MetLife's Data Center

Data storage is critical for an insurance company, and MetLife has their data center right here in the Rensselaer Tech Park. MetLife's IT gurus recently made news by significantly improving their data backup and recovery strategy.

SearchCIO.com: Disaster recovery strategy shift reduces data loss, recovery time

Under pressure to improve recovery time objectives and minimize data loss, IT veterans at MetLife Inc. took advantage of decreasing storage costs and an underleveraged data center to devise a multimillion-dollar disaster recovery strategy that met those goals, eliminated a security risk and will earn a double-digit ROI in five years.

MetLife previously backed up the mainframe onto data tapes, which were stored off-site. In the event of a major system failure, as much as 41 hours of data could potentially be lost, depending on the time of the last tape backup. MetLife turned their Scranton, PA data center into a mirror image backup site for Rensselaer, greatly improving recovery times and reducing potential data loss to 15 minutes. (They had to install an ultra-high-speed optical network line between the two centers to achieve this.)