Israel’s Leading HMO Gets “Mainframe-Class” Performance and Reliability While Cutting TCO by 67 Percent

Published: April 2003

Clalit Health Services Group, Israel’s largest health maintenance organization, put a strategic emphasis on customer service—which required healthcare providers and executives to make faster and better decisions affecting customers. But Clalit’s database infrastructure, based on Sun Solaris and Informix, was expensive and difficult to update and maintain. Clalit turned to the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition, 64-bit, running on Unisys ES7000 servers. The result delivers “mainframe-class” performance and reliability while reducing total cost of ownership by 67 percent. Clalit now contemplates replacing its mainframe and 1,400 clinic servers with the Windows-based solution, as well.

Situation

Clalit Health Services Group is the largest health maintenance organization in Israel and the second largest worldwide. Established 90 years ago, it now serves 3.7 million insured members with 14 hospitals and 1,400 clinics and pharmacies. Its 25,000 workstations and 2,200 servers are interlinked with more than 1,000 wide area network lines and 200 satellite links. Two S/390 mainframes handle the central registry and financial management resources. Database support for customer records—including all data pertaining to hospitalization, lab tests, medicine/drug use history, prescription statistics, and demographics—was beingmanagedthroughSun Solaris (UNIX) Enterprise 10000 and 6000 servers running IBM Informix database software.

Four years ago, Clalit adopted a strategic focus to regard its patients as customers—that is, as consumers who had choices in healthcare and whose loyalty had to be earned. Part of that strategic focus required giving managers and healthcare professionals in the widely decentralized enterprise more and better information, so they could make business and customer care decisions more quickly. Clalit wanted a single, comprehensive database environment to which all users could connect from anywhere in the enterprise.

But Clalit was findingthe UNIX based Informixsoftware increasingly costly and obsolete. With few companies using or supporting it, Clalit found it difficult and expensive to train its staff on the software and to implement the frequent updates to business objects that it required. Beyond the U.S.$300,000 licensing costs for the software, Clalit needed a staff of 10—at the cost of another $650,000—just to maintain it.

“For the sake of our customers, our endusers, and our IT budget, it was time to move to a better and more cost-effective solution,” says Mr. Yechiel Gepner, Chief Information Officer at Clalit. “We considered Linux but rejected it because we did not see it providing the security we needed nor would it enable us to draw on a large, cost-effective universe of third-party tools and expertise.”

Solution

Clalit Health Services is moving to the 64-bit version of Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 DatacenterEdition and SQL ServerTM 2000 Enterprise Edition, 64-bit, running on Unisys ES7000 servers. “We wanted a mainframe-class solution with the openness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of Windows software running on Intel processors,” says Mr. Gepner. “That’s why we chose Windows Server 2003 DatacenterEdition and the Unisys ES7000.”

Clalit is implementing the solution in stages. The first stage was to move its Unisys and ProClarity business intelligence solution to Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 on an ES7000, taking advantage of the Analysis (OLAP) Services integrated into SQL Server. This portion of the solution runs on an 8processor ES7000 server, delivering performance that Mr. Gepner says Clalit didn’t see on a 32processor Sun e10000 server running Informix.

The first stage of the migration introduced Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server Analysis Services into the UNIX/Informix environment, boosting responsiveness to users.

With Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 deployed successfully on the front end of the solution, Clalit was ready to migrate from the Sun/Informix solution on the data warehouse side. This portion of the environment includes three key components:

  • ETL/staging computer.The extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) functionality extracts data from operational systems and loads to flat files, transforms the data for the data warehouse (including data cleansing), and loads the data into the data warehouse. For ETL and staging, Clalit is deploying the 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003on a 16-processor ES7000 with 16 gigabytes (GB)of RAM in two equally sized partitions, replacing a Sun e6000 server running Informix.
  • Data warehouse.The data warehouse runs on an eight-processor ES7000 with 32 GB of RAM and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003and SQL Server 2000, replacing a Sun e10000 serverwith 24 CPUs, running Informix. The total storage of the production environment, including both the ETL/staging and data warehouse computers, is 1.25 terabytes, including 750GB on the database.
  • Development computer. The development system runs on a 16-processor ES7000 with 8GB of RAM and two equally sized partitions, with the 32-bit edition of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000.

The full solution derives greater benefit from Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 by deploying the software in the staging and data warehouse components of the solution.

Clalit implemented the new data infrastructure with the assistance of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and the Windows Datacenter Program, which provides an array of services designed to expedite the deployment of Windows Server Datacenter Edition–basedsolutions. MCS consultants designed and monitored the project, implementing it together with consultants from Unisys and local solution provider Ness.

“This was a very complicated project, but it was implemented flawlessly thanks to our MCS consultants and the Windows Datacenter Program,” says Mr. Gepner. “Microsoft took full responsibility and worked seamlessly with our other vendors. We’re on the other side of the world, but we had immediate access to Microsoft experts in Redmond when we needed it. We received outstanding support.”

Benefits

“Mainframe-Class” Performance and Reliability

Clalit wanted mainframe-class performance and reliability with its new solution. Mr. Gepner says that’s what they are getting, with performance increases of up to 25 percent over the UNIX/Informix solution, thanks to the ability of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition to fully exploit the massive memory and multiprocessing hardware of the Unisys ES7000 server.

For example, the new solution’s support for 64-bit processing delivers far higher scalability than 32-bit file servers by providing:

  • A greatly enlarged virtual address space and paged pool area.
  • The ability to handle increased numbers of users and connections.
  • Increased hardware reliability through predictive error checking and notification of failures.

In addition, the software’s support for 64-way symmetric multiprocessing makes it possible for Microsoft SQL Server to use large numbers of processors when additional processing power is required.

Thanks to the features in Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, and the Unisys ES7000, queries that used to take up to 30 minutes are now being handled in seconds—enabling healthcare professionals throughout the Clalit system to get the answers they need in real time to address customer needs and concerns.

And with this performance comes mainframe-class reliability.“I have news for people who think Windows is unreliable for the data center,” says Mr. Gepner. “Windows Server 2003Datacenter Edition and SQL Server have proven they can contain very large amounts of data and perform satisfactorily to our mission-critical requirements. The solution is very stable; we simply have no data access problems.”

Total Cost of Ownership Cut 67 Percent

The former Sun/Informix solution cost Clalit almost $1 million a year in licensing and support costs. The Windows-based and Unisys ES7000 solution cuts those costs by 67 percent. Clalit is able to redeploy fully 50 percent of the technical staff it needed to support the old solution, thanks to powerful and easy-to-use tools in Windows—such as the Microsoft Management Console—and the Unisys management toolkit. Clalit is able to implement this solution leveraging the existing knowledge base of its system and database administrators, without having to add personnel or incur significant training costs.

“With Windows Server 2003, we gain both the power and reliability we need, as well as the cost-effectiveness,” says Mr. Gepner. “We don’t have the tremendous maintenance costs we saw with our UNIX based solution. Training is simple because we already have Windows expertise in-house. So we are talking about converting our IBM mainframe systems to Windows and SQL Server on Unisys. We are talking about removing the servers in all of our 1,300 clinics and replacing them with this solution. Most importantly, this will be the unifying infrastructure for our company moving forward, enabling us to see similar savings throughout Clalit.”

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 helps you to create a highly productive platform for powering connected applications, networks, and Web services. Windows Server 2003:

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  • Makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and use
  • Empowers you with a complete server platform to quickly build connected solutions
  • Enables you to maximize business value by leveraging the largest partner solution ecosystem

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