Investment Company Plans for Future Growth

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Cisco data center architecture and UCS help Bermuda-based Nephila manage exponential growth and drive up profitability.

Customer Name: Nephila Capital Ltd
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Bermuda
Number of Employees: 35

Business Impact

• Time to provision IT resources cut from 3 days to 30 minutes

• Costs reduced by unified management of network, storage, and computing

• Increased profitability enabled by real-time decision making

Business Challenge
Based in Bermuda, Nephila Capital is an investment manager specializing in reinsurance risk and focusing particularly on weather. The company has grown rapidly since it was founded in 1998, winning industry awards and gaining a reputation for the quality of its innovation and performance in a sophisticated sector. Nephila was moving to new, larger premises and wanted to use the opportunity to create a new IT platform that would provide a different level of capabilities and help support continued growth.

The company had already decided to install an end-to-end Cisco communications network in its new headquarters. However, a new data center would also be needed to house the servers, storage devices, and high-speed connections that support Nephila’s business-critical financial modeling systems. Because human resources are a highly-priced commodity in Bermuda, Nephila wanted to enhance the size and capabilities of its data center without increasing the IT team. In addition to controlling costs, this approach would help minimize risk by better protecting the business intelligence that is the company’s main differentiator in a competitive market.

Solution and Results
Nephila chose the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS™) as its data center platform, because UCS scales smoothly and enables new IT resources, such as servers or storage devices, to be provisioned much faster than before with pre-prepared “service profiles.” This automation enables the IT team at Nephila to better serve the company’s dynamic business by reacting to change more quickly. Whereas previously, two or three days were required to provision a new server, for example, now no more than 30 minutes are needed. Costs are also contained, because unified management enables one IT person to manage the computing, storage, and networking elements without the need for several specialists.

The power and resilience of Cisco® UCS are driving a new period of growth. Nephila’s experts can now work more and more in real time, which has a huge impact in an industry where even 0.25 percent of risk can represent millions of dollars. A faster and more flexible platform is helping Nephila improve its financial modeling, leading to more accurate predictions and, ultimately, a more profitable bottom line.

Pulled Quote:

“UCS is an ideal engine for our high-growth business, because it makes IT more responsive to market-driven needs and frees up our IT people to help bring in revenue.”
First and Last Name: [to be confirmed]
Job Title: [to be confirmed]
Company Name: Nephila Capital Ltd

For More Information
Further details of the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage vision and architecture are available at: www.cisco.com/go/datacenter. For more information on the Cisco Unified Computing System, visit: www.cisco.com/go/ucs.

Partner Profile
The CCS Group Limited provides a complete portfolio of information and communication technology (ICT) services to the Bermuda marketplace, offering a range of technical expertise that is unsurpassed on the island. A Cisco Premier Partner, CCS Group specializes in advanced technologies, such as data center, unified communications, and wireless, and has installed about 70 percent of all Cisco enterprise switching solutions in Bermuda. The company delivered an end-to-end service to Nephila, incorporating pre-sales consultancy, implementation, and support of the new data center environment.

Pull Quote about Partner
Quote: “The selection and deployment of a new data center platform were critically important to our business. CCS Group managed the whole process very professionally, offering valuable advice and much-needed expertise.”
First and Last Name: [to be confirmed]
Job Title: [to be confirmed]
Company Name: Nephila Capital Ltd

 

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Capital G Bank Limited Withdraws Existing Tape Backup System in Favor of ExaGrid's Disk Backup with Deduplication Appliance

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Capital G Bank Limited is a privately held local financial institution in Bermuda with over $1.4 billion in assets providing personalized and simple integrated wealth management services for personal, business and private banking clients. Capital G Bank Limited subsidiaries includes, First Bermuda Group Limited, Capital G Investments Limited and Capital G Trust Limited.

Need for Faster Backups and Restores, Better Disaster Recovery The IT staff at Capital G had long been frustrated by slow and unreliable backups and restores. Using tape to protect and back up its data, which included highly confidential customer and financial information, the bank had difficulty managing the process at remote sites. At the bank's main headquarters, nightly backups often pushed and exceeded the backup window and restoring data from existing tape libraries was slow and very time consuming.
"The organization decided to move to a disk appliance because we wanted to reduce our reliance on tape, meet our backup windows and improve our ability to recover from a disaster. We needed a system that would enable us to replicate data from our remote locations to our main data center," said Capital G Senior Network Analyst Trevon Fubler. "We considered different solutions but chose ExaGrid for its overall performance, scalability and price."

