With 30% Less Hardware and 25% Less Energy Usage, Antares is Ready for an AI-Powered Future

We are Antares Global Management Limited, a global insurance firm that offers a wide variety of insurance and reinsurance solutions. Our innovative products cover everything from property and motor insurance to more specialized fields like marine, terrorism, cyber, political, and financial risks.

Finding the right resources to keep us moving forward

We currently have two big ambitions for our IT infrastructure at Antares:

1. Move as many applications as we can to the cloud where there's a business benefit and it's cost effective
2. Explore the benefits and take advantage of AI to improve business processes

Achieving these goals was impossible with our previous architecture because we had to focus too much on day-to-day management. Some of our pain points arose from the high-performance demands of insurance. Many of our business-critical underwriting, reserving, and actuary applications are resource-intensive. They require massive amounts of compute power and memory, along with substantial network and storage resources, and the requirements grow with each passing day.

We repeatedly hit capacity within our environment. When that happened, the systems our business teams rely on would begin to have performance issues, slowing down or even going offline. The delays were costly, and my team spent a lot of time firefighting because the tool we used to provision new resources didn’t suit our large-scale environment. We spent our days finding a little storage here and there to feed our resource-hungry applications, which left us zero capacity for new demands like introducing AI or supporting hybrid work.

“We spent our days finding a little storage here and there to feed our resource-hungry applications. That left us zero capacity for new demands, like introducing AI or supporting hybrid work.”

Keeping our environment up to date was another time-consuming management challenge. Security is paramount for us, and updating firmware is non-negotiable. But without a cohesive overview and easy access to our entire estate, performing updates meant working on each server one at a time. We wanted to consolidate our servers to reduce the management burden.

Our environment was nearing the end of its extended support, so we looked to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for answers.

Stacking the deck with tech that’s built for how we operate

In thinking through our infrastructure revamp, we had to solve our current challenges while keeping our eyes on the bigger picture. Antares aims to become a cloud-first environment so we can take full advantage of AI tools, including training our own models. Having invested heavily in Microsoft Azure, we wanted a similar experience from our infrastructure.

Antares is a long-term HPE customer, but we didn’t know how well our current vision aligned with HPE’s strategy. We engaged in deep consultations with the HPE team, who explained their cloud approach and even supported us through a series of board reviews to showcase the ROI and TCO of their solutions compared to other options on the market. That effort helped us get the executive buy-in needed to secure the combination of HPE hardware, tools, and services that delivered exactly what we wanted.

It all started with HPE ProLiant servers. We deployed mainly HPE ProLiant DL360 servers and some HPE ProLiant DL380s, along with HPE Alletra Storage devices. Built for a hybrid cloud environment, the compute-dense HPE ProLiant servers were the first step in overcoming our capacity issues.

The next piece was HPE Compute Ops Management within HPE GreenLake cloud. Compute Ops Management gave us a unified view of our entire inventory for the first time, which was a revelation. Compute Ops Management is intuitive and straightforward for my team to use, whether to provision new servers or apply firmware updates across the board. With this tool, our security team can automate updates, resolve vulnerabilities, and maintain high security standards for our environment. It also gave us a great platform to set up site-to-site replication for disaster recovery.

The final piece to our infrastructure revamp was HPE Tech Care Service. Finally, we could end our firefighting days and enjoy full edge-to-cloud operational support from HPE experts.

It was a significant overhaul that made us much more effective in supporting our colleagues worldwide.

Enhancing performance with a smaller footprint

Since adopting HPE servers and storage systems, we’ve said goodbye to performance issues. We use general virtualization for our primary data center and hybrid cloud workloads, and the HPE ProLiant DL360 servers are more than capable of supporting these memory- and performance-intensive workloads. They’ve also enabled Antares to reduce our compute and server footprint by about 30%.

"The HPE ProLiant DL360 servers are capable of supporting heavy memory and performance loads, and they’ve also enabled Antares to reduce our compute and server footprint by about 30%."

Not only does this performance far exceed our previous systems, but my team can now provision additional capacity quickly and easily through HPE Compute Ops Management. With this tool, our security team can automate updates, resolve vulnerabilities, and maintain high security standards for our environment. It also gave us a great platform to set up site-to-site replication for disaster recovery — an unexpected benefit that makes our IT leaders very happy.

The improvements extend beyond IT:

• Increased continuity allows our business teams to work uninterrupted by slow or offline applications.
• We can better support a secure hybrid work environment.
• We have made great strides in adding AI enhancements to our existing applications, further improving efficiency and productivity.
• We have reduced our data-center power requirements by around 25%, even as we increase our use of AI.Staying on top of modern trends isn’t always easy, especially since our IT infrastructure stretches across continents, supporting offices and employees in the UK, Europe, Singapore, Doha, and Bermuda. Yet that’s my mission as a senior infrastructure and cloud specialist at Antares. I have to keep one eye on the present and one eye on the future to ensure we can meet today’s demands while preparing for what comes next.

With such strong support, we can do anything

As happy as we’ve been with these results, we know things sometimes go wrong, and in our business, we can’t afford for anything to be less than optimal for long. That’s why we're grateful to have the full support of HPE, from our account manager through to HPE Tech Care Service. We always have multiple options, including working directly with HPE’s responsive, knowledgeable engineers, to make sure we’re always maximizing our resources and running smoothly.

With HPE, Antares is well on our way to becoming a cloud-first, AI-enhanced environment. The faster and more secure our environment, the easier it is for our colleagues to provide the underwriting and claims services our customers need to help them manage risk. It makes everything we do in IT worthwhile.

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