When Anchor Life was acquired by the PSG group in 1996 it set ambitious growth targets for itself. The life assurer was faced with the task of replacing its IT system with a new one that was cost-effective, but which could grow with the company`s business.
Celebrating its 30th year of business, PSG Anchor Life provides life insurance, disability insurance and endowment policy packages to emerging low- to middle-income families.
"Because of the huge expectations, our holding company, PSG, has allowed us a substantial budget to put the right technology in place to provide the I/O capability for a transaction-heavy environment," says PSG Anchor Life operations director Etienne Prowse.
Subsequent to acquisition the company moved off its IBM AS/400 onto an Intel server that could not cope with the existing SDT life administration package.
"When we explored alternative server solutions, Computer Configurations was able to provide a specification for our requirements and install a server that had enough capacity to run the system, and enough headroom to allow for our projected growth," Prowse says.
Computer Configurations (CC), a CCH group company, also recommended the locally manufactured Orca fibre-connect high-capacity external data storage solution to overcome PSG Anchor Life`s I/O bottleneck.
"We initially believed that a lack of processing power was holding up our system, and slowing our month-end run to four days," says Prowse. "The Orca overcame the I/O problems and reduced our month-end run to a day.
"Should we experience a system failure, our restore procedure now takes only 90 minutes, instead of 10 hours. The Orca gives us headroom for growth for the next two years, even though our data storage requirements are growing at a rate of a Gigabyte per month."
The Orca 5000 fibre solution was recently launched by Orca Technologies, a local storage manufacturing company in the CCH group.
"Having a local product in our computer room is an advantage for us, as we know that the cost of future purchases will not be subject to rand/dollar exchange rates," Prowse maintains. "From a technological point of view we feel secure in having the designers and engineers easily contactable." The fibre system includes multi-channel, hot swap redundant controllers, advanced RAID function and event management capabilities.
Orca Technologies marketing director Rob Hulme says the Orca series reflects CCH`s philosophy of providing scalable solutions to suit growing businesses. "The fibre range gives users both fibre and LVD (low voltage differential) options to multiple hosts. This means companies such as PSG Anchor Life can opt for LVD to host, and upgrade to a fibre interface when they are ready, allowing them to prepare for future fibre growth, yet not have the expense of opting for fibre immediately."
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