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Outsourcing Arm of World's Largest Reinsurance Intermediary Chooses Paragon KVM Solution
Headquartered in Chicago, Aon is a Fortune 500 company
that is a world leader in risk management, retail,
reinsurance and wholesale brokerage, claims management,
specialty services, and human capital consulting services.
The Aon Services Group (ASG) is the outsourcing and
alternative distribution arm of Aon Corporation, providing
unique services to various segments of the insurance
industry through a number of highly specialized and wellrespected
subsidiaries. The subsidiaries provide services to
a host of clients, including: independent insurance agents
and brokers; professional and third party affinity groups;
individual consumers, companies, and organizations; and
insurance carriers.
In April 2002, Cameron Gocke, Systems Engineer III for
the Aon Services Group, needed a rock-solid, reliable
KVM solution to provide local and remote access to his
125 servers and other network devices. "We have a
geographically spread out population of end users and our
choices were to hire trained engineers to be on call 24/7,
or select a best-of-breed solution that provided an out of
band connection and 'over IP' capability for remote access
to our servers. We opted for the latter," said Gocke.
Gocke's single most important criterion for selection was
reliability, but scalability and flexibility were also key
elements of the final choice. "We needed a scalable
solution that could grow with us as our server environment
expands," he added. Scalability was definitely a key issue
for Gocke as well, since he envisions the number of servers
doubling from 125 to 250 before the end of next year. But
Gocke wasn't going to take anyone's word for it: the final
selection would be made on the basis of head-to-head
testing between the final candidates.
After an extensive selection and testing process, Gocke
chose Raritan's award winning Paragon® with Cat5
SimplicityTM and the TeleReach® remote access option.
"When evaluating a solution with multi-user IP access to
the KVM switch, we looked at Raritan and Avocent,"
said Gocke. "We tested Avocent's DS Series, but it was
too slow for us to use—
Raritan's Paragon performance
was head and shoulders above Avocent."
Paragon provided superior performance, Cat5
simplicity, and 100% server availability for BIOS-level
troubleshooting, and even re-booting. And with
TeleReach's 128-bit SSL-encrypted remote access, this
solution offered web-based, non-blocked multi-user
access, without compromising security. According to
Gocke, Paragon seemed to offer all the benefits, with
none of the compromise required with the Avocent
solution.
Aon Services Group has been live with the Paragon
solution since May 2002, and has experienced 100%
uptime. "Raritan delivered exactly what it claimed," added
Gocke. Gocke has realized significant savings with the
Raritan solution, including a reduced need for IT
personnel, and increased capability for emergency access to
the KVM switches. "With our database clusters, we need a
stable environment for our KVM switches, and any inband
remote management tool—
whether software- or
management card-based—
lends itself to instability," said
Gocke. "We solved that problem. Since our Raritan
remote management solution is server independent, no
drivers or software needs to be loaded onto the server."
In the near future, Aon Services Group will be building a
disaster recovery site in a co-location facility and will need
to replicate what is in the data center. "Unless we want to
staff the DR facility, Paragon with the TeleReach option
will be the only solution for us," concluded Gocke.
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The Aon Services Group
Outsourcing arm of reinsurance giant needed
high performance remote and local access to 125
servers and other devices
Raritan's Paragon KVM solution with the
TeleReach option
Aon Services Group avoided the costs of hiring
trained personnel, made existing operations more
efficient and added the capability of emergency
access to KVM switches
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