CU STOM E R P R OF I LE
Plymouth Rock Group
of Companies
Rainfinity plays a pivotal role in company’s ILM strategy
Plymouth Rock Group of Companies is a regional provider of personal insurance with policy holders in
the northeast. Founded with the goal of leading the industry in providing exceptional service, Plymouth
Rock strives to be innovative and to continually provide greater value. As a result, the company has
earned accolades from regional insurance ratings boards.
Claim processing and settlement is a core service that all insurance companies offer. Plymouth Rock
not only provides 24x7 claim services by phone but was the first automobile insurance company in
the nation to offer mobile claim processing. They are industry leaders in fast and easy settlement of
their customers’ claims.
At Plymouth Rock, claim handling is automated with a document-generating application that is
data intensive and results in millions of small files, most of which are completely inactive after just
90 days. Not only was the proliferation of claim files occupying costly tier-1 storage, but all the
information was being replicated as part of Plymouth Rock’s disaster recovery plan.
Providing superior customer service, while at the same time controlling costs, is an organizational
imperative. Plymouth Rock leadership realized a tiered storage solution could help reduce spending
and simplify management. To implement a tiered storage strategy that would not disrupt their day-today business, Plymouth Rock chose a solution based on EMC® Rainfinity® File Virtualization.
“We believe in technology as a source of cost reduction, helping us
make intelligent business decisions... We’ve reduced storage costs
by 70 percent.”
Troy Wood, Storage Administrator
Active data mobility and file archiving go hand in hand
Plymouth Rock is a long-standing EMC customer with SAN data centers in both Massachusetts and
New Jersey that include EMC Symmetrix®, EMC CLARiiON®, and EMC Centera®. The document-imaging
application accessed this storage via Windows file servers. For disaster recovery, each data center
was replicated to the other. Not only were the number of claim files growing rapidly, but most of the
data being replicated was typically not accessed after the first 30 to 90 days.
The company recognized that there were two components to implementing an effective, tiered
storage strategy. First, they needed to eliminate their Windows file servers and move to a lower-cost,
easier-to-manage NAS platform. This would free up costly SAN storage and reduce connectivity costs.
“We had to come up with a solution that was more cost effective. Celerra definitely fulfilled that,”
says Troy Wood, storage administrator for Plymouth Rock. “But then the question became, how do
we move the data from the Windows servers to Celerra? We’re big on virtualization for data mobility.”
Second, they planned to implement an archiving policy for older claim files. “It’s a way to move
those documents that we are required to save but that typically people are never going to touch
again,” says Wood.
Plymouth Rock evaluated a number of vendor solutions, but three key criteria resulted in their
selection of EMC Rainfinity.
• Because of their commitment to excellent customer service, Plymouth Rock could not tolerate any
downtime when migrating data from the general-purpose file servers to EMC Celerra®. They chose
Rainfinity Global File Virtualization to perform migrations without disruption. GFV’s stub-aware
migration was also a key selling point since archiving was an important part of their solution.
• The built-in integration between Rainfinity File Management Appliance and EMC Centera was very
appealing as it would allow Plymouth Rock to take advantage of their existing EMC Centera contentaddressed storage (CAS). “We were already invested in Centera. We liked the thought of Rainfinity
FMA working with it,” says Wood.
• Plymouth Rock leverages a small, centralized IT organization to implement strategic technology
initiatives across its group of companies. Consequently, they were eager to find a vendor that could
augment their manpower to undertake a broad ILM initiative, and help guide and familiarize them
with the new hardware. By choosing a complete solution from EMC, they would have one vendor to
take the lead on implementation, migration, and replication while bringing their team up to speed
with the new technology.
“By archiving files after 90 days, we’ve reduced 1.7 TB of Word
documents down to 250 GB.”
Troy Wood, Storage Administrator
Saving time, saving money
Plymouth Rock has already conducted seven migrations and migrated over 100 million files (about
5 TB) with complete transparency to their end users. Now that they’re very familiar with the technology, the company expects that future migrations will be conducted about 40 percent faster than
traditional, manual migrations. Most important, Rainfinity Global File Virtualization migrations do
not impact application availability.
With Rainfinity File Management Appliance, the company has instituted a 90-day archival policy and
has reduced storage for Microsoft Word documents from 1.7 TB to 250 GB.
For Plymouth Rock, the cost savings have been substantial. By migrating to Celerra, Plymouth Rock
has driven their average storage cost down 70 percent. That number was even further reduced by
nearly half after archiving a portion of the data to EMC Centera.
EMC Corporation
Hopkinton
Massachusetts
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1-508-435-1000
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© Copyright EMC Corporation 2008. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 09/08 Customer Profile H5766