LONDON, 5 July 2006 - Norwich Union, the UK's largest insurer, is deploying a Cisco Systems storage area network (SAN) to improve storage management, increase data security and reliability and help reduce overall IT costs.

The Norwich Union SAN, built using Cisco MDS 9000 Multilayer fabric switches and directors, will help the company consolidate 'islands' of storage and enable the company to deploy more than 2500 SAN ports in support of a multi-platform data centre environment. It will support heterogeneous host operating systems and allow them to share storage needs across multiple storage devices. Cisco is also expected to help Norwich Union significantly reduce storage costs year-on-year as well as improve storage resource utilisation.

The new SAN will also allow Norwich Union to make better use of existing storage capacity and help the company to reduce the cost of storage media by enabling the company to choose the most cost-effective storage technologies. In all, the Cisco SAN will be used to manage over 150 terabytes (TB) of data which comprises information on Norwich Union's UK customers who account for one in five UK households and one in seven vehicles. In the financial services industry, data volume increases can be as much as 70 percent every year.

Roly Goram, Principal Consultant at Norwich Union, said, "Our Cisco-based SAN will help us consolidate and improve the efficiency of our data storage environment and, through the cost savings we expect to achieve, help realise our business vision of making IT a business asset instead of an overhead. We believe that technology such as the Cisco solution will help Norwich Union improve the provision of financial products and services to our customers as well as enabling us to make better use of existing IT resources."

"For large organisations like Norwich Union, the enterprise-wide network is becoming increasingly important as a strategic business tool for reducing costs, improving customer services and meeting regulations more effectively," said Scot Gardner, Director - Finance, Cisco Systems UK. "Not only does Cisco technology sit at the heart of many of the UK's leading financial institutions, it is also the foundation of many applications that are having a significant impact on business effectiveness and business performance."

Norwich Union will use Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer directors to manage its SAN solution, which will share storage resources across the company's two data centres, together with Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches as part of its data centre network architecture. The new SAN solution at Norwich Union was implemented by Cisco Strategic Alliance Partner IBM for the mainframe environment and Cisco Registered Partner, EMC, for open standards platforms.