DBV-Winterthur Versicherungen
Major German Insurance Group Consolidates Server Infrastructure and Reduces Costs with Sun TechnologyDBV-Winterthur is a leading insurance group based in Germany, where it has been in business for more than 130 years. The group has approximately 3.6 million policy holders and 4,475 employees. DBV-Winterthur is part of the Swiss Winterthur Group and the international Credit Suisse Group. Customer Challenges
SolutionDBV-Winterthur migrated its mainframe applications to a scalable, open systems infrastructure based on Sun technology. Business Results
Story DetailsDBV-Winterthur previously ran its business-critical applications on mainframes. Today, however, the insurance group has ushered in a new IT era by migrating critical applications to mid-range Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The results, to date, include increased productivity and flexibility with significantly lower costs. The trigger for the migration was the replacement of the group's accounting applications with SAP Collections & Disbursements (SAP FS-CD) software. DBV standardized on the SAP accounting applications in order to comply with new international invoicing requirements. The IT team also chose to launch the new application on open systems servers in order to utilize hardware capacity more efficiently and gain flexibility for deploying and executing applications to meet demand. In addition, the group decided to migrate its data warehouse and data mart applications off of mainframes. The search was on for a highly flexible system to support these critical applications.
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By converting to Solaris 10, we are achieving cost savings of almost 25 percent in the operation of our UNIX infrastructure.
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— Stephan Horn, Head of UNIX Server and Storage Systems, DBV-Winterthur Versicherungen AG
To meet these requirements, the UNIX team within the DBV IT organization chose Sun Fire V490 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The servers each have four dual-core UltraSPARC IV processors and 32 Gigabytes of RAM. Key factors in the choice of new servers and operating system included high performance and low licensing costs. In addition, the Containers technology in Solaris 10 enabled DBV to set up virtual servers in order to improve hardware utilization and operational efficiency. Goals for the new system included significantly higher system availability and shorter start-up times for provisioning and rebooting, along with a significant increase in operational efficiency and related cost savings. After the changeover, the server load increased from below 30 percent to 70 percent. DBV has already deployed 30 operating system environments on two Sun Fire V490 servers. The systems are still far from being used to full capacity. Indeed, they still offer enough space for the use of other applications. The conversion to Solaris 10 was performed without disruption to the company’s day-to-day operations and took just over six months. Staff from Sun Professional Services played a supporting role in sizing the system. Sun training for DBV's system integrators in the new operating system took five days, while application integrators were taught the necessary skills within just two days. |
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