Island Insurance Selects INX Disaster Recovery Solution

Honolulu-based property/casualty carrier Island Insurance Company, Ltd., has selected INX's Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service (VRS) as its disaster recovery solution. As the largest locally owned and managed P&C company, Island Insurance's challenge is to keep its data center online in the event that the island of Hawaii's single power grid were to fail in order to serve its customers.

Hawaii's telecommunications infrastructure is interdependent with the island's power grid, meaning that a larger-scale catastrophe could render disaster recovery effects ineffective, according to a joint Island/INX source. Island Insurance's existing physical-based disaster recovery facility housed on the U.S. mainland was adequate, but keeping the system current required significant capital cost increases, according to the source. Another drawback to the system in place was the need to fly IT staff to the mainland to activate the system in the event of a disaster. These limitations led the carrier to select Houston-based INX's Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service' (VRS), based upon a VMware (Palo Alto, Calif.) virtualization environment.

In preparation for the VRS implementation, INX helped Island complete the virtualization of its production data center. As a result, Island was able to consolidate six racks of computer equipment down to one, decreasing space requirements and power usage. The battery backup in the production environment now lasts for two hours versus only thirty minutes prior to virtualization. VMware's high-availability feature also means that downtime from server failure is now eliminated, according to the source.

"Working with INX has been very cost-effective," says Jeff Fabry, CIO, Island Insurance Companies. "INX utilized our existing equipment wherever possible in virtualizing our production environment which minimized our capital expenditures. We saved enough money by virtualizing our production environment to more than offset INX monthly fees for hosting our DR site. In addition, we no longer face the possibility of having to send IT staff to the mainland to activate the DR environment as the management is handled by INX staff on a 24 X 7 basis."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio