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SSP to PERMANENTLY shutter mega-outage bit barn

Sod this. Let's just start over

Insurance tech biz SSP Worldwide has decided to “permanently decommission” one of its data centres, following a huge outage that lasted for ten days.

A power blackout hit SSP’s Solihull Data Centre on 26 August, which fried its HPE Storage Area Network.

SSP was working with the US vendor to resurrect its systems when the work was interrupted by a recurrence of the original problem.

Laurence Walker, group chief exec of SSP said:

"Our Solihull data centre has a more traditional daily back-up, so to restore services to these customers we are working through a process of ‘unpacking’ data from back-up discs, re-coupling it with application data and then reconfiguring systems for individual customers.”

He added: “In light of this incident we have accelerated the migration from, and decommissioning of, Solihull. Once this is complete, data and services for all customers will be provided from our two Tier 3 Data Centres.

The outage had a huge impact on customers unable to access SSP’s services. By its own reckoning the business works with "8 of the top 10 UK insurers, 4 of the top 10 global insurers and over 40 per cent of UK Brokers.”

SSP's SAN system comprises a large number of storage disks, grouped into cassettes, over which the business and configuration data that supports the systems is housed. A number of these disks were damaged following the exceptional disruption to power supply that caused the original loss of service.

SSP sells tech to motor insurers, and Walker said customers whose renewals were due during the service interruption will be able to process them with the existing insurers when the system is back online.

"Full details have been provided to brokers to help minimise the impact of the outage. We have also been working closely with the MIB and our insurer partners to agree emergency processes to support SSP brokers and their customers.

He added: “Throughout this process, our priority has been on restoring services as quickly as possible and keeping our customers as up to date as possible on the situation. Once again, we would like to express our disappointment about the delay, disruption and frustration experienced by our customers, for which we sincerely apologise.”

Well, quite. ®

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