BUPA

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Amdahl Supports BUPA's Mission Critical IT Environments

Summary

BUPA, one of the UK's largest global health and care organisations with members in nearly 190 countries worldwide, recently commissioned Amdahl IT Services to provide consultancy on a migration of core mission critical applications from its HP9000 server platforms onto the Sun™ E10000 Solaris™ based server. As well as the installation and migration of the new server, Amdahl® provided Solaris based training for BUPA staff to enable them to maintain the new system architecture. This server migration was one of the most significant in the long-running relationship between Amdahl IT Services and BUPA. This project was a very significant undertaking, involving the move of mission critical applications and sensitive data from six HP servers onto both a new server and operating system platform. The move came as demand grew to consolidate costs and administration, as well the need to rationalise systems to enable flexibility and growth.

Background

BUPA has had a long-standing relationship with Amdahl IT Services, who most recently installed a Millennium 2037A server to provide support and services to all of BUPA centres around the country. BUPA appointed Amdahl IT Services to oversee the migration of all of its systems from several disparate HP based servers to the mainframe capabilities of the Sun E10000 server allowing BUPA to provide a scaleable and reliable service. This project provided two challenges for BUPA. The first was to ensure a smooth migration from the existing servers to the E10000, without any loss of data or interruption in service. As this was a new operating system, the second challenge was a lack of internal staff with Solaris skills.

Given these challenges, Amdahl was relied upon to project manage the installation, testing and migration as well as training BUPA's internal IT staff. In addressing these challenges, Amdahl IT Services had to ensure constant communication with BUPA throughout the delicate stages of migrating applications and data to the E10000 server.

"Amdahl broke this project into two phases to ensure success," commented Andrew Caldwell Infrastructure Projects Group Manager for BUPA." The first phase was getting all the hardware installed and the system running which took three months," he continues, "However, the second and most vital aspect of the whole project was the migration of systems from the HP servers to the Solaris platform of the E10000. Taking over a year, Amdahl ensured BUPA where able to take on the process of a trouble free migration which required a lot of testing and relinking of all the systems to ensure that everything made the journey."

The other challenge was the lack of Solaris programming skills within BUPA's IT department. Amdahl commenced a training programme with key BUPA personnel in order to transfer the necessary skills.

The Benefits

"We chose Amdahl IT Services, as it is responsive, flexible and has a great track record in doing just this sort of project," stated Caldwell. "This project was typical of BUPA's business process streamlining. The upshot of it is that we wanted to centralise more of our critical systems and data. We also had to fully consolidate the costs associated with administration and rationalise our systems to fully facilitate future flexibility and growth," said Caldwell.

Conclusion

Caldwell concludes, "Amdahl had fully understood our needs and the importance of this project from the initial hardware installation, testing and migration as well as the Solaris training. Amdahl ensured that we were fully prepared to cope with the new infrastructure once installed and implemented."

Matthew Piercy, General Manager for Amdahl IT Services commented "we are very pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with BUPA, with our 30 year history of supporting mission critical IT environments for large blue-chip clients such as BUPA, this challenge was the ideal candidate for us."