The Challenge Continually enhance third-party arbitration services to meet the needs of growing membership while supporting new lines of business. The Solution Deploy NetApp systems in a flexible, high-performance, clustered configuration to support a private cloud environment.

1. Joint Customer Story
Arbitration Forums Expands
Business with Private Cloud
on NetApp and VMware
Customer Profile
When insurance carriers differ on how an
auto claim should be settled, they turn to
third-party mediator Arbitration Forums,
Inc. (AF). Established in 1943 as a feder-
ally funded, nonprofit, member-based
organization, AF is now the largest reme-
diation and subrogation services provider
in the United States, serving more than
4,700 members who file more than
510,000 arbitration disputes and 770,000
subrogation demands representing over
$5.5 billion in claims annually.
The Challenge
Growing pains, increasing complexity
Several years ago, AF and its members
were incurring millions of dollars annually
in costs associated with managing and
distributing insurance claims information
on paper. To reduce costs while more
efficiently supporting members’ needs,
AF migrated to a paperless claims-
processing infrastructure. Soon after,
the organization further enhanced its ser-
vices by allowing members to upload
claims documentation to its new private
cloud using a live service portal, where
AF arbitrators would conduct online
hearings to settle cases. As word of AF’s
simple and secure online arbitration
services spread, its membership grew.
Claims are now doubling every two
years while also becoming more com-
plex. Claims that averaged 15 pages
now often exceed 200 pages and con-
tain hundreds of high-resolution photos.
Although AF’s storage infrastructure
had enough capacity to support current
needs, it was increasingly unable to
deliver the level of performance
required by the company’s rapidly
growing VMware®
environment.
“Nobody knew our business was going
to escalate as it did,” says Eric Tuley,
director of IS Operations. “In 2010, we
had 50 virtual servers. Now we have
580, and performance is absolutely crit-
ical for streamlined operations and a
quality member experience.” In addi-
tion, a highly disruptive forklift upgrade
would likely be required to support plans
to extend arbitration services into new
lines of business.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Industry
Insurance
The Challenge
Continually enhance third-party
arbitration services to meet the
needs of growing membership
while supporting new lines of
business.
The Solution
Deploy NetApp®
systems in a
flexible, high-performance, clus-
tered configuration to support a
private cloud environment.
Benefits
• Preserves close to $2 million in
existing storage investments
• Saves nearly $55,000 a year on
backup-related costs
• Reclaims up to 90% of storage
capacity with deduplication
• Meets performance and capac-
ity demands without disruption
• Supports rapid growth and
entry into new lines of business

2. “This was one of the easiest storage
implementations we have done.
When you install the NetApp VSC
plug-in into your VMware vSphere
server and it optimizes all of your ESX
hosts automatically, it’s an awesome
thing to see.”
Eric Tuley
Director of IS Operations, Arbitration Forums, Inc.
The Solution
Power, agility, and asset preservation
After exploring many options, a NetApp
V-Series open storage controller platform
running the NetApp clustered Data
ONTAP®
operating system was deemed
the best fit. In addition to its reputation for
NFS performance, NetApp would enable
AF to move to a unified and agile storage
infrastructure where performance and
capacity could be managed and scaled
without disruption. For a company like
AF, with stringent SLAs to meet its grow-
ing membership’s uptime requirements,
as well as big plans for expanding its
cloud-based services, these capabilities
were critical. Best of all, this technology
transformation could be accomplished
while preserving close to $2 million in
existing storage investments.
“We were able to get substantial buy-in
from the board of directors because
NetApp gave us a way to utilize still viable
equipment as part of the solution, while
delivering substantial performance
improvements,” says Tuley.
A new IT paradigm
NetApp Professional Services assisted
AF with the deployment of its new
NetApp infrastructure, which was in
production within 60 days of delivery.
NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC)
for VMware vSphere®
was integral to
that process. “This was one of the easi-
est storage implementations we have
done,” says Tuley. “When you install the
NetApp VSC plug-in into your VMware
vSphere server and it optimizes all of
your ESX hosts automatically, it’s an
awesome thing to see.”
Today, two NetApp V6240HA systems,
each running clustered Data ONTAP and
equipped with 2TB of NetApp Flash
Cache™
, form the storage foundation for
two fully redundant, live/live data cen-
ters in Tampa, Florida, and Charlotte,
North Carolina. The Tampa-based V6240
cluster supports AF’s member-facing,
private cloud production environment
and online portal. The Charlotte-based
V6240 cluster provides an agile founda-
tion for development and test, load,
quality assurance, user acceptance
testing, and training environments.
AF leverages both NetApp and legacy
disk arrays to create different perfor-
mance tiers using various combinations
of SAS, SATA, and SSD drives and Flash
Cache technology. This enables the
organization to easily and cost-efficiently
deliver the right amount of performance
and capacity to meet both member and
business needs—from the demanding
high-I/O requirements of AF’s business-
critical Oracle®
and VMware View®
environments to the more moderate
needs of testing and disk-to-disk
backup. “Our V6240 cluster in production
typically runs a 20% CPU load, and at
any given time, we run less than 1.5
milliseconds of delay on our NFS back-
ground,” says Tuley. “Most of the time
we’re at 900 to 800 microseconds on
our NFS connectivity out of all of our
virtual machines.”
The new NetApp infrastructure also
seamlessly integrates with AF’s Cisco®
UCS®
servers and Cisco Catalyst®
6500
Series switches, supporting a cohesive
link between storage, server, and net-
working resources. Together, these
components form a unified and flexible
IT foundation for AF’s private cloud,
delivering the right combination of
assets to accommodate fluctuating
workloads, fast and efficient test and
development processes, and even
new business directions.
End-to-end features, nondisruptive
functionality
AF’s new V6240 systems, piloted by the
clustered Data ONTAP management
framework, extend the benefits of per-
formance, deduplication, simplified
management, and integrated data pro-
tection across all of AF’s NetApp and
third-party arrays. In addition, such
activities as virtual storage segmentation
for multi-tenancy, load balancing,
maintenance, and upgrades can all be
accomplished without disruption to
member services. That, combined with
the resiliency and redundancy of NetApp
systems and software—such as NetApp
SnapMirror®
and VMware vCenter™
Site
Recovery Manager—have enabled AF to

3. consistently uphold the SLAs of some of
the largest insurance carriers in the
country with five-nines availability.
Clustered Data ONTAP is also key to
the seamless growth of AF’s virtual
environment, which currently includes
member-facing Oracle workloads that,
for example, support current and his-
torical claims search functionality. It
also supports back-office applications
such as Microsoft®
Exchange, SQL
Server®
, and SharePoint®
Server, as well
as a growing VMware View desktop
environment currently running 120 virtual
desktops delivering a secure, stable,
and distributed desktop solution to
AF’s remote field arbitration staff.
“With NetApp clustered Data ONTAP we
can perform quarterly upgrades without
having to call for member-impacting out-
ages. This is a huge benefit for us,” says
Tuley. “We can also scale out horizontally
and not worry about buying additional
software to meet that scale.”
Business Benefits
Lower operating costs despite growth
NetApp deduplication occurs across all
areas of AF’s storage infrastructure, from
its primary datastores, to its NetApp
Snapshot™
copy–based backups to its
replication processes supported by
SnapMirror. For example, AF has
reclaimed 80% to 90% of capacity on
some Microsoft Windows®
and Linux®
datastores. In its massive web server
environment, which supports primary
production applications, there has been
a 75% reduction rate in actual block
usage on the back-end NetApp array.
AF has also dramatically curtailed new
storage investments. In recent years,
AF spent close to $200,000 buying new
disk shelves from its previous vendor
because deduplication for virtualized
environments was not supported when
running NFS.
