Case Studies

The Challenge With its exponen al growth – both organic and through acquisi on – Bankrate Insurance needed to consolidate servers and update its data center to effec vely serve its customers. Data center consolida on and upgrades are typically the most demanding projects an IT organiza on will undertake. There are many cri cal challenges associated with moving and consolida ng servers and other hardware, including: down me, data loss, extended deadlines and budget overruns. Most issues, however, can be minimized or avoided through careful planning and diligent communica on. It was with a data center upgrade ini a ve that OneNeck® IT Solu ons helped posi on Bankrate Insurance for future growth through superior data management and connec vity. The OneNeck IT Solutions Answer Bankrate Insurance has two data centers in Denver, Colorado. Both needed compute and storage upgrades. When it was me for the upgrades, OneNeck met with Bankrate Insurance's data center team to discuss their needs and perform a comprehensive review of their infrastructure. OneNeck recommended using Cisco's Nexus 7010 switches as the core. With up to 384 ports of line-rate 10-gigabit capacity, this data center switch has the unique ability to scale with Bankrate Insurance and meet future bandwidth infrastructure demands. OneNeck also recommended EMC's unified network storage solu on, the VNX7500 Series. As one of the largest members of the VNX family, the VNX7500 supports a combina on of flash, SAS and/ or NL-SAS for up to 1000 drives with a total capacity of 2970TB. With this solu on, Bankrate could achieve unparalleled performance while maintaining the ease-of-use and flexibility of the other VNX models. OneNeck provided both product procurement and installa on services for the data center upgrade, including project management, staging of equipment, cut-over and post-installment support. Most importantly, the upgrade was completed in just 12 hours, on schedule and on budget, with minimal down me or business interrup on. The Company Founded in 1976, Bankrate, Inc. made its first foray into the insurance industry with the 2008 acquisi on of InsureMe. In 2010, the company created the Bankrate Insurance brand upon acquiring NetQuote, the largest insurance lead generator on the web. Bankrate acquired the assets of Insweb in 2011 and in April 2012 con nued its growth by acquiring InsuranceAgents. com. With these companies, and their history of innova on and excellence, Bankrate Insurance allows consumers to comparison shop for the best insurance rates available, delivering on their mission to equip consumers to make informed financial choices. Of course, the deployment of technology is cri cal to that mission. "If I'd had a person dedicated to this project for a week, we could have done it. However, this took 12 hours, and that's with us learning as we went. Tangible results." James Harvey Bankrate Insurance Vice President of Systems Customer Case Study Bankrate Insurance Insuring smooth and trouble-free data center upgrades

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