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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39168100,00.htm

Insurer integrates four data centres
Cutting carbon footprint and electricity costs

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Thursday 09 August 2007

Consumer insurance company Paymentshield has completed a technology upgrade as part of a four-into-one office move, reducing its carbon footprint by 76 per cent and saving £6,500 a year on electricity costs.

A significant part of the data centre migration project was outsourced to system integrator Migration Solutions, which completed the move over one weekend, ensuring that the impact on Paymentshield's sales was kept to a minimum.

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Paymentshield trades with 30,000 intermediaries to deliver products such as home insurance and mortgage protection.

The move to the new site has allowed the company to migrate 50 servers to a VMware virtualisation system, with a further 30 servers under review. Alongside the move was a switch to VoIP communications provided by Avaya, costing £250,000.

Paymentshield IT Director Eamonn Kennedy said: "We had four different sites dividing our headquarters, call centre and admin. We were running out of space and extension lines because we've been growing by 25 per cent per year. The move gave us an opportunity to consolidate all our equipment."

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Kennedy said that the quality bar of Migration Solutions' work meant he was able to set up ongoing service management processes that complied with ITIL guidelines once the move was completed.

The integrator's work on data integrity during the migration also meant that an error by BT over disconnection fees of more than £64,000 was detected and reclaimed.