system for server infrastructure, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 created a platform of fast, reliable, highly available and integrated, scalable solutions which would grow and evolve as ANZIIF’s needs changed in the future.
Delivering Benefits
Kiandra implemented a HP BladeSystem chassis with three VMware vSphere blades, and NetApp FAS2000 SAN which was a cost effective solution, allowing for rapid future expansion and providing all the reliability and performance benefits of shared centralised server resources.
With members and students accessing ANZIIF materials from around the globe, around the clock, ANZIIF required all business critical applications to be online 24/7.
Utilising VMware High Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduling services, Kiandra can ensure that protected servers will automatically restart or migrate to another physical server in case of server failure or high load.
The solution centralised all file, application and server data on a highly redundant NetApp SAN and allows ANZIIF to leverage underlying NetApp technology for rapid server failover in case of a disaster and extend this capability to its entire server fleet, including an offsite Disaster Recovery site. ANZIIF also gained the benefits from the centralised and simplified data backup and recovery strategy Kiandra implemented, including increased file security, reduced potential loss of data and reduced recovery time in a disaster scenario.
Kiandra was able to prolong the life of ageing but adequate desktop hardware, and remove application compatibility issues, by rebuilding all desktop machines with a clean and simple operating system image which launched into a centralised Citrix XenApp infrastructure to provide a completely scalable server-based computing solution.
This addressed the growing frustration from staff with the slow performance of the desktop computers and eradicated the labour-intensive rebuilds and application installs the ANZIIF IT team needed to perform when things went wrong.
The solution provided users the convenience of a single username and password for their logon as well as a familiar desktop environment in the office and from home when working remotely via the secure ANZIIF environment.
The power, cooling, rack space and ageing hardware maintenance cost savings on a month to month basis formed a sizable ROI benefit for ANZIIF. Coupled with the benefits of running a shared scalable storage platform for critical business data, the strategy provides an agile platform to grow the business with minimal future investment.
The infrastructure implemented at ANZIIF was designed to be highly available and scale with the organisation’s future expansion projections.
Combining the technologies used in the Kiandra solution, ANZIIF were able to achieve their goals and can increase the power of the system with a low investment cost, while maintaining the core requirement of 24/7 access to their systems.
"Kiandra demonstrated the flexibility and creativity we were looking for in a provider to support our IT transformation. They took the time to get to know our business and understand all current and future requirements. We look forward to continuing the relationship with Kiandra."
Uday Jagasia
IT Manager, ANZIIF