Transcript of a discussion on how an insurance innovator built a modern hyperconverged infrastructure environment that rapidly replicates databases to accelerate developer agility.

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Big Data Meets HCI—How South African
Insurance Provider King Price Gives
Developers the Royal Treatment
Transcript of a discussion on how an insurance innovator built a modern hyperconverged
infrastructure environment that rapidly replicates databases to accelerate developer agility.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the
Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with
us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.
Our next developer productivity insights interview explores how a South African insurance
innovator has built a modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) IT environment that replicates
databases so fast that developers can test and re-test to their hearts’ content.
We’ll now learn how King Price in Pretoria also gained data
efficiencies and heightened disaster recovery benefits from their HCI-
enabled architecture. Here to help us explore the myriad benefits of a
data transfer intensive environment is Jacobus Steyn, Operations
Manager at King Price in Pretoria, South Africa. Welcome.
Jacobus Steyn: Thank you so much for having me.
Gardner: What have been the top trends driving your interest in
modernizing your data replication capabilities?
Steyn: One of the challenges we had was the business was really
flying blind. We had to create a platform and the ability to get data out of the production
environment as quickly as possible to allow the business to make informed decisions -- literally
in almost real-time.
Gardner: What were some of the impediments to moving data and creating these new
environments for your developers and your operators?
Steyn: We literally had to copy databases across the network and onto new environments, and
that was very time consuming. It literally took us two to three days to get a new environment up
and running for the developers. You would think that this would be easy -- like replication. It
proved to be quite a challenge for us because there are vast amounts of data. But the whole
HCI approach just eliminated all of those challenges.
Steyn

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Gardner: One of the benefits of going at the infrastructure level for such a solution is not only
do you solve one problem but you probably solve multiple ones, things like replication and
deduplication become integrated into the environment. What were some of the extended
benefits you got when you went to a hyperconverged environment?
Time, Storage Savings
Steyn: Deduplication was definitely one of our bigger gains. We have had six to eight
development teams, and I literally had an identical copy of our production environment for each
of them that they used for testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and things like that.
At any point in time, we had at least 10 copies of our production environment all over the place.
And if you don’t dedupe at that level, you need vast amounts of storage. So that really was a
concern for us in terms of storage.
Gardner: Of course, business agility often hinges on your developers’ productivity. When you
can tell your developers, “Go ahead, spin up; do what you want,” that can be a great productivity
benefit.
How to solve key challenges
With HPE
SimpliVity HCI
Steyn: We literally had daily fights between the IT operations and infrastructure guys and the
developers because they were needed resources and we just couldn’t provide them with those
resources. And it was not because we didn’t have resources at hand, but it was just the time to
spin it up, to get to the guys to configure their environments, and things like that.
It was literally a three- to four-day exercise to get an environment up and running. For those
guys who are trying to push the agile development methodology, in a two-week sprint, you can’t
afford to lose two or three days.
Gardner: You don’t want to be in a scrum where they are saying, “You have to wait three or
four days.” It doesn’t work.
Steyn: No, it doesn’t, definitely not.
Gardner: Tell us about King Price. What is your organization like for those who are not familiar
with it?
Steyn: King Price initially started off as a short-term insurance company about five years ago in
Pretoria. We have a unique, one-of-a-kind business model. The short of it is that as your
vehicle’s value depreciates, so does your monthly insurance premium. That has been our
biggest selling point.
We see ourselves as disruptive. But there are also a lot of other things disrupting the short-term
insurance industry in South Africa -- things like Uber and self-driving cars. These are definitely a
threat in the long term for us.

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It’s also a very competitive industry in South Africa. So we have been rapidly launching new
businesses. We launched commercial insurance recently. We launched cyber insurance. So we
are really adopting new business ventures.
Gardner: And, of course, in any competitive business environment, your margins are thin; you
have to do things efficiently. Were there any other economic benefits to adopting a
hyperconverged environment, other than developer productivity?
Steyn: On the data center itself, the amount of floor
space that you need, the footprint, is much less
with hyperconverged. It eliminates a lot of
requirements in terms of networking, switching, and
storage. The ease of deployment in and of itself
makes it a lot simpler.
On the business side, we gained the ability to have more data at-hand for the guys in the
analytics environment and the ratings environment. They can make much more informed
decisions, literally on the fly, if they need to gear-up for a call center, or to take on a new
marketing strategy, or something like that.
Gardner: It’s not difficult to rationalize the investment to go to hyperconverged.
Worth the HCI Investment
Steyn: No, it was actually quite easy. I can’t imagine life or IT without the investment that
we’ve made. I can’t see how we could have moved forward without it.
Gardner: Give our audience a sense of the scale of your development organization. How many
developers do you have? How many teams? What numbers of builds do you have going on at
any given time?
How to solve key challenges
With HPE
SimpliVity HCI
Steyn: It’s about 50 developers, or six to eight teams, depending on the scale of the projects
they are working on. Each development team is focused on a specific unit within the business.
They do two-week sprints, and some of the releases are quite big.
It means getting the product out to the market as quickly as possible, to bring new functionality
to the business. We can’t afford to have a piece of product stuck in a development hold for six to
eight weeks because, by that time, you are too late.
Gardner: Let’s drill down into the actual hyperconverged infrastructure you have in place. What
did you look at? How did you make a decision? What did you end up doing?
[Hyperconverged] eliminates a lot of
requirements in terms of networking,
switching, and storage. The ease of
deployment in and of itself makes it
a lot simpler.

