Integrated health fund manager Medscheme has completed the migration of its mission-critical applications from a legacy mainframe and a proprietary Risc-based system onto the Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 platform.
The company was one of the first in SA to adopt a Unisys mainframe-class Intel-based server, run on Caldera UnixWare. The Unisys server can also run on other non-proprietary operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 2000.
Hankie Vogel, group IT director at Medscheme, says: "When we started looking at the Unisys system a year ago, the suitability of the Windows-Intel platform for the data centre was still largely unproven.
"The ES7000 range was relatively new on the market, but we saw it as a world-class product backed by a global company with strong consulting and support capabilities in SA."
Vogel says the risk has paid off. By adopting the technology ahead of its entrance into the mainstream, Medscheme has made a hardware investment that it expects to last for five years.
"We are enjoying mainframe-like levels of reliability, uptime and performance from a system with up-front and running costs that come in at a fraction of the price of the proprietary alternatives. The ES7000 was the right technology at the right time," says Vogel.
"The Unisys platform will be able to scale up to cater for our anticipated growth in transactions and customers as we are not using it near its full capacity as yet."
The Unisys ES7000 scales up to 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, 64GB of memory, and 96 PCI slots for I/O. Future developments will include support for Intel`s 64-bit Itanium processor range.
Medscheme uses a 32-processor ES7000 running Windows 2000 Datacenter and Caldera UnixWare Data Center Edition to run its most critical claims assessment, membership, risk analysis and financial applications. This system processes more than 6 million health claim transactions a month from Medscheme`s 2.7 million beneficiaries.
The company has also bought a 16-processor Unisys ES7000 for disaster recovery, software development and quality assurance. Medscheme is using excess capacity on the ES7000s to consolidate its proliferation of Intel-based file, application and print servers into two easy to manage boxes.
Barry Holt, MD of Unisys Africa, says the Medscheme project provides a good example of how partnership between an IT vendor and a customer helps to ensure the success of a project that involves the roll-out of new technology.
Holt points out that the Medscheme project pulled together resources from almost every area of Unisys`s business. It involved the deployment of a broad range of technical and business skills across disciplines such as project management, project administration, Unix consulting, and facilities management.
"As Medscheme was an early adopter of this technology, market interest in the installation was high. The project proved to be a valuable learning experience for both Medscheme and Unisys, and serves as a good reference for the new technology," says Holt.
Share
Editorial contacts