SolarWinds Improves Network Management for British Insurer
June 24, 2008 Alex Woodie
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The English insurance company BGL Group has deployed SolarWinds‘ systems management software, called Orion, to help the company keep on top of its global IT network. BGL Group is a privately held company that was founded in 1992 and is made up of six subsidiaries spanning life and home insurance, competitive insurance pricing Web sites, and claims and loss-recovery operations. Today, the company insures more than two million people and employs more than 2,255 people, making it one of Britain’s largest insurance companies. With plans to grow the company by more than 50 percent by 2009, BGL would have been pressing its current IT infrastructure, which is spread from England to South America and employs 200 people. “As the business has grown, we have tended to just throw more capacity at the network,” says Stewart Barrett, senior network analyst for BGL Group. “The network has become increasingly congested with more VoIP and Internet application traffic, and small problems can quickly escalate to cause an issue with major impact on the business.” The company started looking for a systems and network management product that could pinpoint the origination of its network traffic, and provide capacity modeling to ensure it wasn’t buying too much or too little bandwidth. It tried several products, but they failed to provide dividends. BGL decided to give SolarWinds a shot. SolarWinds is a provider of low-cost systems- and network-management software that’s based in Austin, Texas, with EMEA headquarters in Cork, Ireland. BGL installed SolarWinds flagship Orion product, which starts at just $2,475, and started pointing it at its 1,200 network nodes. The results were good. “For the first time we had complete visibility of our network infrastructure,” Barrett said. “We are now able to inspect traffic on our network as well as on each side of our carrier-supplied MPLS network and our data links to our South African operation.” BGL is now planning to expand its use of Orion to other aspects of its company, including its AS/400 servers, helpdesk operations, and Web developers, which will give BGL an even wider view of its IT operations.
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