Canal Insurance Thinks Out of the Box to Establish a Foundation for Growth

Canal Insurance, Inc. - an underwriter and provider of property and casualty insurance, primarily for the commercial trucking industry - needed a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that would empower users' to make timely, effective decisions across the organization using granular market data.

However, before the company could attempt to deploy this vital solution, they needed to establish a foundation by architecting a reliable infrastructure platform. As a result of the prevailing business climate, Canal IT was also tasked to architect and deploy the complete solution with minimal hardware and software expenditures within a tight timeframe using very specific requirements passed across the aisle from the business, including highly available systems to ensure operational continuity for business users, and tested quantifiable business value to guarantee solid ROI.

Intellinet engaged with Canal Insurance to build the underlying infrastructure that would support the company's BI solution. After careful consideration of the client's budget, time constraints, and existing tools and processes, Intellinet recommended a solution - which would maximize value, guarantee ROI and achieve business goals - consisting of: Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.

In an effort to "do more with less," Intellinet recommended using virtualization to build nine operating system environments (OSEs) using only two hardware hosts. Each environment (development, test, and production) had fully independent three-tier platforms consisting of a SQL Server 2008 Database Engine system, a SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services system, and a SharePoint Server and SQL Server Reporting Services system. Intellinet then leveraged failover clustering within Windows Server to guarantee production environment uptime in the event of a hardware failure.

The infrastructure platform designed and deployed by Intellinet has produced success for Canal Insurance in a number of ways. The first measure of success is cost savings:

• Almost 80% in new hardware costs was avoided using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition
• By leveraging Hyper-V, 80% of OS licensing costs and 100% of virtualization software costs were saved over the competing commercial virtualization solution

Intellinet's infrastructure solution also saved Canal Insurance's IT staff significant time and training costs. By leveraging Microsoft tools over competitive platforms, the company's personnel are using existing administration skills to manage their new virtualization platform with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Not only has the deployment of this platform met uptime, expenditure and development time goals, Canal Insurance's BI solution will be better positioned over the long-term to drive value across the organization.

"I have been around computers professionally since 1994 and have gathered a 'bag of tricks' to deal with system problems over this time. It was very apparent to me that Intellinet's experts also had an extensive knowledge and their own 'bag of tricks' to help clients be successful. As an example, we were skeptical of using two hosts as a highly available cluster for failover with Hyper-V due to its perceived novelty and complex support requirements. However, it is working fine, and we are better off having this configuration. Intellinet did a great job helping us with our plan, sticking to that plan, and inspiring confidence."

- Craig Colaluca, Manager of Infrastructure & Helpdesk, Canal Insurance Company