Data Center Consolidation at Guardian Life- Internet Working

By
Responsive Centered Red Button

Need Help with this Question or something similar to this? We got you! Just fill out the order form (follow the link below), and your paper will be assigned to an expert to help you ASAP.

Order Form

Added on: 0000-00-00 00:00:00Order Code: Question Task Id: 0

Internal Code: IAH238
Internet Working:

As one of the largest mutual life insurance firms in the United States, Guardian Life (www.guardianlife.com) has more than 5000 employees and over 3000 financial representatives in 80 agencies. Guardian and its subsidiaries provide almost three million people with life and disability income insurance, retirement services, and investment products such as mutual funds, securities, variable life insurance, and variable annuities. The company also supplies employee benefits programs to six million participants, including life, health, and dental insurance, as well as qualified pension plans. In addition to regional home offices in New York City; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Spokane, Washington; and Appleton, Wisconsin, the company has 55 remote sales offices and 80 remote agency offices. Like other insurance companies, Guardian Life is an information-intensive organization where data processing and communications network infrastructure have consistently been important contributors to its success. Guardian Life’s IT organization has earned numerous accolades including multiple CIO100 awards from CIO magazine [PRNE11]. According to Dennis Callahan, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for,
Guardian Life, “A strong partnership between IT and the businesses enables Guardian to deliver cost-effective technology services that facilitate world-class customer service, product innovation, and operational efficiency.” Ensuring alignment between business and IT is important to Guardian Life and provides a consistent theme for many of the insurance companies IT projects including its data centre consolidation initiatives. Data centre consolidation has been an ongoing concern at Guardian for more than a decade. Guardian’s IT governance structure is team-oriented and the company’s data centre consolidation initiatives are overseen by it Infrastructure team. The Infrastructure team is primarily co-located in New York, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania but it has key support teams in Spokane, Washington, Appleton, Wisconsin, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Guardian Life began taking a serious look at data centre consolidation in 2000, but in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, Guardian also became more concerned with business continuity issues. Guardian had four significant data centres, at its four home offices, but the primary data centre was in New York City. After 9/11, Guardian wanted to make infrastructure changes to ensure business continuity across its existing data centres and made plans to add two more data centres to the mix.
Guardian performed an assessment of its data centres to provide a basis for planning on the location of data processing resources. One surprising outcome of this assessment had to do with utilization. The assessment revealed that the four data centres had about 1000 UNIX and NT servers, with an average capacity utilization of 10%. Even at peak demand, only 25% of the processing power of the servers was being used [MUSI02]. Guardian responded to this assessment with a plan that included the following

Questions:

1) What benefits do they commonly hope to realize? How does Guardian’s rationale for consolidating data centres compare to those of other businesses?

2) Getting outside consultants to manage data centre consolidation projects is a common practice. Discuss the pros and cons of using
consultants to manage data centre consolidation projects?

3) How/why has virtualization fueled business interest in data centre consolidation?

4) Why is the availability of high-speed, high bandwidth communications an important consideration in data centre consolidation plans and
decision-making?

5) Do some Internet research on modular (pod) data centres. Summarize the advantages of disadvantages of modular data centres.

 

Uploaded By : celina
Posted on : February 09th, 2018
Downloads : 0

How to create Testimonial Carousel using Bootstrap5

Clients' Reviews about Our Services