Unisys The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company

Visible Breakthrough: MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company Consolidates Applications and Boosts Performance on 64-Bit Technology.
Imagine it.
The Insurance Center of The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company ("MEGA") provides health insurance to self-employed individuals. After three years of strong growth, The Insurance Center applications couldn't keep up with the increasing number of policies and claims—performance was dropping while maintenance times and costs increased. The Insurance Center wanted to increase its capacity yet consolidate the number of servers needing support.
Done.
To that end, the company migrated its key applications to 64-bit hardware and software: Unisys ES7000 servers with Intel&<74;&<60;Itanium&<74;&<60;2 processors running Microsoft&<74;&<60;SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) on Microsoft&<74;&<60;Windows&<74;&<60;Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems. With this solution, The Insurance Center consolidated 20 servers onto four server clusters, increased application performance at least 43 percent, improved system availability, reduced maintenance time by 100 days and cut hardware costs.

Visible Breakthrough: Positioned for Growth
Through powerful 64-bit technology and a streamlined IT environment, The Insurance Center has a robust, highly available server platform to support growing processing requirements and meet real-time business needs.
Secure Business Operation
Claims processing

Innovation Metrics
Performance: Daily load time of the IVR data has been cut from nearly 2 hours to just under 1 hour; total maintenance time has been cut from 4 hours to just under 30 minutes; and the time needed to update the IVR rules has been reduced from 26 hours to 7 hours.
Cost:&<60; The company expects to see around $1M in cost savings from reduced maintenance time and hardware costs in the first year.
Growth: Scalable platform based on 64-bit technology readily handles business growth.
Productivity: Systems management and administration is easier after consolidating 20 servers onto four server clusters.
Business Challenge: Eliminate Processing Delays and Support Growth
Dealing with rapid growth is the sort of challenge that a company doesn't mind having, and The Insurance Center of The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company ("MEGA") is no exception. The Insurance Center is licensed to issue health and life insurance in all states but New York. Business at The Insurance Center has been booming since the turn of the millennium. The growth has been driven largely by MEGA, which provides health insurance and related products to self-employed individuals. However, quickly building an infrastructure to support that rate of expansion is a challenge, and The Insurance Center was in danger of being overwhelmed by its own success.

The Insurance Center relies on a combination of mainframe and distributed systems for its daily operations. The mainframe—running IBM z/OS—serves as the data store for insurance policies. The mainframe also hosts most of the core applications that apply the policy rules to incoming claims and determine if and at what rate the policies should be paid. In addition, The Insurance Center runs at least 47 separate applications on servers running the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server operating system and the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database.

The two largest and most important applications are the Nortel Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and eiStream Imaging systems. The IVR application downloads policy and claim data from the mainframe and then makes it available to healthcare providers and MEGA clients over the telephone through an automated response system. The IVR application also makes the data available over the Internet at a customer self-service portal. The eiStream system stores the scanned images of paper documents and manages the workflow for The Insurance Center customer service staff.

After two years of serving an ever-increasing number of customers, the systems—and The Insurance Center's IT staff—were becoming strained. The IVR application was especially problematic. Each night, the application loaded the claims and policies processed by the mainframe that day. As The Insurance Center grew, the IVR system was loading and processing a database every night that comprised as many as 500,000 claims and policies for 300,000 customers. As a result, a process that was supposed to happen each business day within a two-hour window was frequently taking more than two hours to complete. Some processes could take as long as 26 hours to complete.

"The server for the IVR system was running at capacity every night," says Glen Whitling, Database Administrator (DBA) Manager for The Insurance Center. "The data had to be available by 6:00 A.M, and there were times that we missed the deadline."

If the mainframe extract files were not available early enough in the morning, the IVR system had to use data that was one or two days old. The delay would also complicate business analysis at The Insurance Center, requiring the company analysts to reconcile the data in the IVR system with the data on the mainframe.