 

ExaGrid Provides Data Replication from Remote Sites, Data Deduplication to Maximize Disk Space and Speed Transmissions

Capital G installed a two-site ExaGrid system including a primary ExaGrid appliance at its main headquarters and offsite for disaster recovery. The ExaGrid solution works in conjunction with Capital G's backup applications, Symantec NetBackup and Quest vRanger Pro. "We have more piece of mind now since deploying the ExaGrid system in our primary and offisite locations. Not only have we secured our ability to recover from a disaster but we also eliminated other issues that come with working with tape," said Fubler. "We don't have to constantly change tapes because everything is automated. Our process is more streamlined – making us more confident that our backups are completed every night." Fubler also said that ExaGrid's post-process data deduplication technology helps reduce the amount of data stored and maximize disk space. "ExaGrid's data dedupe helps us in a couple of ways. It aximizes the amount of disk space we have on the ExaGrid units and it speeds the data transmissions between systems because only the changed data is backed up each night." ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This unique approach reduces the disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 or more, delivering nparalleled cost savings and performance. ExaGrid delivers extremely fast backup performance because data is written directly to disk, and data deduplication is performed postprocess after the data is stored to reduce data. When a second site is used, the cost savings are even greater because ExaGrid's byte-level data deduplication technology moves only changes, requiring minimal WAN bandwidth.

Fast Backups, Restores

Fubler said that since installing the ExaGrid appliance, the bank can complete its backups each
night within its backup window. In addition, restores can be done within a matter of minutes or even seconds depending on the file.
"The ExaGrid system has really given our team more bandwidth to focus on other IT initiatives and priorities. We no longer spend ours managing tape. The time it used to take us to pull tapes, catalog, label, get them offsite, is gone," said Fubler.

Easy Setup, Industry-leading Customer Support

Fubler said the ExaGrid system was easy to install and configure to its infrastructure. "The management interface in ExaGrid is very user friendly which was an added bonus for me," said Fubler. The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid's industryleading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house engineers who are dedicated to individual accounts. The system is fully supported and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot-swappable components. "My experience with ExaGrid's technical support team has been great. I have a dedicated account manager who knows my system inside and out and is extremely helpful and proactive," said Fubler. "If we have any issues at all, I know I can count on support to resolve them quickly and completely."

GRID Architecture Delivers Smooth Scalability

As Oberg's backup needs grow, the ExaGrid system can scale easily to meet increased demands. ExaGrid's GRID computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, different sized onfigurations can be mixed and matched into a single GRID system with capacities of up to a 130TB full backup plus retention. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

ExaGrid and Symantec NetBackup

Symantec NetBackup delivers high performance data protection that scales to protect the largest UNIX, Windows, Linux and NetWare environments. With complete protection from remote office to center to vault, NetBackup offers a single console for all backup and recovery operations. Organizations using NetBackup can look to ExaGrid as an alternative to tape for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as NetBackup, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running NetBackup, using ExaGrid in place of a tape backup system is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to the ExaGrid for onsite backup to disk.

ExaGrid and Quest vRanger

Quest vRanger is the recognized industry-standard backup and restore solution for virtualized environments. Administrators can schedule regular image-level backups of virtual or physical machines – while the machine is still running. Images can be stored locally in the SAN or sent as compressed files over a WAN to remote locations to support disaster recovery strategies.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid is a cost-effective, scalable disk-based backup solution that replaces tape in your nightly backup process, enabling faster and more reliable backups at a price comparable to a new tape library. ExaGrid offers the only disk backup appliance with data deduplication purpose - built for backup that leverages a unique architecture optimized for performance, scalability and price.
The ExaGrid system is a plug-and-play disk backup appliance that works with existing backup applications. ExaGrid's patented zone-level deduplication technology minimizes the amount of data to be stored by storing only the unique bytes across backups instead of storing the redundant data. This unique approach reduces the amount of disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to as high as 50:1 or more, delivering unparalleled performance in a cost-effective solution.

For more information about ExaGrid, please visit www.exagrid.com or call us at 1-800-868-6985 or 1-508-898-2872.