LV 1871 cuts complexity and boosts performance with advanced storage and server virtualization from IBM. IBM's smarter approach to storage - http://ibm.co/WivIFU.

1. IBM Systems and Technology Insurance
Case Study
LV 1871 cuts complexity
and boosts performance
With advanced storage and server virtualization
from IBM
Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München (LV 1871) is a medium-
Overview sized mutual insurance company headquartered in Munich, Germany.
LV 1871 specializes in life insurance, annuities and disability income
The need
benefits. Employing approximately 450 people and working with
To maintain its competitive edge,
LV 1871 wanted to improve its ability to independent insurance brokers, in 2011 LV 1871 has annual premium
develop new services rapidly and at low incomes of about €736 million. Approximately 98 percent of the compa-
cost. The insurer also wanted greater ny’s business processes rely on IT systems, and the company has experi-
flexibility in data storage.
enced a ten-year trend of 10 to 20 percent annual business growth.
The solution
LV 1871 deployed IBM System Storage® Lack of flexibility
SAN Volume Controller and IBM System
Despite an agile approach to application development, we always needed
Storage disk arrays. The company
implemented IBM PowerVM® and to buy servers and extend our storage systems before we could actually
IBM VIOS virtualization technologies deploy new business applications, which meant planning weeks or even
to run 13 logical partitions on its months in advance,” recalls Alexander Triebs, Project Manager IT
IBM Power® 770 servers.
Production and Services at Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München.
The benefit “As applications and plans change, this meant that over time we ended up
Increased storage capacity by a factor with an unoptimized set of IT resources: too much capacity in some
of ten without increasing energy places, and too little in others.”
consumption; highly flexible virtualized
storage infrastructure provides optimal
support for agile software development; LV 1871’s existing high-performance storage solution provided no
increased CPU utilization to 60 - 80 per- support for storage tiering, the solution was inflexible, expensive and
cent with advanced virtualization.
difficult to maintain.
To maintain its competitive edge, LV 1871 wanted to ensure the highest
quality of service for its independent insurance brokers by launching
new and innovative products and services quickly. To achieve this, the
company needed to ensure faster time-to-market by improving the
flexibility of its IT infrastructure.

2. IBM Systems and Technology Insurance
Case Study
Choosing virtualization
After migrating and consolidating its core insurance applications from a
“The IBM solution has legacy environment to two IBM Power 770 servers running IBM AIX®
doubled our computing and IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX and Windows, LV 1871 determined
performance and that IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller would be the best-fit
solution with company’s strategic requirements.
increased our storage
capacity tenfold without “Storage virtualization gave our IT infrastructure the necessary flexibility
to make growth easier to manage and simplify storage upgrades,” explains
increasing energy Triebs. “We thought that IBM storage virtualization technology was way
consumption. Thanks ahead of the competition.”
to the efficiency and
Working with IBM and IBM Business Partner FRITZ & MACZIOL,
scalability of the new LV 1871 implemented a SAN Volume Controller stretched cluster with
solution, we’ve stopped integrated solid-state disks and an IBM System Storage DS8100 array,
the dramatic increase of together with IBM System Storage DS5100 and IBM System Storage
DS4800 disk systems. LV 1871 deployed 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel interfaces
our IT spend for storage, to achieve high I/O performance. This storage environment provides
servers and manpower, optimal support for the company’s agile application development pro-
cesses. It also ensures high availability for production systems, and
and eliminated the provides cost-efficient mirroring and data protection for all 70 TB of
need to build a new business data.
data center.”
For increased flexibility, LV 1871 implemented IBM PowerVM and
IBM Virtual I/O Server virtualization technologies to run 13 logical
—Alexander Triebs, Project Manager
partitions on its IBM Power 770 servers. The company operates a com-
IT Production and Services,
Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München prehensive SAP ERP environment with a SAP BusinessObjects business
intelligence solution. LV 1871 also runs other core insurance applications
developed in Cobol and Java on the IBM Power Systems™ servers.
For infrastructure services and desktop virtualization for its 120 applica-
tion developers, the company deployed eight IBM System x® 3650 and
one IBM System x3950 class servers, running Microsoft Windows and
Linux operating systems virtualized on VMware ESX Server.
“All our servers are configured without internal disks,” says Triebs.
“Everything is stored on the virtualized space provided by the IBM stor-
age infrastructure, and we can flexibly allocate and reallocate storage
completely transparently while the servers are running.”
2

3. IBM Systems and Technology Insurance
Case Study
Boosting storage performance
Solution components IBM Power Systems with IBM PowerVM allow the dynamic allocation
of processing resources to LV 1871’s business applications, and the virtu-
Hardware
alized storage infrastructure enables sophisticated storage tiering across
●●
IBM Power® 770
●●
IBM System Storage® DS8100
different devices, so that higher-performance capacity can be reserved
●●
IBM System Storage DS5100 for the applications that really need it. Taking advantage of advanced
●●
IBM System Storage DS4800 virtualization features enabled LV 1871 to keep staff capacity constant
IBM System x® 3650 class server
while double number of logical Servers and increase CPU utilization to
●●
●●
IBM System x3950
●●
IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified Storage 60 to 80 percent.
Software
“The performance of the IBM System Storage DS8100 is exceptional,
IBM System Storage SAN Volume
and the advanced caching feature of IBM SAN Volume Controller has
●●
Controller
●●
IBM PowerVM® boosted our I/O performance across all storage systems,” says Triebs.
●●
IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail
“By mirroring data from our enterprise storage to a midrange storage
●●
●●
IBM Lotus Notes® and Domino®
●●
IBM Content Collector for SAP system, we reduced our costs significantly, without compromising on
Applications security or performance. These savings enabled us to fund our investment
●●
IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino in IBM SAN Volume Controller technology.”
●●
IBM AIX®
●●
IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX and
Windows With its simplified storage infrastructure, LV 1871 can provision capacity
at the touch of a button and in a matter of minutes. Triebs says, “With
IBM Business Partner
IBM SAN Volume Controller, we can scale our storage systems easily.
●●
FRITZ & MACZIOL Software und
Computervertrieb GmbH The applications keep running in the background and can automatically
make use of the extra capacity without any reconfiguration.”
Comprehensive solution
LV 1871 also deployed IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino® and
IBM Content Collector for SAP Applications to reduce storage require-
ments and move rarely used data from its primary storage systems to its
archive. The company has reduced backup times for offline backups by
70 percent. Furthermore, IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager enables
LV 1871 to run online backups of its SAP applications and IBM Lotus
Notes® and Domino systems, so that it no longer needs to stop these
systems for daily backups.
“In total, we consolidated 120 physical servers to 13 IBM Power Systems
and IBM System x servers and implemented a fully virtualized storage
infrastructure,” says Triebs. “The IBM solution has doubled our comput-
ing performance and increased our storage capacity tenfold without
increasing energy consumption. Thanks to the efficiency and scalability
of the new solution, we’ve stopped the dramatic increase of our IT spend
for storage, servers and manpower, and eliminated the need to build a
new data center.”
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4. Standardizing storage with IBM Storwize V7000
Unified Storage
Moving forward, LV 1871 plans to standardize its storage devices to
IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified Storage systems. This will enable
24/7 operation for its midrange storage systems, eliminating application
downtime and weekend shifts for the IT team. The Storwize storage
devices allow mixing different disk types and speeds in one storage device,
the company can use the same solution for different storage classes.
LV 1871 also plans to replace its file servers with the integrated file
network-attached storage features to reduce complexity and increase
efficiency.
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit
us at: ibm.com/storage
For more information on LV 1871, visit: http://www.lv1871.de
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