HCI 2.0 enables rapid scaling under pressure

When PetSure, a company with 400-plus employees, had to start working remotely due to COVID-19, switching to HCI 2.0 helped pave the way for a future-proofed IT infrastructure.

PetSure is Australia’s largest insurer of cats and dogs, with half a million Australian clients. It also provides claims processing services for leading pet insurers in the United Kingdom and the United States. The company has embraced the benefits of technology with its financial technology solution, GapOnly – a paperless claims service that allows customers to obtain claims approval within minutes, from the veterinary offices.

The COVID-19 lockdown had two effects on the business. First, there was a surge in pet ownership in Australia, and secondly, the company had to shift over 400 employees to a virtual office environment. Like many businesses across the world, PetSure had to digitally transform quickly, without disrupting its services to customers.

HPE partner AC3 recommended HCI 2.0, a combination of HPE Nimble Storage, HPE ProLiant servers and HPE InfoSight management software.  HCI 2.0 improves on first-generation HCI with several key innovations. Firstly, the architecture has had a major redesign. Previously one had to purchase compute and storage as a unit, which led to overprovisioning. With HCI 2.0, storage and compute nodes are independently scalable, maximizing resource efficiency. HPE Nimble Storage uses always-on data reduction that eliminates tuning and improves performance, providing more data per raw terabyte than any other platform, while improving performance.

HPE Nimble storage guarantees absolute data resilience with 99.9999% availability and a unique ability to tolerate up to three simultaneous drive failures.

Compute and storage are shared as a pool across the system, eliminating network traffic across nodes, and providing unrivalled low-latency performance, with fewer bottlenecks.

This allowed PetSure to rapidly deploy remote-working services for over 400 employees when COVID-19 hit. According to Rob Collins, Head of Infrastructure and Service Management at PetSure, HCI 2.0 enabled the insurer to reduce operating costs by 50 percent, double the performance of VDI workloads, achieve 50 percent faster application provisioning, and improve efficiency by 70 percent.

When the company needs more capacity, it’s a simple case of attaching more storage, and within minutes it is automatically configured and added to the pool of resources.

­The simplicity of HCI and the flexibility of a three-tier architecture are combined with intelligence. HPE InfoSight monitoring tools use artificial intelligence to predict and prevent disruptions and provide cross-stack analytics that improve application performance and optimize resource use. In addition, business continuity is assured through advanced replication for multi-site disaster recovery.

As a medium-sized business, PetSure is able to enjoy the benefits of enterprise-level capabilities and cloud like scale without compromise.

Find out more.