Sydney Superuser Award Nominee: Insurance Australia Group (IAG) Data Team

Voting is now closed. Stay tuned to find out who wins!

It’s time for the community to determine the winner of the Superuser Award to be presented at the OpenStack Sydney Summit. Based on the community voting, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner.

Now, it’s your turn.

The Insurance Australia Group (IAG) Data Team is among the seven nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline Wednesday, September 20 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

How has OpenStack transformed the organization’s business?

OpenStack has enabled the move to a real time data architecture that allows for continuous integration and building of data products in days instead of months. This work is all tightly integrated with GitHub for pair programming and peer review and then automatically deploying new data and analytics products to serve our internal users better and faster. OpenStack has also allowed us to enable new ways to interact with our external customers and make their world a safer place. The OpenStack solution has also improved our performance stats and enabled new ways to deliver open source software solutions point in time for our internal teams. Overall it has changed our culture and our way of delivering both internal and external customer value.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to the OpenStack community?

IAG is active in many open source communities and has been on the mailing lists and attending community events as well as presenting at several conferences on our transformative solution. In addition to partnering with external companies to commit code to enable other to leverage our solutions IAG will be open sourcing our first piece of software in early September directly that has all been built using our OpenStack solution.

What open source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?

IAG leverages a number of data as well as web open source solutions today and contributes back to a number of them as well thru our digital and data teams.

What is the scale of the OpenStack deployment?

OpenStack is deployed in three separate tenants within IAG: Pre-production, production and analytics. The analytics tenant consists of 12 server with high performance and archival storage leveraging commercial ScaleIO SDS solution. The pre-production is 10 nodes and uses a nl-sas solution using open source ScaleIO SDS solution. The production tenant has 18 node of a mixed SSD, SAS and nl-SAS the later two leverage commercial ScaleIO SDS solution. The performance for data workloads is four times the performance and one-fifth the cost of our VMWare environment. Currently we support workloads from micro to 8xlarge and have volumes from 40G to 18TB per node.

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with OpenStack?

The ability to stand up a new complete environment end to end do a quick validation of proof of concept and fail fast has been highly valuable and the upgrade and migration of the platform has been seamless.

How is this team innovating with OpenStack?

The data workloads and adoption of quick fail fast prototypes to deliver data products has aided in our pricing, customer service, marketing and analytics space. The solution has also allowed IAG to focus on core customer facing capability using developers and code, while not worrying about the infrastructure underneath.

How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?

Five.