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BENEFITS: Full data recovery in less than 6 hours, Zero outages, Subsecond image retrieval, Image permanence to meet regulatory and legal requirements, Simplified disaster recovery processes.

THE CUSTOMER: West Bend Mutual Insurance Company (www.westbendmutual.com) has provided property/casualty insurance for businesses, home, autos, and personal property since 1894. West Bend Mutual has maintained an A+ rating (Superior) by A. M. Best, financial analysts of the insurance industry, since 1973. The company has also been ranked as a member of the Ward’s Top 50 Benchmark Group for its successful balance of safety, consistency, and top performance since 1997. The company’s mission is to bring peace of mind to its customers through sound insurance and legendary service. Not satisfied with the status quo, employees are encouraged to think ahead of the curve and come up with new ways to ensure that West Bend Mutual can offer the fastest response and most immediate answers to both its policyholders and independent agents alike.

THE CHALLENGE - REDUCE TIME TO RECOVER CUSTOMER IMAGE FILES WHILE SPEEDING ACCESS TO CUSTOMER DATA: Central to West Bend Mutual’s service is a promise the company will be there when needed. West Bend Mutual CIO Tom Lindell explains, “The nature of our business is to protect customers from unexpected events. If our headquarters were blown away by a tornado, chances are many of our customers would suffer that same fate. When our customers need us most, we’ve got to be there.”  As part of its commitment to continuous improvement, West Bend Mutual launched an aggressive initiative to improve time to recover in three critical areas and set an ambitious goal for its IT team: meet these new requirements by year end. “By the end of the third quarter,” recalls Tammy Weyer, IT operations and systems manager, “all was achievable except for our Tower (now Vignette IDM) imaging project, where we were restricted by optical jukebox limitations.” The company had been using two optical jukeboxes and 380 optical platters to store millions of customer policy-related images accessed by agents and the company’s underwriting and claims groups. Uninterrupted access to images of policy documents is key to the company’s ability to respond to customers in a timely manner. Independent agents working with West Bend Mutual had increasingly begun to rely on the company’s robust Web portal, West Bend Connect, to access images electronically and streamline the process of servicing customers. West Bend Mutual had just about stretched its optical systems to their limit. Based on red laser technology that was rapidly approaching its own end of life, the jukeboxes were starting to feel the strain that came with adding as much as one extra platter a day during peak periods. The electromechanical nature of the jukeboxes made them prone to failure, with an average of three downtime events and about 15 retrieval outages each year. Recovery plans for the jukeboxes involved restoring data from tape, and, in the event of a disaster, it would have taken days to restore full access to business-critical information.

Optical software drivers had also begun to cause reliability problems that impacted image access. “Any downtime to our imaging system impacts agent and associate productivity,” explains John Boehm, lead programmer analyst in IT Imaging. “Stability problems with the previous solution required that we stop and restart the image application. Agents and associates would be cut off from documents until we restored.”

Platters could take up to 22 seconds for image access, so the IT team had also implemented a smaller disk cache for fast access to more recent images. While the image disk cache helped minimize service disruptions, the IT team recognized it was time to look at disk-based storage that could guarantee rapid access to all its image files and equally rapid recovery in the event of disaster.

Finally, an important criterion in any new solution was the ability to offer write-once, read-many (WORM) functionality. The company’s legal department considered it important to store its scanned documents on WORM-enabled media in order to ensure they remained in their original, unaltered state.

THE SOLUTION - TEAM WITH DATALINK TO REPLACE UNDERPERFORMING OPTICAL STORAGE WITH COMPLIANT, DISK-BASED NETAPP STORAGE: For help locating the best disk-based storage to meet its new availability and disaster recovery objectives, West Bend Mutual turned to storage architect Datalink, which had helped the company design and implement past data storage systems. Based on their past relationship, the West Bend Mutual team knew they could trust Datalink to help them sort through their technology options in a fair and impartial manner.

“Datalink has been highly responsive. They know our environment and understand the multiple vendors that are part of our IT infrastructure. Vendor bias has never been an issue for us. In some cases they’ll advocate for one vendor versus another,” says Weyer. “They are very honest.”

Datalink subsequently assessed West Bend Mutual’s availability and recovery needs, followed by detailed review of the pros and cons of each disk-based technology. This ultimately led to a Datalink recommendation of NetApp storage to replace both of the company’s optical jukeboxes and prior disk cache array.

