Data centre investment for RubiBlue MyZA

Global organisations are losing 127 man-hours a year through lost employee time due to IT failures. And it doesn’t stop there, when systems are down many businesses reputations are negatively impacted and compliance and regulatory commitments aren’t able to be met.

With this in mind, one of SA’s most exciting software developers, RubiBlue has invested R1million and introduced a new state of the art data center to maintain its already impressive up time of 99.95% and limit downtime from possibly a few hours to minutes. A key requirement for its EasiPol product, the leading policy administration software in Southern Africa, insurance companies can reliably and securely collect policy payments, prevent theft and administer policies for greater customer service.

The new infrastructure is plugged into NAP Africa, a neutral, layer two Internet exchange point and has the added benefit of having multiple ISP lines into the datacenter its cloud to ensure the data centre is always connected to the cloud.

For RubiBlue clients it means mitigated risk in terms of downtime and connectivity to EasiPol services for continued reliable and secure policy payment collection.

RubiBlue MD Chris Ogden said of its new datacenter: “We have essentially doubled our hardware capacity, of which we were only using 40% of the original, so we can upscale by a factor of 400%.
In typical datacenter deployments, the client is asked to invest in IT infrastructure and deploy one instance in their office, which is seriously concerning for disaster recovery, as there is essentially no application backup and costly for the client. Now, RubiBlue will manage the IT outlay, backups, upgrades and everything else.”

RubiBlue is using the latest IT hardware, including more expensive storage area network (SAN) data storage devices, which are known for their reliability and access speeds. It is also running VMWare cloud technology to switch between infrastructures (locally and to our second data centre setup for back up), allowing us to have a complete configuration running within minutes of disaster.

Tenacit assisted RubiBlue in planning the deployment, required hardware infrastructure, setup of the data centre, and maintenance of both instances.

Author: Kimberley Nanson.