West Asset Management collects on winning agility with IBM XIV

West Asset Management (WAM), a subsidiary of the West Corporation, is one of the top-rated companies in accounts receivable management sector in the United States. It is the vendor of choice for the largest U.S. healthcare system, seven of the top 10 credit card issuers, and other Fortune 500 companies. Headquartered in Marietta, GA, the company has more than 2,500 employees at 14 locations across 13 states.

WAM needs to be able to manage complex cases, such as medical insurance claims investigations, and to process and respond to new collection requests as swiftly as possible. In the collections industry, requests go out to multiple fulfillers—the business is awarded to the fastest responders. Quick turnaround time across its IT infrastructure, including its data warehouse, is critical to WAM’s success.

“Speed is important operationally, to give business users access to the data they need,” explains Jeff Ealy, Director of IT at WAM. “Speed is also important strategically: As we evolve, we need to be able to provide new IT services and respond rapidly to requests from business users.”

Seeking speed and simplicity

Not surprisingly, performance was a primary driver for WAM in looking for a new storage solution, and simplicity in use was close behind. To enable high speed in IT service provisioning, the company had already implemented a virtualized landscape based on VMware ESX Server, running 200 virtual environments, to support its key systems. Most were applications built around Microsoft® SQL Server and Microsoft Windows® Server 2008: In-house-developed surveying, data mining and validation applications for the insurance services sector, and an Artiva accounts receivable management application from Ontario Systems. WAM also runs a voice-recording application for phone calls, a small number of Linux® and IBM AIX® systems, and an IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager server that handles tape backups from the company’s SAN.

“Although our VMware environment gave us virtualization on the server side, there was a bottleneck when it came to the storage,” explains DJ Toms, Vice President of Information Services. “Setting up new storage volumes was a complex process, involving manual configuration of RAID arrays and a lot of other technical work. Provisioning a single volume could take three or four hours, which slowed down our ability to respond to business users and distracted our IT staff from more valuable work.”

Seeking new storage options, WAM consulted Sirius Computer Solutions (formerly MSI Systems Integrators). Says Ealy: “MSI has been one of our closest partners for many years, and have always helped us invest wisely in new technologies. Once again, they came up with a great solution by suggesting we test out the IBM XIV Storage System.”

The IBM XIV Storage System revolutionizes enterprise storage technology; its highly parallelized grid architecture of high-capacity SATA disks delivers tier-one performance and resilience at exceptionally low total cost of ownership.

300 percent performance gain and much more

Sirius helped WAM run a proof of concept on a 45 TB XIV system at its main data center, in Omaha, Nebraska.

“Initially, we thought the claims IBM was making about the XIV system were too good to be true—but then we saw it deliver a 300 percent improvement in performance,” says Toms. “And when we analyzed the business case, we realized we would potentially achieve cost savings of 30 percent over traditional SAN infrastructures.”

WAM put the test model straight into production, migrating 27 TB of data from all environments of its existing storage in just 30 days, without assistance. Today, the XIV system stores all the company’s mission-critical applications.

“It was the easiest migration we’ve ever done,” says Ealy. “The XIV migration tools are fantastic—the whole data transfer took place in the background, with no need to take systems offline. The only downtime was for a few minutes when we rebooted the servers. Our last SAN migration was a nightmare, so we were astounded at how easy the XIV made the process.”

Nondisruptive scalability

Just three months after the initial migration, the company added two new modules. “XIV’s expandability is great: You can add capacity at low cost, and nondisruptively,” says Toms. “Moreover, unlike a traditional storage system, adding modules actually improves performance, because you’re adding controllers as well as disks.”

West Asset Management has continued to add capacity easily as business growth has required.

Ealy adds: “The XIV system is also extremely reliable and resilient. We haven’t had a single moment’s downtime since the ‘go-live.’ Once, when a disk failed, we just took the module out of service, replaced the disk, and brought it back into the array again. The disk was rebuilt automatically within 40 minutes. We monitored the I/O performance during the whole operation and had no effect on performance whatsoever.”

Toms comments: “The reporting tools are terrific; with our previous storage product, we had to create tools for performance monitoring ourselves, but the IBM XIV comes with everything you need as standard. There are many advanced features available that we haven’t even started using yet, such as thin provisioning and remote mirroring. Snapshots are already proving useful for backups, and we’re looking to introduce writeable snaps in the near future.”

“But above all, it’s XIV’s ease in creating, allocating and extending storage volumes that is the real ‘wow factor’ for us. A job that used to take up to four hours of tedious manual work can now be completed in 30 minutes—so we can respond to business users much more quickly when they ask us to create a new environment.”

Compact and energy efficient

WAM retired its previous storage hardware, saving floor space and reducing power and cooling requirements. “The old system took up two or three racks; the XIV just occupies one,” says Ealy. “And you can feel the difference in the data center—it pumps out much less hot air and puts less strain on the UPS. We’re planning to install a second XIV system at our Atlanta site. Space and power are severely constrained there, so the compact footprint and energy efficiency will be a major advantage.”

Following the success of the project, WAM has recently purchased a second XIV, which is installed at its San Antonio, TX, data center and used to support the operations of West Business Services (WBS)—a highly agile sales force optimization company that needs to be able to expand its IT environment rapidly to support new clients. WAM’s parent company, West Corporation, has also decided to invest in an XIV Storage System, which will support its Peoplesoft HRMS system. The San Antonio XIV has greatly improved the reliability of a dialer/IVR system, and has offered the business the ability to run real-time reporting.

Ealy concludes: “We’re convinced that IBM XIV is the future of storage at West Asset Management—it delivers a high-performance, highly resilient storage infrastructure that not only reduces total cost of ownership, but also enhances business agility through the ability to respond rapidly to changing business needs.”

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/xiv

For more information about Sirius Computer Solutions, visit: siriuscom.com

For more information about West Asset Management, visit: westassetmanagement.com