Citizens Property Insurance
Long Term Data Center Facilities Program
ISAC Briefing
Citizens Property Insurance
Overview:The Long Term Data Center Facilities Program is an initiative of the approved data center strategic plan to consolidate Citizens data center operations into a purposed and protected environment. Success of this Program will ensure the long term survivability and sustainability of Citizens’ Data Center environments. To achieve the needed improvements, this plan has identified objectives and roadmaps to facilitate optimization of Data Center processes and reduce risk to core operative qualities (Protected, Secure, Redundant, Connected, Purposed, and Managed) of Data Center operations, while also decoupling these facilities from Citizens General Office Space facilities.
Status
Significant progress has been made since last report. Additional phase and stage definition has been applied to the program activity. Phase 1 – Program Management (Oversight, Procurements and Special Projects)
The Migration PM has been engaged and initial scoping and scheduling have been completed.
The Enterprise Risk Management team is continuing to finish the Tampa data center risk assessment this month. There were some delays encumbered through the end-of-year holidays 2011. The draft findings report has been presented to management and is undergoing review. The collocation solicitation team has completed the first round of vendor scoring and will be entering the second round, physical site reviews, in
mid-February. The procurement remains on plan to make an ISAC presentation in Aril 2012 and conclusion within Q2-2012. Phase 2 - Data Center Provisioning (New Collocation Data Center site and Existing Disaster Recovery site)
The data center provisioning phase was kicked-off in December 2011 and the IT teams are now working to finish their engineering designs for the new data center environments and required platform acquisitions. The current plan is to be complete with all infrastructure designs by mid-February, and required procurements in motion in March to time with the collocation data center contract execution.
Phase 3 - Data Center Migration
The lower-level details of the migration schedule were vetted and approved in December 2011.
The project teams were engaged in January 2012 to begin their work in identifying, documenting, and validating the current state of the existing IT infrastructure. Discovery efforts are scheduled to transition in April 2012 to application grouping and review.
Phase 4 - Data Center Decommission
The program was able to officially conclude the JAX2 data center migration and decommission scope in December 2011. Decommission efforts will continue in February with the kick-off and initial discovery for the TLH1 data center.
Citizens Property Insurance
Effort Overview
Phase 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Activity
Strategic Plan Ongoing Bi-Annual Review
Program Management – PH1
Program Planning Complete
Program Oversight In Process
Data Center Provisioning – PH2
Collocation Data Center (Procurement) In Process
Collocation Infrastructure (Procurement) In Process
Collocation / DR Build-Test-Commission In Process
Data Center Migration – PH3 In Process
Migration PM (Procurement) Complete Discovery & Planning In Process
Sequencing & Execution In Process
Data Center Decommission – PH4
Site 1 (Tallahassee Monroe) Complete Site 2 (Jacksonville CAT) Complete
Citizens Property Insurance
2012 Data Center Equipment - Planned Major Acquisitions for Systems Lifecycle Replacements during Data Center Migration Activity
Networking Equipment, Software and Maintenance Estimated at $500,000
This is the core Cisco networking equipment required for the new data center. This equipment provides the capability for the connectivity from/to servers, storage, backup, company intranet, internet and external service providers. Equipment currently being used at the center of the existing data center network environment will be repurposed as backfill for End of Life equipment within Citizens network. The equipment , once implemented into the new Data Center, is not anticipated to require upgrades for at least 7-10 yrs.
Server Computing Platforms, Software and Maintenance Estimated at $2,000,000
We are currently in the middle of planned server platform lifecycle upgrades and transitional activity to a new server platform and these activities will overlap with the data center migration. The platform and virtualization technology being implemented (HP Blade and VMware 4.1) positions Citizens to meet the required processing capabilities of Citizens applications and to do so with a significantly reduced footprint for hardware size and electrical power consumption. This will provide floor space reductions and other significant costs savings at the new data center facility. Use of this technology reduces the transition risks associated with moving physical hardware, reduces requirements to refresh once inside the new data center and will reduce space and power consumption costs at the new facility.
Storage Systems Equipment, Software and Maintenance Estimated at $3,250,000
Citizens current storage environment is 7 yrs old and will be 8.5 to 9 years old at the end of this data center transition. We are carefully evaluating the long term costs and efforts to migrate and then replace the storage systems after the migration. Those costs and efforts along with additional factors including the risks in moving existing storage equipment, not having the ability to have direct vendor support for certain system components, the cost of third party support for these systems and the risks around a shrinking Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) are being evaluated. These costs and risks indicate that performing the lifecycle upgrades and migration to equipment acquired as part of the data center move is more prudent and cost effective than moving systems or performing device swaps utilizing third party services. The lifecycle replacement system(s) will provide equal or better performance than existing systems at a lower cost per terabyte of storage and with a smaller footprint. This is a significant decision factor due to our increasing storage needs for the company.
Communication Circuits Estimated at $250,000
During the transition to the new Data Center, Citizens systems and applications will require additional connections to our existing data center in Jacksonville and our existing disaster recovery center in Tampa. These additional circuits will be 4-5 times larger than the existing circuits between our facilities and will provide the required bandwidth to migrate the data between the old and new data centers and to conduct normal business operations while our systems are split between the old and new data center. After the transition is complete we will implement a permanent circuit to our facilities sized to support normal operational activities. It is our intent to use the State of Florida - My Florida Network Communication Services for our communications circuits in order to provide the most cost effective and flexible terms for the services while at the same time maintaining our current levels of service.
