Farm Bureau Insurance

Insurance Company Meets Growing Data Management Needs with Cloudian Object Storage

Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan serves farms of all sizes and varying styles of production throughout the state. When its previous data archiving vendor was acquired, the company deployed Rubrik together with Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage as the archive target. The switch to Cloudian has given Farm Bureau Insurance an easy-to-manage, cost-effective data storage foundation that provides cloud-like scalability and flexibility in its own data centers, behind the firewall and fully under its control.

Need for a Better Archive Solution

Founded in 1949, Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan provides farm insurance as well as standard home and auto insurance to its members. The company’s IT infrastructure is about 99% VMware-based, and it has approximately 2 PB of archive data, which it previously stored on an object storage system from another vendor. When that vendor was acquired, Farm Bureau Insurance was informed that key features it required would no longer be updated or supported. As a result, the company began looking for an alternative solution.

“Because of the sensitive nature of the data we handle, we were reticent to move to the public cloud,” says Julie Ulrich, IT Systems Engineer, at Farm Bureau Insurance. “However, we wanted an on-prem archive solution that would deliver cloud-like scalability, flexibility and ease of management and also integrate well with Rubrik.”

Dewpoint, a leading IT Services and value-added reseller in Michigan, recommended Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage to Ulrich, who found that it met all of Farm Bureau Insurance’s criteria, including being highly cost-effective.

The company deployed HyperStore in each of its two data centers, and implementation was smooth.

HyperStore: Limitlessly Scalable, Highly Cost Effective and Easy to Manage

Farm Bureau Insurance has now been using HyperStore for a year, and it’s been a great solution.

“The integration with Rubrik has been seamless and having Cloudian as the target has made archiving pretty effortless,” says Ulrich. “We recently got some new Rubrik nodes, and as I’ve been moving things over, I just set it to archive. I don’t have to check on it very much, and I receive notifications if something goes wrong.”

As its data continues to grow, Farm Bureau Insurance expects to add more Cloudian capacity. The company may also incorporate Cloudian’s S3 Object Lock, which provides data immutability to prevent cybercriminals from altering or deleting backup data, thereby enabling recovery of an unencrypted copy in the event of a ransomware attack, without having to pay ransom. In addition, Farm Bureau Insurance is considering deploying container applications in the future, in which case HyperStore’s integration with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid will provide a strong storage foundation.