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 IBM mainframe makes it possible
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Overview
Nissay IT Technology places System z at the hub of Japan's largest life insurance company. Results: More efficient processing, reduced costs and a platform for future business deployment. |
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Challenges
Nissay IT Technology is the strategic IT subsidiary of Nippon Life Insurance Company, which is the largest life insurance company in Japan. We design and develop information systems for Nippon Life Insurance and other group companies. We also maximize this know-how to deliver solutions for the insurance and financial industries. |
| The life insurance market in Japan became drastically competitive in recent years and even though Nippon Life insurance is the leading company, this situation does not allow them to be in a peaceful environment. |
| Nippon Life Insurance's issues were product development based on customer needs and diversification of sales channels. To address those issues, Nissay IT had to leverage system capability while reducing running costs as much as possible - meaning that we were required to overcome contradictory issues. |
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System z and the infrastructure fabric
Nippon Life Insurance has approximately 2,000 offices in Japan; approximately 60,000 sales people work out of them. We had a mid-term plan to renew their system to a Web technology-based system, because we needed to meet an increasing workload demand. As part of this renewal, we assumed that the per-second transaction volume would increase. So, from a capacity standpoint, we considered deploying the System z 990. |
| While considering an upgrade to the System z 990 and z/OS version 1.4, we found out we could reduce the running costs of the software by utilizing the Workload License Charge. And so we included this in our proposal to Nippon Life Insurance and they accepted. |
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System z flexibility
This time we implemented the Intelligent Resource Director (IRD). By optimizing the allocation of CPU and I/O automatically according to the workload, the IRD can change the weight level of the CPU in accordance with the scale of the batch transactions - between large in the daytime and small at night. In other words, we are utilizing the IRD so that it uses few resources to respond to many transactions. |
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Infrastructure simplification
The existing system at Nippon Life Insurance was operating a Coupling Facility Model (CF) on external hardware. But with the System z 990, we deployed an Internal Coupling Facility (ICF), therefore eliminating the need for the external CF, meaning reduced hardware costs. The ICF duplexing supports higher security and it contributes to cost reduction because we were able to remove the old hardware. |
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Application integration
On z/OS Version 1.4 we are running IMS Version 7, DB2 Version 6 and CICS TS 2.2. In particular, the DB2 is useful as a main database product, so we would like to utilize it in all sorts of ways. |
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Future business deployment
When it comes to using the cutting-edge features of the z990, we were the first in Japan to use the Intelligent Resource Director with the Workload Manager in this configuration, to create a cutting-edge system that improved our own image and implementation skills. |
| For the future, we would like to better utilize System z' hardware and software. Taking advantage of its open environment, we would like to be involved in new things such as Linux® on System z. |
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