Barmer Ersatzkasse

Story Details

For almost 25 years, Barmer has used mainframe applications to perform processing operations. These applications recently approached their capacity limits and were also extremely expensive to maintain and adapt to changing needs. Considering these factors, it became clear that a change was required beginning with a transition of applications for the open systems environment. In addition, the datacenter staff was striving to reduce the time required to administer the environment.

The health insurance fund selected standard SAP modules for areas such as accounting, material management, inventory management, payroll, project management, funds management and treasury in the new environment. Barmer also chose a health insurance industry solution called oscare as its new insurance premium system.

The challenging aspects of the project were its complexity and a requirement to implement the new environment in just four months. In addition to several midrange servers, the project team selected Sun Fire E6900 with UltraSPARC IV+ processors and E20K with UltraSPARC IV processors as enterprise servers. Both the Solaris 10 Operating System and the Solaris 9 OS run in this environment.

In addition, the Sun N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions software automates the distribution, installation and administration of the SAP applications. Its standardized graphical Web interface enables virtualized applications to be controlled from every workstation. The cloning function allows rapid duplication of entire systems, a feature that dramatically improves flexibility, scalability and speeds the work of system administrators. Without this powerful functionality, significantly more hardware resources would have been required to complete the implementation.

A 50-terabyte Sun StorageTek 9980 system with the Sun StorageTek 9900 Software Suite and the Sun StorageTek L700e tape library with Sun StorageTek LTO 2 tape drives are the foundation of a storage area network (SAN). The Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage In-System Replication, HiCommand Device Manager, Sun StorageTek 9900 TrueCopy Replication and Resource Manager simplify the management of the entire storage environment.

With Sun Professional Services, including SAP migration services, data management services for the SAN and onsite engineering support for Solaris OS and SAP, the transition was completed in just four months. This included developing the overall architecture, specifying the new SAN infrastructure, provisioning components, incorporating Barmer’s existing core systems, implementing a backup and recovery solution, and migrating approximately 40 SAP systems to the new platform. Sun also drafted all of the documentation and trained Barmer employees on using the new systems. The project team, consisting of as many as 40 members during the peak time, was comprised of employees from both Barmer and Sun.

As a result of the new open systems architecture, this insurer has improved information workflows to serve customers more efficiently. The company has streamlined the system environment so that tasks are completed much more quickly. For example, implementing changes takes significantly less time and repetitive tasks in the datacenter are now automated.