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"Since Microsoft releases patches for Windows about once a month, we needed to
invest a sizeable amount of time to keep the operating systems current. This
caused downtime for the business as well. We decided to investigate some other
options and see if we could find a cost-effective solution that would avoid these
issues."
BCBSM evaluated various UNIX® options, and also looked at Linux® on the
IBM System z mainframe platform.
"We did our due diligence and spoke to a lot of other companies about how they
constructed their application server landscapes," comments Ted Mansk. "The feed-
back we received was that Linux on System z was one of the most stable plat-
forms imaginable: none of the references had ever experienced a serious outage.
Our own experience of running DB2 on z/OS® on the System z platform bears this
out—you don't have to worry about it, it just works."
Finding the most cost-effective option
BCBSM then performed a five-year TCO study to see if Linux on the System z
platform could deliver comparable price-performance to a distributed Windows or
UNIX-based server landscape.
"Even without factoring in the maintenance and support costs—which would be
considerable for a large estate of physical servers—we found that running a virtual-
ized Linux environment on System z would be somewhere between 30 and
50 percent less expensive than a distributed architecture," says Ted Mansk.
"Suddenly, the choice of infrastructure had become an easy decision."
Pulling out all the stops
Working with IBM, BCBSM migrated around 140 application servers from the HP
hardware onto six new Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors installed in its
System z9® Enterprise Class mainframe. The IFLs have enabled the organization
to decommission almost all of the old physical machines.
"We had to start the project after the annual financial close in December, and we
needed to complete it within two months to avoid delaying a number of other
strategic projects," comments Ted Mansk. "IBM showed extraordinary dedication
to help us complete the project within an extremely tight deadline. The project team
worked seven-day weeks over the winter holiday season to get the job done."
Advantages of virtualization
For BCBSM, running the application servers on virtual instances of SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server in partitions on the IFL processors delivers several advantages.
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