A key part of Datalink’s recommended project plan allowed West Bend Mutual to meet its 24-hour imaging system recovery objective via the use of NetApp SnapMirror software and Snapshot™ technology. (Snapshot technology enables the automatic creation of an incremental backup copy that includes only changed data.) To help West Bend Mutual satisfy internal and external compliance needs, Datalink recommended the patented WORM functionality of NetApp SnapLock software.

As “co-project manager,” Datalink partnered with West Bend, Vignette, and Network Appliance to ensure the teams stayed in close alignment with the original project plan. From initial analysis and migration planning to design and implementation, Datalink’s professional services team worked closely with West Bend Mutual throughout each phase of the project.

In place of the prior optical solution, the current NetApp storage implementation now supports image access from within the company’s Vignette imaging application.

Datalink helped the IT team deploy a NearStore system at its primary data center and a second system at the company’s disaster recovery site 75 miles away. As part of the deployment, Datalink also performed operability testing to ensure the systems were running at peak performance. Following the deployment, Datalink support teams were made available to address West Bend Mutual’s technical support needs.

With the mirrored NearStore solution in place, West Bend Mutual now has confidence in its ability to fully recover image data in just a few hours—well under the original 24-hour recovery requirement. If a disaster strikes, the second NearStore system can be quickly moved into action. “We blew past our 24-hour recoverability goal and can now recover our imaging application and have the images fully available at our remote site in four to six hours,” says Weyer. “The NetApp solution cut our recovery time quite a bit and made it less complicated.” In addition to meeting the company’s primary objective for 24-hour recoverability, the NetApp solution has offered substantial benefits over the previous optical solution. Prior issues with stability and reliability have now been resolved. Over the last year, the optical solution had been responsible for 12 separate outages and over five hours of full system downtime. In contrast, the insurance provider has reported no outages since deploying the NetApp solution.
Slow access to images is also a thing of the past. “Our agents now have immediate, subsecond retrieval of about nine million documents that are on the NetApp NearStore system,” Weyer notes. How important is it to ensure rapid, dependable access to the company’s imaging system? “It plays directly into servicing our customers,” explains Lindell. “Whether the claimants or agents are calling in with a question, the information has to be available quickly and efficiently…Now that the images are available, it speeds decision making and improves collaboration.”

West Bend Mutual Insurance storage infrastructuree West Bend Mutual stores nine million customer images from its Vignette imaging application on a NearStore system. WORM-protected images are simultaneously copied, via NetApp SnapMirror software, to a second NearStore system at the company's remote disaster recovery site. Based on a tiered-storage model, West Bend Mutual uses the NearStore system in the critical role of nearline, or secondary, storage for its imaging application. Another heterogeneous, Fibre Channel–attached array serves the role of primary storage for imaging application binaries and database indices.

PARTNER COLLABORATION CUTS IMPLEMENTATION TIME 66%: Although originally slated to take nine months to complete, the entire upgrade project finished just under the company’s year-end deadline—after only three months. West Bend Mutual attributes its success to a combination of determination and strong teamwork on the part of its IT staff and the combined efforts of Datalink, NetApp, and Vignette. “It was a matter of pride once Tammy threw down the gauntlet,” says Boehm. Adds Lindell, “The entire team rose to the occasion. I just wish every project worked this well.” “This is the first time we’ve had this many outside vendors involved in one project, and we were a bit apprehensive at first,” recalls Weyer. “The project went more smoothly than we could have imagined. It was all about being team players. Vignette, Datalink, and NetApp worked together incredibly well to help us meet our deadline. ”Overall, Lindell is thrilled at how the solution has improved the company’s ability to serve both its customers and its agents. “West Bend Mutual is focused on making service a priority, and we manage it aggressively,” he says. “NetApp, Vignette, and Datalink help ensure that image documents are available whenever an agent calls, and that plays a key role in how we provide top-notch service.”

KEY SOLUTION COMPONENTS: NetApp NearStore systems, NetApp SnapLock™ software, NetApp SnapMirror® software, Vignette IDM integrated document management system, Datalink professional services, Vignette professional services

DATALINK PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: Analysis, Design, Project management, Implementation, Support

INDUSTRY: Insurance