Weekends provided no respite, because that was when The Insurance Center performed system maintenance—re-indexing and checking for consistency—on its eiStream Imaging databases. The tasks, which took more than four hours to complete, needed to be performed at times that would not interfere with system availability to customers and healthcare providers. "We had to start scheduling backup and maintenance times that affected image processing that needed to be complete before the next business day," says Whitling. "There were times when people needed to use the system, but because of the system maintenance, the performance was severely degraded."

The IT staff at The Insurance Center also faced a growing maintenance workload, because the furious pace of growth encouraged the company to add more server computers whenever more capacity was needed. "For a period of time, the policy was to add another server whenever we added another application," says Whitling. The result was more servers than the group could maintain easily or utilize effectively. "Some of our systems were at capacity, while others were underutilized," says Whitling. Regardless of how efficiently an individual server was being used, The Insurance Center staff had to work just as hard to maintain each one.

Finally, although The Insurance Center had backups standing by in case a server or an application failed, restoring service often required manual intervention. The large IVR and imaging systems were particularly vulnerable because they took a lot of time to return to service and because they were so integral to the company's daily operations. "If our imaging application went down, we would have to send some of the company home," says Whitling. "It would take us hours to restore the application and the databases."

Solution: Consolidation onto More Powerful Servers
The Insurance Center knew that it couldn't solve the problems it faced by adding more servers. The IT staff was already struggling to maintain the servers in use—many of which were underutilized. "What we were doing wasn't sustainable," says Whitling. "We had to figure out a way to improve our system performance, consolidate our servers, and increase availability."

The company also concluded that it couldn't simply buy servers with more powerful 32-bit processors. "Generally, our issues were less about processor speed and more about the effective utilization of memory," says Whitling. "We looked at 32-bit servers but realized that even with faster processors, system memory would still be a bottleneck. So we decided that we needed to move to 64-bit systems."

Despite the performance advantage of the 64-bit systems, the decision was not a simple one. "We took a big risk on moving to a technology that was still very new," recalls Whitling. "With the support we received from Unisys, Microsoft, and Intel&<74;, however, it was one of the better decisions we've made."

The company knew that it wanted to continue using systems running the Microsoft Windows Server operating system and SQL Server 2000, which are part of Windows Server System integrated server software. Although The Insurance Center evaluated hardware from several hardware vendors, the group chose Unisys after Unisys prepared and executed a five-week proof of concept in July 2003. Unisys and The Insurance Center tested the IVR and imaging applications on ES7000 Aries 130 servers with four Intel&<74; Itanium&<74; 2 processors. The servers ran Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit).

The Unisys consultants really understood and supported what we were trying to do. They helped us take the theories we had and prove them out in the real world.Glen WhitlingDatabase Administrator (DBA) ManagerThe Insurance Center
The results were dramatic. Even though the Itanium&<74; 2 processors ran at a lower clock speed than that of the four-way, 32-bit Intel&<74; Xeon&<74; processor clusters that The Insurance Center had been using, the test systems ran almost all of the applications and procedures an average of 35 percent faster. The one glaring exception was the IVR rules process: The new systems cut the time 74 percent, from 26 hours to 7 hours. “The Unisys consultants really understood and supported what we were trying to do," says Whitling. "They helped us take the theories we had and prove them out in the real world."On the basis of the successful proof of concept, The Insurance Center purchased nine ES7000 Aries 410 servers. Each server has eight Itanium 2 processors and runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit). The company reserved one server as an internal development environment and configured the other eight into four active/ passive clusters, each cluster consisting of one active and one passive server.

The company installed its IVR application on one cluster, installed its imaging application on a second cluster, and then consolidated the applications running on 18 other servers onto the other two clusters. The nine servers are connected to EMC Symmetrix DMX networked storage systems through a storage area network.

The deployment started in November 2003, and the system went into full operation in January 2004.

Results: Cost-Effective, Better-Performing IT Infrastructure
By moving to Unisys systems running Intel&<74; Itanium&<74; processors and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit), The Insurance Center was able to increase the performance of its key applications—in some cases, processes are now running four times as fast as before. The Insurance Center was also able to consolidate 18 servers down to 4, significantly reducing both hardware costs and maintenance time.

