MSI Solution with Healthcare Provider Proves that Scaling Out, Not Scaling Up, Offers Best Flexibility & Lowest TCO

The Challenge

In today's IT arena, runaway growth often sends IT personnel reaching for a vertical, "scale-up" solution to feed the infrastructure. Bigger workloads call for bigger servers, right? But think about the long term for a moment. When you consider overall losses caused by downtime, complex management requirements, and inflexibility of these huge, expensive servers, many are realizing that a scale-up approach is no longer the answer.

"Unlike business partners we've had in the past, it was clear MSI wanted more than to simply sell products. It was a matter of what we needed and what would serve us well into the future." - UNIX Administrator

A healthcare system in Missouri found itself in the vertical trap recently before partnering with MSI Systems Integrators (MSI) to revamp its scale-up server environment to a scale-out infrastructure that is bringing greater flexibility at a much lower TCO. How is this possible? First let's take a look at the company's former system and the snags it was creating.

Over time they had deployed a number of IBM RS/6000® servers, each of which hosted a separate and distinct workload. This led to several challenges from a system support standpoint-specifically with the support and maintenance of all of the separate systems. Initially They added two IBM eServer® pSeries® 680s directly cabled to SSA disks. However, the enterprise's Cerner® software application was growing too rapidly, and found itself on a slippery slope trying to expand the solution upward to accommodate this growth.

Scaling up was not a cost-effective route for several reasons:

• Larger hardware meant higher acquisition and maintenance costs
• The multiple test environments impacted each other, significantly increasing downtime
• Disk expansion meant re-cabling all direct connects

This healthcare system is a large, multi-company provider of health care and insurance with approximately 9,000 employees and $900 million in annual revenue. In a corporation of this size, growth, and urgent nature of services, there is no room to entertain a large server-based system that takes down the entire enterprise or overtaxes management resources every time something goes wrong in one of its components. What They needed was a flexible scale-out infrastructure offering much more in the way of reliability, affordability and manageability.

MSI was summoned to help them refresh the server inventory, take advantage of reducing the number of servers to be managed, and provide a UNIX® environment offering flexible growth and low TCO without the need for additional staff. This could be done via multiple database and application nodes that could communicate with each other quickly and provide common access through high-speed disks. The scale-out infrastructure would also need to provide a common backup solution for all disks and offer plenty of room for continued growth.

The MSI Solution

MSI got to work in early 2005, replacing two large RS/6000 Model 80s with three highly flexible pSeries 570s as the platform for the customer's consolidated workloads. The p570s free up floor space and allow themto transition to micro-partitioning and VIO-a strategy that separates the system into multiple environments (logical partitions or LPARs) so that problems in one environment will be isolated and unable to cause problems in the others. The multiple environments also give Them the ability to shift resources among components such as CPU, memory, disk, etc. from one to another on demand.

In addition to the new LPARed p570s, MSI built a complete SAN Fabric for its AIX® environment utilizing:

• McDATA Fiber Director to zone for SAN traffic
• IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server® Models 2105-800 and 2107-922
• HMCs to remotely manage hardware and shift resources on demand
• Five p650 servers
• One p630 server
• IBM POWER4™ and POWER5™ microprocessors
• IBM Network Installation Management (NIM) to migrate among nodes
• SAN-attached IBM Tape Library 3584-L52 for performing common disk backups

MSI was involved in the solution from development through implementation of the new environment. The team facilitated whiteboard sessions to outline current state and future goals, and then developed a roadmap to move toward these goals utilizing the technology They already had on the floor.

After advising on technology in preliminary meetings, MSI presented quotes including IBM Passport Advantage® for maximum savings, conducted systems assurance, configured McDATA zoning services, configured nodes including LPAR, set up the HMCs and the NIM server, migrated from the old servers to the new ones, ran storage health checks, and arranged thorough technology transfer to the system administrators.

In terms of performance, how did MSI fare? The customer was quite pleased:

"Unlike business partners we've had in the past, it was clear MSI wanted more than to simply sell products," The UNIX Administrator said. "It was a matter of what we needed... what would serve us well into the future. All activities were performed professionally and to our satisfaction," she added.

The Benefits

The healthcare organization is already seeing significant savings in leasing and administrative costs over the old system. Growth is well under control and there is plenty of room for continued growth, without the need for additional staff to support it. Isolating the database and application components-yet establishing a high-speed communication link between all of them-ensures maximum availability and manageability of business-critical applications, 24x7, even from an administrator's home.

What is most impressive is the scalability of MSI's solution. Because of the p570's ability to spawn logical partitions as needed, the customer's IT team can modify the server environment to match its needs at any given point in time, enabling true on demand flexibility that was unthinkable with the scale-up environment.

The scale-out approach is the smartest move for any company looking to get a handle on growing workloads while cutting overall TCO. In a vertical scalability mindset, it can be quite tough to accomplish both. But MSI is making it easy through creativity, IBM inroads, and affordable scale-out strategies that just make more sense all around.

For additional information on how MSI Systems Integrators can help your organization, contact us at 800.640.4674 or visit our Web site at www.msiinet.com.