Norwich Union insures one in five households, one in seven motor vehicles and more than 800,000 businesses in the UK. Founded in 1797, Norwich Union merged with CGU in 2000 to create the Aviva Group, which is the largest insurance services provider in the UK.

The group also has an international presence, and is the fifth largest insurance group in the world with 59,000 employees and more than 40 million customers.

Norwich Union has seen significant expansion in recent years. Maintaining this growth is a key priority for the company along with cost rationalisation and simplification of its legacy infrastructure.

Trust is fundamental in the insurance business: Norwich Union’s customers expect the company to deliver on its promises and policies, no matter what might be happening in the world’s financial markets.

With Norwich Union’s products encompassing investments, retirement, protection and healthcare, motor, household and travel, customers rely on the company to provide rapid advice and financial assistance when they need it most.

To meet its customers’ expectations, Norwich Union must not only deliver good quality, value-for-money products but also ensure the stability of its business through the mitigation of risk. This focus on risk management is particularly important when it comes to technology. Many of Norwich Union’s business and customer services are underpinned by IT, so it is essential that the company optimises the performance and availability of its core datacentre systems.

With some of its servers running the legacy Windows NT4 operating system, Norwich Union was keen to upgrade this environment to reduce not only risk but also total cost of ownership. Steve Houghton, infrastructure architect at Norwich Union, comments: “As an insurance company, Norwich Union understands the importance of minimising business risk. We needed to eliminate the risks associated with running internal systems on a legacy platform.”

To achieve its goals, Norwich Union embarked on a massive infrastructure transformation at two of its datacentres. This included:

• Updating its operating systems to Windows Server 2003
• Replacing aging hardware
• Consolidating its server estate
• Implementing a new virtual environment

Virtualisation was a key part of the project, as it would enable Norwich Union to create a stable but cost-effective platform for future growth. To help deploy the new virtual infrastructure and the other elements of the project, Norwich Union required an IT partner with significant datacentre expertise.

Computacenter assisted with the initial audit of the server estate, scheduling, design of the virtualised architecture and provided the engineering resource for the virtualisation work, the upgrade to the new operating system and migrating the servers onto a new domain, as well as providing ongoing support throughout the project.

The project team, which comprised a combination of both Norwich Union and Computacenter staff, used VMware virtualisation technologies and PlateSpin PowerConvert to implement the new environment.

Although the original scope of the project encompassed 160 applications and 800 servers, the initial audit revealed there were actually 320 applications being hosted on 1,200 servers at the two datacentres. Despite this significant change in project scope, Computacenter managed to exceed the original consolidation target, achieving a 12:1 ratio and decommissioning 229 servers. “Although the project was extremely complex, Computacenter was very flexible and minimised the number of project change requests, which helped ensure the implementation was delivered within budget,” comments Houghton.

These results were also delivered with minimum disruption to Norwich Union’s business, as Houghton confirms: “It was essential that our systems suffered minimal downtime throughout the upgrade. By following proven processes and using the rollback capabilities of Platespin PowerConvert, we were able to safeguard system availability.”

The project has benefited both the IT department and the company as a whole. In addition to reducing business risk, the project has enabled Norwich Union to improve the availability, performance and resilience of internal support systems.

“Since implementing the new server infrastructure, we now have greener, simpler and more cost-effective datacentres,” comments Houghton. “Computacenter had an integral role in ensuring the success of such a complex project, we were impressed by the openness and the collaborative approach taken by the project team.”