LIMA jumps to the storage aid of Autonet with NetApp flash
Autonet Insurance overhauls architecture to solve slow online response times
IT solutions firm LIMA is using NetApp technology to revamp Autonet Insurance’s storage architecture to help improve customer service. Autonet is one of the UK’s largest independent van insurance brokers.
Autonet now handles more than 1.2 million customer calls and more than 250,000 live insurance policies a year, with a turnover in excess of £130 million.
Prior to its infrastructure refresh, Autonet found that its website was becoming less responsive with increased load times. As a result, its customer services were being slowed down due to limited disk I/O. Internally, teams were also working long hours to service planned downtime and complete necessary infrastructure maintenance.
In conjunction with LIMA, Autonet Insurance opted to upgrade to the latest NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) system with the clustered Data ONTAP operating system. The AFF has brought “lightning-fast performance”, said Autonet, ten times faster than experienced previously, with an increase of 10,000 IOPS to 100,000 IOPS.
In addition, customer web page refresh times reduced from 15 seconds to sub-three seconds. The cDOT operating system is “non-disruptive”, meaning the Autonet team no longer needs to deal with downtime, even when adding disks or re-configuring the infrastructure.
For its 600 customer experience agents the upgrade has resulted in the instantaneous completion of customer transactions, which previously took several seconds. The result has been significant financial savings and increased online sales, said Autonet.
Nik Potts, head of IT, Autonet Insurance, said: “With this new solution in place we have seen great improvement in our customer experience, both for the agents and for the customers themselves, and this is something that really differentiates us within the market. Thanks to NetApp, we have seen an increase in online sales.”
Elliot Howard, UK&I managing director, NetApp, said: “We have a very strong partnership with LIMA. Together, we are helping Autonet Insurance to improve its customer experience through a robust infrastructure, which allows it to process a huge volume of data effectively.
“This was previously a major pain point for Autonet and now the company’s secure and scalable IT infrastructure is helping the team continually improve and evolve the service their customers are receiving.”
Earlier this year, HR and recruitment services firm Randstad chose to re-vamp its data infrastructure through NetApp partner Storm Technologies, using the NetApp All-Flash FAS8040 and NetApp Cloud ONTAP for AWS solutions.
@AntonySavvas