Pojišťovna IBC kryje zdravotní rizika u 3,4 milionu pojištěných, což si každým rokem vyžádá více než 32 milionů realizovaných pojistných plnění. Spolu s tím, jak společnost rostla, stávalo se její počítačové prostředí neúnosně těžkopádným a rovněž náklady na jeho udržení rostly nezadržitelným tempem. Nekontrolovatelné bujení serverů se projevilo také na účtech za elektřinu, které spolu s náklady na správu takového množství hardware přispěly k tomu, že IT rozpočty začaly silně narážet na svoje horní hranice. Aby tento trend zvrátila a získala nad svou IT infrastrukturou opět kontrolu, rozhodla se společnost IBC obrátit na VMware
Dále pokračuje zpráva v původním znění : “We needed a cost-effective solution that would manage server sprawl, and ensure we had a high-performance application environment that could handle our business as it grew,” said Michael Garber, director, distributed infrastructure, at Independence Blue Cross. “VMware met these needs. In fact, the performance of many of our Microsoft applications have actually improved since we started running them on the VMware platform. The product has paid for itself in less than 16 months and helped us avoid more than $1 million in hardware costs.”
IBC has virtualized approximately 70 percent of its Windows-based applications, including business-critical systems involving claims authorization and processing, billing, and member enrollments. Specific applications that have been virtualized include Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server as well as PeopleSoft and Oracle 9i.
“We now have 386 virtual machines running on 48 physical hosts,” said Garber. “We’ve increased our processor utilization from 5 percent to 75 percent, and we still have extra horsepower to add more virtual machines.”
VMware DRS and VMotion – unique VMware capabilities – aggregate hardware resources into logical resource pools and dynamically allocate them to applications that need them most. When a virtual machine experiences an increased load, VMware DRS automatically allocates additional resources by redistributing virtual machines among the physical servers in the resource pool. The live migration of virtual machines across the resource pools is executed by VMotion.