Application performance increased by at least 43 percent
The new hardware and software dramatically boosted the performance of The Insurance Center's applications. The improvement varied depending on the application or process but ranged from 43 percent to nearly 400 percent. Specifically, the daily load time of the IVR data has been cut from nearly 2 hours to just under 1 hour, the total maintenance time has been cut from 4 hours to just under 30 minutes, and the time needed to update the IVR rules has been reduced from 26 hours to 7 hours. "Working with Unisys, Microsoft, and Intel&<74; to move our systems to 64-bit has increased both our application performance and our efficiency," says Whitling.

Savings of more than U.S.$1 million expected
The server consolidation has significantly affected the company's bottom line. As a result of the project, The Insurance Center expects to see an initial savings of around U.S.$234,000 and year one savings of $802,000 for a non-redundant environment or $1,600,000 for a redundant environment. In addition, the company expects a return on its investment in little over a year.

Maintenance and hardware costs reduced
The increased performance of the Itanium&<74; 2-based systems has enabled The Insurance Center to consolidate applications running on 18 individual servers onto two active/passive SQL Server 2000 clusters.

That consolidation has reduced the IT department's workload by 100 days per year, permitting staff to spend less time on maintenance and administration and more time on developing and tuning applications. "Consolidating our servers has relieved the burden on my staff," says Whitling. "It's much easier to manage 27 servers than it is to manage 47 servers."

The performance of our 64-bit systems has saved us from needing to buy 10 to 15 servers since the deployment.Glen WhitlingDatabase Administrator (DBA) ManagerThe Insurance Center
In addition, the increased performance afforded by the Unisys servers running Itanium&<74; 2 processors has enabled The Insurance Center to install new applications on the servers it has, rather than buy additional hardware. "The performance of our 64-bit systems has saved us from needing to buy 10 to 15 servers since the deployment," says Whitling.

System availability improved through server clustering
The Insurance Center has significantly increased the availability of its applications by installing them on active/passive nodes running SQL Server 2000 (64-bit); if the active server experiences trouble, the system automatically fails over to the backup server. The transition takes seconds, and the applications are available without interruption. "We lost a memory module on one of the servers, and we didn't even know it until the next morning," says Whitling. "That server failed over, and the applications continued running."

64-bit platform provides capacity for future expansion
In addition to building a system that meets its current needs, The Insurance Center has used components from Microsoft, Unisys, and Intel&<74; to design a solution that provides plenty of room for growth.

With Microsoft, Unisys, and Intel&<74;, we built a long-lasting solution that will help us maintain a strong competitive position, while keeping our IT costs under control.Glen WhitlingDatabase Administrator (DBA) ManagerThe Insurance Center
"The Itanium&<74; 2 processors give us extra capacity," says Whitling. "They're more powerful and can manipulate more data than our old CPUs could. That added functionality, combined with the ability to upgrade the Unisys ES7000 servers, positions us best for the long term. With Microsoft, Unisys, and Intel&<74;, we built a long-lasting solution that will help us maintain a strong competitive position, while keeping our IT costs under control."

Whitling also cites the progress that Microsoft has made in 64-bit software. "The maturity of the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 allows us to reevaluate our mainframe environment," says Whitling. "The software has grown into an enterprise-level solution."
The Relationship: Leveraging Partner Know-How
By working with Unisys, Microsoft, and Intel&<74;, The Insurance Center was able to transition to the new systems in a matter of weeks. The company was able to streamline its IT environment, achieve cost savings, and minimize risks associated with the project. "Unisys came in and was a part of the group," says Whitling. "There were setbacks and things that didn't go as planned, but Unisys, Microsoft, and Intel&<74; helped us put together an excellent solution for the long term."

The Insurance Center also welcomed the assistance that the three companies provided in designing the new system. "This was our first wide-scale implementation of clusters," says Whitling. "Unisys and Microsoft helped us develop our skills and understand how to build highly available systems."