MADISON, WI - 14 Mar 2002: Wisconsin Physicians Service Insurance Corporation (also known as WPS Health Insurance), a non-profit insurance company and one of the largest Medicare carriers in the nation, has selected IBM to consolidate its growing data storage environment, resulting in improved performance and a 40 percent hardware cost saving.
WPS Health Insurance chose IBM to design and implement an integrated computing infrastructure consisting of an IBM eServer z900, an 11.6 terabyte IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (code named "Shark") and an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Tape System capable of storing up to 200 terabytes (TB) of data.
The IBM technology enables WPS Health Insurance to more efficiently manage healthcare claims, which have grown in four years from $800 million to almost $6 billion paid. "We are processing 350,000 claims daily - that's 12 per second. We need a technology supplier that can provide 24x7 support, along with a technology infrastructure solution that will grow with us," said Randy Lengyel, senior vice president of Management Information Systems at WPS Health Insurance.
"Being a non-profit company, total cost of ownership is also a real concern and after investigating solutions from Sun and HP, we quickly realized that IBM was the only company capable of delivering on all our requirements. With IBM as our technology supplier, we have more storage capacity and faster backup speeds at 40 percent of the cost of the previous HDS solution," Lengyel said.
The IBM tape library provides WPS Health Insurance with 12 times more storage capacity and scalability than its previous tape environment, which required six hours and 430 tape cartridges during a weekly backup of the company's mainframe data. Centralized storage management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software and the Enterprise Storage Server has also greatly reduced maintenance loads. As a result, WPS can now backup both its mainframe and open system servers in less than two hours using 30 tape cartridges.
The IBM tape library provides 20 backup drives for the z900 mainframe, six drives for IBM TotalStorage Virtual Tape Server storage and six fibre-attached drives for IBM TSM running on an IBM RS/6000 server, which manages WPS' entire open system, Linux and Windows NT computing environments. The Enterprise Storage Server is connected to the mainframe via 16 ESCON channels.
With the storage systems integration managed by IBM Global Services, which provided project planning and implementation, as well as training, the WPS disk storage conversion took less than one month and the tape conversion less than two months.
Contact(s) information
Chris Andrews
IBM Media Relations
(914) 766-3722
candrews@us.ibm.com
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