Phasing out an expensive third-party
backup solution is another area where
NetApp technology is making a big
difference in AF’s bottom line. Capable
of supporting fast and space-saving
backups and quick restores for AF’s
core virtualized applications, NetApp
SnapDrive®
for Windows and NetApp
VSC for VMware vSphere and
SnapManager®
for Microsoft Exchange,
SQL Server, SharePoint, and Oracle are
providing an easy and more economical
data protection alternative. “We were
paying close to $65,000 a year to one
vendor for all of the backups that we had
to do on our back-end array,” says Tuley.
“Now that we have VSC integrated back-
ups we’ve saved close to $55,000 a year.”
Tape purchases as well as third-party
maintenance policies costing $15,000 to
$20,000 every few years have also been
eliminated. With its V-Series infrastructure
and NetApp SnapVault®
disk-to-disk
backup capabilities, AF has repurposed
preexisting storage resources for near-
line and long-term archival storage.
Faster response, greater value
One of the bigger advantages of the
NetApp deployment is the easy integra-
tion between NetApp technology and
the organization’s extensive VMware
environment. This has dramatically
reduced day-to-day management and
streamlined the workflow model between
IT management and development teams.
This in turn facilitates a faster, more
agile response to member and business
needs. For example, the ability to rapidly
incorporate member feedback to opti-
mize cloud-based services such as the
newly updated E-Subro Hub electronic
subrogation claims service helps AF
continually enhance the value of offerings
to members.
“NetApp tools, such as the VSC plug-
in, give us seamless integration and
management inside of the storage, so
if someone needs some scratch space
for a development stack, I don’t have
to go to multiple people to carry out
the task,” says Tuley. “I just ask our
VMware guy to provide it, and at the
end of the day, it is easily reclaimed,
something that was a painful process
in our previous environment.”
From single to multiline arbitration
services
The organizational impact of AF’s transi-
tion to a NetApp V-Series and clustered
“With NetApp clustered Data ONTAP
we can perform quarterly upgrades
without having to call for member-
impacting outages. This is a huge
benefit for us.”
Eric Tuley
Director of IS Operations, Arbitration Forums, Inc.

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CSS-6691-0214
Data ONTAP IT environment is making it
possible for AF to move into new areas
of business while supporting rapid
growth. Plans include a major undertak-
ing to redesign AF’s back-end portal to
support all lines of business, as well
as the ability to process many different
types of claims, including worker’s com-
pensation, personal injury, medical, and
property/casualty.
“The simple shifting of technology foot-
prints has made all the difference for us,”
says Tuley. “With NetApp technology
behind us, we’re pushing the envelope on
what we can do and are well positioned
to expand beyond automotive insurance
and become a complete digital docu-
ment transfer hub for multiple insurance
industries throughout the United States.”
“With NetApp technology behind us,
we’re pushing the envelope on what
we can do and are well positioned to
expand beyond automotive insurance
and become a complete digital
document transfer hub for multiple
insurance industries throughout the
United States.”
Eric Tuley
Director of IS Operations, Arbitration Forums, Inc.
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
NetApp Products and Services
NetApp V6240HA controllers (with
both NetApp and third-party storage
on the back end)
NetApp clustered Data ONTAP 8.2
NetApp Flash Cache
NetApp SnapDrive for Windows
NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft
Exchange Server, SQL Server, and
SharePoint Server
NetApp SnapManager for Oracle
NetApp SnapMirror
NetApp Snapshot technology
NetApp SnapVault
NetApp Virtual Storage Console for
VMware vSphere
NetApp deduplication
NetApp Professional Services
Third-Party Products
Cisco Unified Computing System™
(UCS) B200 M3 servers
Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SharePoint Server
Oracle 11g
VMware View
VMware vSphere
VMware vCenter Site Recovery
Manager
Protocols
NFS
iSCSI