CIC Gains Flexibility and Increases Performance with Red Hat Storage

Founded in 1981, CIC is a leading supplier of electronic signature solutions for the financial services industry. By enabling enterprises to fully execute Business Process Automation (BPA) initiatives, CIC allows for a paperless workflow and legally binding electronic transactions. CIC’s mission is to expand the adoption rate of its electronic signature technology both within the financial industry and in other sectors, enabling a wider number and range of companies to benefit from speedy and secure transactions.

CIC’s electronic signature application requires a high-performance and highly available IT infrastructure in order to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs). CIC selected Amazon Web Services and the RightScale Cloud Management Platform as its cloud technology infrastructure based on RightScale’s proven track record of building, monitoring and managing cloud services. CIC investigated the most optimal capabilities to offer services on the cloud and also looked for technology that enables secure and reliable performance for cloud storage.

“Our clients not only require 24/7 retrieval and access to documents, but also expect us to deliver these items quickly and efficiently,” said Nhan Nguyen, chief scientist and chief technology officer at CIC. “Therefore, reliability and performance are major focal points for our IT operations department. Having the right technology solutions is imperative to our business.”

CIC researched multiple solutions to satisfy its client and SLA requirements. Based on CIC’s evaluation, RightScale suggested its partner, Red Hat Storage, on AWS’ Elastic Block Storage (EBS) as a method to improve performance and information availability.

“We support a very high number of concurrent users. Maintaining very high uptime and guaranteed document load performance of under three seconds are our main goals,” stated Nguyen. “Red Hat Storage provided the flexibility we needed while also delivering the performance necessary to allow our clients to meet their SLAs.” After deploying Red Hat Storage, CIC quickly realized dramatic storage performance and availability improvements to its cloud storage deployment. Utilizing Red Hat Storage provides CIC with easily managed shared storage that elevates performance by pooling, aggregating, and virtualizing EBS and provides greater availability with synchronous and asynchronous replication.

Red Hat Storage has a unique scale-out architecture that stores and retrieves files quickly and efficiently. Its high performance capabilities enable CIC to continue to honor its SLAs and even surpass expectations, while moving to the cloud. By deploying within a single global name, resources are added as required for capacity and performance management.

“We were extremely pleased with the results RightScale was delivering, so it was crucial to select a cloud storage solution that required no change to our existing infrastructure,” said Nguyen. “Red Hat Storage provided the flexibility we needed while also delivering the performance necessary to allow our clients to meet their SLAs.

With RightScale, Red Hat Storage, and AWS, CIC is delivering new and innovative products and services to its clients while ensuring it maintains its high SLAs. “Overall, Red Hat Storage is providing a cloud storage technology that not only allows us to quickly provide our services on the cloud, but also matches and exceeds the high availability and performance--as if deployed on premise at our client sites,” concluded Nguyen. “We are looking forward to the continued benefits Red Hat Storage provides and are extremely excited about what its technology and RightScale are allowing us to serve our clients.”