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Steyn: We had initially invested in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity 3400 cubes for
our development space, and we thought that would pretty much meet our needs. Prior to that,
we had invested in traditional blades and storage infrastructure. We were thinking that we would
stay with that for the production environment, and the SimpliVity systems would be used for just
the development environments.
But the gains we saw in the development environment were just so big that we very quickly
made a decision to get additional cubes and deploy them as the production environment, too.
And it just grew from there. So we now have the entire environment running on SimpliVity
cubes.
We still have some traditional storage that we use for archiving purposes, but other than that,
it’s 100 percent HPE SimpliVity.
Gardner: What storage environment do you associate with that to get the best benefits?
Keep Storage Simple
Steyn: We are currently using the HPE 3PAR storage, and it’s working quite well. We have
some production environments running there; a lot of archiving uses for that. It’s still very
complementary to our environment.
Gardner: A lot of organizations will start with HCI in something like development, move it
toward production, but then they also extend it into things like data warehouses, supporting their
data infrastructure and analytics infrastructure. Has that been the case at King Price?
Steyn: Yes, definitely. We initially began with the
development environment, and we thought that’s
going to be it. We very soon adopted HCI into the
production environments. And it was at that point
where we literally had an entire cube dedicated to the
enterprise data warehouse guys. Those are the
teams running all of the modeling, pricing structures,
and things like that. HCI is proving to be very helpful
for them as well, because those guys, they demand
extreme data performance, it’s scary.
Gardner: I have also seen organizations on a slippery slope, that once they have a certain
critical mass of HCI, they begin thinking about an entire software-defined data center (SDDC).
They gain the opportunity to entirely mirror data centers for disaster recovery, and for fast
backup and recovery security and risk avoidance benefits. Are you moving along that path as
well?
Steyn: That’s a project that we launched just a few months ago. We are redesigning our entire
infrastructure. We are going to build in the ease of failover, the WAN optimization, and the
compression. It just makes a lot more sense to just build a second active data center. So that’s
what we are busy doing now, and we are going to deploy the next-generation technology in that
data center.
We had an entire cube dedicated
to the enterprise data warehouse
guys. HCI is proving to be very
helpful for them as well, because
they demand extreme data
performance, it’s scary.

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Gardner: Is there any point in time where you are going to be experimenting more with cloud,
multi-cloud, and then dealing with a hybrid IT environment where you are going to want to
manage all of that? We’ve recently heard news from HPE about OneSphere. Any thoughts
about how that might relate to your organization?
Cloud Common Sense
Steyn: Yes, in our engagement with Microsoft, for example, in terms of licensing of products,
this is definitely something we have been talking about. Solutions like HPE OneSphere are
definitely going to make a lot of sense in our environment.
There are a lot of workloads that we can just pass onto the cloud that we don’t need to have on-
premises, at least on a permanent basis. Even the guys from our enterprise data warehouse,
there are a lot of jobs that every now and then they can just pass off to the cloud. Something
like HPE OneSphere is definitely going to make that a lot easier for us.
How to solve key challenges
With HPE
SimpliVity HCI
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how an insurance
innovator has built a modern hyperconverged infrastructure that replicates databases very fast
for their developers and has also led to a wholesale modernization of their IT environment. We
have learned how King Price has also gained data efficiencies and heightened disaster-
recovery benefits as a result of their HCI-enabled architecture.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Jacobus Steyn, Operations Manager at King Price in
Pretoria, South Africa. Thank you so much.
Steyn: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this BriefingsDirect
Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst
at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-
sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do come
back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how an insurance innovator built a modern hyperconverged
infrastructure environment that replicates databases to accelerate developer agility. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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