Case: How to 0 cost upgrade data center

Highmark is a health insurance provider that provides health insurance to 4.6 million Pennsylvania State residents, mainly through a welfare program guaranteed by the employer. The company is taking a big risk when pricing its premiums, because if the price is too high, customers may switch to other low-cost competitors, but if prices are too low, the company's revenues will be lost.

The actuarial department of the hippocampus is responsible for pricing trade-offs. Actuaries analyze emerging health insurance claims and provide pricing advice based on forecasts of future trends. For example, if actuaries find an upward trend in claims for computed tomography, they may recommend that companies adjust premiums to cover these costs. Of course, predictions can't be all right, just as we sometimes hear the weather forecast say it's sunny and the rain gets drenched. If the actuary misjudged, the company would face the same dilemma: if the actuary ignored the 1% trend change, it could lead to millions of of dollars in losses.

The 12.4 billion-dollar annual income of the hippocampus believes that if actuaries have more timely and richer data, the accuracy of their predictions will be improved. As a result, the actuarial and IT departments work closely together to create an actuarial trend system (actuarial Trend System,ats) based on an enterprise-wide data Warehouse, using the technology of the Teradata Information Company (Intel). The Data Warehouse stores information on policyholders and medical and pharmaceutical claims from physicians, pharmacies and hospitals. These claim data are derived from a variety of application and database platforms.

The use of data warehouses has two main benefits: first, the claim data can be used more quickly, and secondly, the time that actuaries use to collect data will be significantly reduced. Every day, the hippocampus claims processing system can automatically append new data to the Data warehouse. Chief Information Officer (CIO) Tom Tabor Tom Tabor said: "The claim system can automatically approve or reject a considerable portion of the claim, thereby minimizing errors and expediting the payment process." "claims that the system cannot automatically judge are left to the adjusters for manual processing," he said.

As more and more claims can be processed by the system ahead of time, the actuaries have more new data available at their fingertips. In the old system, actuaries had to wait for all claims to be artificially processed before they could start analyzing claim data, so they tended to lag behind two or 2.5 months of data, leaving the firm with a limited amount of time to find trends and respond. The Data Warehouse also standardizes data in various formats, incorporating information into the same framework to facilitate analysis by actuaries. Prior to the birth of the Data warehouse, actuaries had to write their own database query statements and collect data from several different traditional databases for analysis. As there are up to 1.6 billion records in the database, actuaries spend up to 10 working days on data collection.

Dave Berry, the actuarial director of David Berry, said: "When we used the old system, we couldn't query all the data at once because of the amount of information, so we had to extract the data in batches." Now I ask the system a question and I can get the answer in a day or two. He said that as actuaries were able to use new data more quickly, they could find the latest trends earlier. It also means that actuaries can spend more time analyzing, which is their job, Tabor said. The company estimates that the actuarial trend system will not only increase the accuracy of the forecast, but also save the company 200,000 of dollars a year because actuaries do not have to write their own database queries to collect data.

In the beginning, the hippocampus of the IT and actuarial team are aware of the urgent need to develop ATS, but because the two departments of professional different, communication is always some're same page taste, so the communication on ATS encountered difficulties. "It's really hard to understand the needs of actuaries and turn them into the information that IT staff needs," says Dell Gilly Del Gealy, head of financial systems. ”

In view of this, the actuarial department has organized an important team internally-the actuarial infrastructure Support Group (actuarial infrastructure Support Group), which serves as a link between the two departments. This group of business analysts knows a lot about it and actuarial, enough to help one department communicate needs accurately to another department. "With their help, I can talk about actuaries in the jargon without having to talk about relational databases," Berry said. ”

Green IT

In addition to the ATS program, the company is also committed to cutting data center energy consumption. The company's data center meets the environmental standards set by the "Energy Environmental Design Indicators" (Leadership and environmental design,leed) to obtain "silver" level certification. When the data center was finished, the company immediately began looking for other ways to make it business greener. Mark Wood, the infrastructure director, has targeted the target to cut power consumption.

It's an environmental project that keeps everyone in high spirits and promotes good public relations, but it's clear that there are business drivers behind these measures. Tabor said the company initially sought LEED certification for the purpose of attracting more government business. In addition, there are operational cost factors. Public companies that supply electricity to data centers are now charging fairly well, but the price will expire in 2010, when the cost of electricity will rise by as much as 40%. This number makes people have to pay attention to the problem of energy consumption.

Wood's first priority is to measure the actual energy consumption of the data center. The IT team found that data centers consume up to 462-kilowatt per month. Based on this data, wood cut the energy consumption target to 10%.

He starts with the easiest cuts, eliminating retired hardware that is idle but still consumes power. This equipment IT team has eliminated about 20 units altogether. The second is to speed up the process of virtualization. The company uses VMware to run Windows and Linux applications, while also running Ibm/linux applications on IBM's system z platform. In 2007, the company created server virtual instance on underutilized servers, thereby streamlining 100 physical servers. By the end of this year, 80 more servers are about to be virtualized, which means fewer machines are consuming power and cooling supplies.

Wood's energy-saving plan has been an initial success. Today's energy consumption is about 418-kilowatt per month. Such energy cuts are not just a triumph for the environment: The data Center's annual energy bill has been reduced by 100,000 dollars. More important, Tabor says, is that companies can postpone a $12 million trillion in data center upgrades because the power capacity of the facility is sufficient to meet the energy growth requirements of the next few years.

With its ATS and energy-saving programs, the company has demonstrated how it is bringing its business into the book.

The IT environmental protection of the hippocampus company:

Users are important: Involve key users in the development process, accelerating the pace of adoption of new applications by users.

Mouthpiece: Find people who know both it and business to act as a communication link between the departments.

Business drivers: Use the business to drive the green it process, ensuring that the green solution is more than just an empty PR slogan.

Spreading the idea of environmental protection: insisting that suppliers take a serious approach to energy conservation, and that the supplier's project proposals include provisions for efficient use of energy.