Cegedim Activ reduces internal costs and boosts service levels

To read a French version of this case study, click here.

Cegedim Activ provides software and managed solutions to health insurers throughout France. The company employs 500 people across nine sites, serving 200 clients with a total of 30 million insured customers. In addition to selling and servicing enterprise applications for health insurance providers, Cegedim Activ offers integration services, application hosting services and software-as-a-service solutions to its clients.

As its existing storage technologies approached end-of-life, the total cost of ownership was growing. Increasingly frequent issues with both hardware and software required Cegedim Activ to commit multiple technicians to fixing problems, and there was also a risk to the company’s ability to maintain its service-level agreements (SLAs). Cegedim Activ operates in a highly competitive sector, and its clients demand both keen pricing and exceptional service.

“To ensure that we could continue to adhere to our SLAs, and to keep our operational costs down, we needed a new storage solution that would offer higher performance and greater ease of management,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo, Systems and Storage Infrastructure Engineer at Cegedim Activ.

High availability as standard
The core health insurance management systems at Cegedim Activ run primarily on IBM Power Systems™ servers on IBM AIX® and Linux, with Oracle database servers and a variety of web application servers including Oracle WebLogic and Apache Tomcat. As these systems support live production environments for major health insurers throughout France, round-the-clock resilience and availability are crucial.

“We guarantee 99.8 percent application availability to our clients,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “In the storage environment, a critical factor is the overnight batch performance: if we fail to complete batch runs by the 7am deadline, there are financial penalties in our contracts. Performance and reliability were therefore important factors in our choice of solution.”

Based on its key selection criteria — including ease of management, flexibility and performance ­— Cegedim Activ selected the IBM Storwize V7000 virtualized storage system as its new strategic platform for data storage.

“Compared to the alternative option we considered from EMC, the IBM Storwize V7000 offered all the functionality we needed as standard features rather than as additional extras,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “Equally, the internal clustering concept helps us to achieve extremely high availability, which is great news for our clients.”

Fast and easy migration
Working with IBM and IBM Business Partner SCC, Cegedim Activ has deployed two IBM Storwize V7000 Unified systems, the first with 80 TB and the second with 50 TB capacity. In addition to putting new applications onto the V7000 systems, Cegedim Activ is steadily migrating applications from its older storage systems. The company will continue to run the older systems while they remain in warranty.

“Our strategy is to depreciate our investment in the older systems as we build up the V7000 environment,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “Migrating data is fast and easy, whether between different pools of storage in the same array, or between the arrays. It’s also transparent to the operating system, so we no longer need to stop applications in order to migrate data.”

Price-performance gains
The V7000 solution includes IBM System Storage Easy Tier® software, which can automatically migrate data up and down the three virtual tiers of storage created by Cegedim Activ. The V7000 itself contains two different kinds of disks: solid-state drives (SSDs) and SAS disks.

The top virtual tier, designed for production landscapes with the highest performance and availability demands, features SSDs and 300 GB SAS disks. The middle virtual tier has 450 GB and 600 GB SAS disks and is used for less demanding applications and for pre-production and development environments. The lower virtual tier, which uses 2 TB SATA disks, is used for functions such as file storage.

“The Storwize V7000 provides data tiering, storage virtualization, thin-provisioning, NAS capabilities and built-in clustering for resilience, all at no extra cost,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “Easy Tier allows us to align the cost of data storage with the business value of the data much more accurately and easily than before. This allows us better control over our costs and helps us offer very competitive pricing.”

Taking into account capital costs, maintenance and energy consumption, the top tier of V7000 storage costs Cegedim Activ approximately 20 percent less per GB per year than the equivalent storage on its older systems. It also offers significantly better performance, thanks in to part to high-speed SSDs and the 32 GB of cache in each V7000.

For one system migrated to the V7000 environment, Cegedim Activ has seen a 240 percent improvement in Oracle response times. The company has also achieved an increase of more than 30 percent in batch processing speed for systems residing on the top tier of the V7000 systems versus its previous top-end storage.

New flexibility
Cegedim Activ is building up its data centers based on the cloud model, in which all IT resources are fully virtualized and can be seamlessly orchestrated to meet new requirements. At the server level, the company has embraced IBM PowerVM® virtualization with Live Partition Mobility for its Power Systems servers and VMware virtualization for its x86 servers. In parallel, the new V7000 systems provide full virtualization of the data storage resources, enabling extreme flexibility and speed in addressing new requirements.

“We can now dynamically provision new storage volumes, and the built-in thin-provisioning capabilities of the Storwize V7000 allow us to conserve disk space,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “We can allocate the requested capacity to an internal team or a client, but continue to use it for other purposes until they actually need it.”

Simply better
In addition to providing the performance and availability needed to exceed the SLAs, the V7000 solution is helping Cegedim Activ to cut its operational costs through simplified management. “The Storwize V7000 has a very user-friendly and intuitive GUI [graphical user interface],” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “For most tasks - even relatively advanced operations — we can use the GUI rather than the command line, which makes it much simpler to manage storage than with our older disk arrays.”

By using the V7000 software to manage its older arrays too, Cegedim Activ will be able to harmonize its storage management process and focus it on a single tool, versus the multiple tools previously used. “With a single approach to storage management, both our training costs and our daily operational costs can be reduced,” says Jean-Marc Piccolo. “It’s also faster and easier to resolve issues, so as we extend the V7000 environment, our clients should experience higher service levels and higher end-to-end availability.”