LV 1871 cuts complexity and boosts performance

Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München (LV 1871) is a medium-sized mutual insurance company headquartered in Munich, Germany. LV 1871 specializes in life insurance, annuities and disability income benefits. Employing approximately 450 people and working with independent insurance brokers, in 2011 LV 1871 has annual premium incomes of about €736 million. Approximately 98 percent of the company’s business processes rely on IT systems, and the company has experienced a ten-year trend of 10 to 20 percent annual business growth.

Lack of flexibility
Despite an agile approach to application development, we always needed to buy servers and extend our storage systems before we could actually deploy new business applications, which meant planning weeks or even months in advance,” recalls Alexander Triebs, Project Manager IT Production and Services at Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München. “As applications and plans change, this meant that over time we ended up with an unoptimized set of IT resources: too much capacity in some places, and too little in others.”

LV 1871’s existing high-performance storage solution provided no support for storage tiering, the solution was inflexible, expensive and difficult to maintain.

To maintain its competitive edge, LV 1871 wanted to ensure the highest quality of service for its independent insurance brokers by launching new and innovative products and services quickly. To achieve this, the company needed to ensure faster time-to-market by improving the flexibility of its IT infrastructure.

Choosing virtualization
After migrating and consolidating its core insurance applications from a legacy environment to two IBM Power 770 servers running IBM AIX® and IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX and Windows, LV 1871 determined that IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller would be the best-fit solution with company’s strategic requirements.

“Storage virtualization gave our IT infrastructure the necessary flexibility to make growth easier to manage and simplify storage upgrades,” explains Triebs. “We thought that IBM storage virtualization technology was way ahead of the competition.”

Working with IBM and IBM Business Partner FRITZ & MACZIOL, LV 1871 implemented a SAN Volume Controller stretched cluster with integrated solid-state disks and an IBM System Storage DS8100 array, together with IBM System Storage DS5100 and IBM System Storage DS4800 disk systems. LV 1871 deployed 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel interfaces to achieve high I/O performance. This storage environment provides optimal support for the company’s agile application development processes. It also ensures high availability for production systems, and provides cost-efficient mirroring and data protection for all 70 TB of business data.

For increased flexibility, LV 1871 implemented IBM PowerVM and IBM Virtual I/O Server virtualization technologies to run 13 logical partitions on its IBM Power 770 servers. The company operates a comprehensive SAP ERP environment with a SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solution. LV 1871 also runs other core insurance applications developed in Cobol and Java on the IBM Power Systems™ servers.

For infrastructure services and desktop virtualization for its 120 application developers, the company deployed eight IBM System x® 3650 and one IBM System x3950 class servers, running Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems virtualized on VMware ESX Server.

“All our servers are configured without internal disks,” says Triebs. “Everything is stored on the virtualized space provided by the IBM storage infrastructure, and we can flexibly allocate and reallocate storage completely transparently while the servers are running.”

Boosting storage performance
IBM Power Systems with IBM PowerVM allow the dynamic allocation of processing resources to LV 1871’s business applications, and the virtualized storage infrastructure enables sophisticated storage tiering across different devices, so that higher-performance capacity can be reserved for the applications that really need it. Taking advantage of advanced virtualization features enabled LV 1871 to keep staff capacity constant while double number of logical Servers and increase CPU utilization to 60 to 80 percent.

“The performance of the IBM System Storage DS8100 is exceptional, and the advanced caching feature of IBM SAN Volume Controller has boosted our I/O performance across all storage systems,” says Triebs.

“By mirroring data from our enterprise storage to a midrange storage system, we reduced our costs significantly, without compromising on security or performance. These savings enabled us to fund our investment in IBM SAN Volume Controller technology.”

With its simplified storage infrastructure, LV 1871 can provision capacity at the touch of a button and in a matter of minutes. Triebs says, “With IBM SAN Volume Controller, we can scale our storage systems easily. The applications keep running in the background and can automatically make use of the extra capacity without any reconfiguration.”

Comprehensive solution
LV 1871 also deployed IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino® and IBM Content Collector for SAP Applications to reduce storage requirements and move rarely used data from its primary storage systems to its archive. The company has reduced backup times for offline backups by 70 percent. Furthermore, IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager enables LV 1871 to run online backups of its SAP applications and IBM Lotus Notes® and Domino systems, so that it no longer needs to stop these systems for daily backups.

“In total, we consolidated 120 physical servers to 13 IBM Power Systems and IBM System x servers and implemented a fully virtualized storage infrastructure,” says Triebs. “The IBM solution has doubled our computing performance and increased our storage capacity tenfold without increasing energy consumption. Thanks to the efficiency and scalability of the new solution, we’ve stopped the dramatic increase of our IT spend for storage, servers and manpower, and eliminated the need to build a new data center.”

Standardizing storage with IBM Storwize V7000 Unified Storage
Moving forward, LV 1871 plans to standardize its storage devices to IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified Storage systems. This will enable 24/7 operation for its midrange storage systems, eliminating application downtime and weekend shifts for the IT team. The Storwize storage devices allow mixing different disk types and speeds in one storage device, the company can use the same solution for different storage classes. LV 1871 also plans to replace its file servers with the integrated file network-attached storage features to reduce complexity and increase efficiency.