The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $131 billion in total assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial.

 

Business Challenge
Allstate wanted cost flexibility around licensing and physical hardware.  They also wanted to evaluate overall power use and consumption for IT infrastructure as part of a companywide environmental awareness effort.  A critical aspect of this challenge was adding Disaster Recovery sites while achieving the directive of a smaller, more efficient footprint.

  • Over 1000 servers and several thousand databases and hundreds of TB of storage
  • Large project that affected over 15,000 internal applications
  • High risk because of the complexity of the applications using the SQL Server environment
  • Update architecture to support a consolidated platform

 

Engagement Summary
Allstate charged SQLHA with technical project leadership, responsible for designing the future state architecture, managing the internal SQL Server team and  designing an approach and process to upgrade and consolidate the databases at the same time.

  • Upgraded all of the SQL Servers to SQL 2005 from several other versions and updated the physical architecture to support a consolidated SQL Server environment
  • Designed a utility to scan the network and retrieve metadata about each SQL Server host
  • Developed a migration utility that migrated the database and all the related objects from one server, enabling scheduling and reducing the time to configure for each database

 

Results
Allstate was able to upgrade their system, save money, increase efficiency and reduce their overall IT footprint, meeting requirements for an environmentally-aware infrastructure.

  • SQLHA reduced overall server footprint by 65%
  • Standardized hardware, assisted in launching green datacenter
  • Physical patching/maintenance process enabled better service out to lines of business
  • Increased resiliency of applications with new Disaster Recovery plan
  • Designed future-state  architecture, working with business on potential future service offerings and their impact on infrastructure and performance
  • Enabled technology initiatives to be updated to meet best practices and support massive global business demands