HCL ensures future success

HCL is the fourth-largest Indian business processing outsourcing (BPO) company. With a 34-year history, 64,000 employees and operations in 27 countries, HCL is a trusted BPO partner for dozens of major global businesses. Its Insurance Business Services (HCL IBS) division in Croydon, UK, has more than 21 years of industry experience and boasts several of the world's best-known insurance companies as its clients.

HCL IBS wanted to significantly increase the capacity and performance of the platform running its core life insurance management software: a self-developed UNIX-based application called ALPS. ALPS was running on end-of-life hardware, and remaining with the existing vendor would have required HCL IBS to move to a completely new architecture based on the Intel® Itanium® processor. With no simple upgrade option available, the company took the opportunity to look at alternative architectures, and identified the IBM POWER7 processor as the best platform for its growing business.

“We were facing continued growth in the volumes on the ALPS application, and we knew that would cause significant performance problems on the existing platform,” says Simon Barber, Lead Unix Administrator, HCL IBS. “Facing a major re-write even if we stayed with the current vendor, we looked at other options, and determined that the IBM POWER7 processor would offer much better price-performance than an Intel Itanium-based option.”

Proving the point
To prove the benefits of migrating to IBM Power Systems™ servers, IBM invited HCL IBS to its Hursley laboratories to port the ALPS application to IBM AIX® and run performance and capacity tests. Using a system configuration generated by IBM, HCL IBS went to tender for the new solution, and chose to work with IBM Premier Business Partner Northdoor.

“Northdoor made the strongest offer, both commercially and in terms of the support they could offer,” says Barber. “We had worked with them before on our IBM Informix® databases, and their consultants had built up a good understanding of our software stack. We had a strong and open relationship, and that was also an important factor in terms of minimizing risk. Northdoor had experience of delivering similar solutions based on IBM Power Systems and the IBM XIV Storage System within the insurance industry, which gave us further confidence.”

Northdoor helped HCL IBS to deploy and configure two new IBM Power 770 servers, each of which has eight active POWER7 processors, and a further eight that can be activated and deactivated as required to deal with peak workload. HCL IBS will later use IBM PowerHA® to cluster the two Power 770 servers.

“The ability to activate additional processors on demand, paying for them only as we use them, will be a major benefit as our business grows,” says Barber. “And for month-end processing, we'll be able to run the processing on temporarily activated CPUs, thereby avoiding disruption or loss of performance in our production environment. For our clients, this will mean excellent performance at all times.”

Rapid migration
For data storage for the new ALPS platform, HCL IBS was also considering a new solution from its previous vendor. When IBM proposed its XIV solution, HCL IBS realized that it offered the required performance and availability but at much lower cost. Simon Barber comments: “We saw that the solution's huge high-speed cache makes disk I/O more like a background activity, and we realized that XIV could deliver the performance we needed.”

IBM invited HCL IBS to one of its UK laboratories to test the XIV solution. This testing showed that it would significantly accelerate a number of operations and enable faster migrations when HCL IBS wins new clients. HCL IBS has implemented a single XIV system with 54 TB, and plans to add a second so that the Power 770 cluster will have mirrored storage.

“Migrating a new client to our system would previously have required a two- or three-hour backup after each stage—this is our standard practice to give us a safety net,” says Barber. “The built-in snapshot capability on XIV will bring that inter-stage backup down to a matter of seconds, so we'll be able to save up to nine hours overall when migrating new clients.” With further enhancements, HCL IBS expects to reduce the predicted time to complete migrations, enabling them to take place over a single weekend, minimizing potential disruption.

The IBM Power 770 servers and the IBM XIV system are much more compact and efficient than the technology they are replacing: the new environment fits in two data center racks instead of the 12 previously required, and consumes far less electrical energy.

Hit the ground running
HCL IBS expects the XIV system to provide major increases in speed while also minimizing administration. “We received some consultancy days from IBM as part of investing in the XIV solution, but we've only used a couple so far,” says Barber. “The XIV system is extremely straightforward to use. The performance is also highly impressive. It used to take about 12 hours to load our current largest database, but with the XIV system we've successfully cut this down to 5.75 hours. We also ran four database loads on separate LPARs in parallel, all completing in under six hours. Our teams in India start work at 04:00 am London time, so this ability to load data faster means that overnight maintenance is less likely to impact on the new working day. More productivity means better service and, ultimately, greater profitability.”

HCL IBS is now continuing to move client environments to the new Power 770 and XIV system landscape.

“Running our core application on POWER7 will give us far more performance and reliability than before,” says Barber. “In some cases, we've seen more than four times the previous performance: one batch job came down from 15 hours to just 3.5 hours. Working with IBM and Northdoor has given us a robust, high-performance platform that helps us continue to deliver an excellent quality of service.”