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IBM Case Study
BCBS Minnesota achieves a significant TCO reduction with virtualized Linux on IBM System z
Overview
■Challenge
The Microsoft Windows and Intel processor-based server landscape at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (BCBSM) was inflexible and costly to operate and maintain.
■Solution
IBM helped consolidate 140 HP Intel-architecture servers to a single IBM System z with six Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) engines. Key applications now run in SUSE Linux Enterprise virtual servers, while IBM DB2 databases run on z/OS on the same physical machine.
■Benefits
BCBSM expects to reduce TCO significantly over five years; energy-efficient server platform helps to achieve green computing objectives; virtualization cuts server provisioning times by
99 percent and provides enormous flexibility to meet emerging business objectives; full disaster recovery can be achieved within 90 minutes— 97 percent faster than before.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (BCBSM) is the largest health plan in the state, providing health coverage to more than 2 million members. With headquarters in Eagan, MN, and branch offices in Arrowhead and Rochester, BCBSM employs 3,800 people and operates as a not-for-profit, taxable organization: more than 90 percent of the premiums it receives are paid back out for health care claims.
To maintain this high ratio of payouts to premiums and provide the best possible value to its members, BCBSM puts continual downward pressure on its operational costs. In the IT department, this translates into a strategy of doing more with less—choosing the hardware and software that will drive business optimization while reducing acquisition, implementation, support and maintenance costs.
A new platform
“For several years, we had been running our IBM DB2® databases on the IBM System z® platform—but our applications servers, including those for SAP ERP, were running in a Microsoft® Windows® environment on Intel® processor-based hardware from HP,” explains Ted Mansk, Director of Infrastructure Engineering and Databases at BCBSM.
“From every perspective, running applications under Linux on System z makes sense for our organization. Performance, reliability, disaster recovery, server provisioning and cost efficiency have all seen dramatic
improvements—helping BCBSM deliver better service and better value to its members across the state.”
—Ted Mansk, Director of Infrastructure Engineering and Databases at BCBSM
“Since Microsoft releases patches for Windows about once a month, we needed to invest a sizeable amount of time to keep the operating systems current. This caused downtime for the business as well. We decided to investigate some other options and see if we could find a cost-effective solution that would avoid these issues.”
BCBSM evaluated various UNIX® options, and also looked at Linux® on the IBM System z mainframe platform.
“We did our due diligence and spoke to a lot of other companies about how they constructed their application server landscapes,” comments Ted Mansk. “The feedback we received was that Linux on System z was one of the most stable platforms imaginable: none of the references had ever experienced a serious outage. Our own experience of running DB2 on z/OS® on the System z platform bears this out—you don’t have to worry about it, it just works.”
Finding the most cost-effective option
BCBSM then performed a five-year TCO study to see if Linux on the System z platform could deliver comparable price-performance to a distributed Windows or UNIX-based server landscape.
“Even without factoring in the maintenance and support costs—which would be considerable for a large estate of physical servers—we found that running a virtualized Linux environment on System z would be somewhere between 30 and
50 percent less expensive than a distributed architecture,” says Ted Mansk. “Suddenly, the choice of infrastructure had become an easy decision.”
Pulling out all the stops
Working with IBM, BCBSM migrated around 140 application servers from the HP hardware onto six new Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors installed in its System z9® Enterprise Class mainframe. The IFLs have enabled the organization to decommission almost all of the old physical machines.
“We had to start the project after the annual financial close in December, and we needed to complete it within two months to avoid delaying a number of other strategic projects,” comments Ted Mansk. “IBM showed extraordinary dedication to help us complete the project within an extremely tight deadline. The project team worked seven-day weeks over the winter holiday season to get the job done.”
Advantages of virtualization
For BCBSM, running the application servers on virtual instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in partitions on the IFL processors delivers several advantages.
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