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Great Eastern Life Assurance
CASE STUDY – FINANCIAL INDUSTRY
Agency Management Project for Great Eastern Life Assurance
With a total of 2.4 million policyholders in Singapore and Malaysia, Great Eastern Life Assurance is the largest asset-based life insurance company on either side of the Causeway and manages about S$37 billion in assets. To better manage their enormous customer base, the market-leading insurer ditched their old legacy inhouse agency sub-system in favour of a newer platform based on open systems. Such a move has resulted in higher levels of performance, reliability and scalability.
Migration of a Legacy System
In 2002, Great Eastern made the decision to migrate their in-house agency sub-system, which is a legacy platform, to one that is based on open systems. At that time, the insurer was facing difficulties in supporting the legacy system due to a shortage of staff with the relevant skills.
Thus, the company began searching for a solution that could give them the lowest total cost of ownership, as well as meet the following stringent criteria:
- Performance – 24 x 7 full application performance
- Reliability – mainframe level of reliability, availability & serviceability
- Future scalability – ability to stand up to rigorous demands to meet customer’s needs in future
Besides these criteria, Great Eastern was also looking for a vendor who had a proven track record in project management and technical support, and was able to provide a good risk mitigation scheme that the insurer was comfortable with.
Hence, the company embarked on the usual process of calling for a project tender among IT vendors, briefing the companies and scrutinizing their proposals.
The job eventually went to Fujitsu Asia.
PRIMEPOWER Offers the 24x7 Operational Paradigm
To meet the objectives, Fujitsu Asia proposed its UNIX-based enterprise class PrimePower1500 (PW1500) servers for the Great Eastern’s mission-critical Oracle database and application servers. In addition, Fujitsu’s PrimePower450 (PW450) workgroup servers were used for the user acceptance testing, system integration testing environments as well as the Web servers.
PRIMEPOWER 450
“Back in 2002 when the project began, the 1.35GHz PrimePower1500 CPU was the industrial leading processor that offered one of the best price-to-performance ratios at that time,” said Chun Wai Kok, AVP of Sales at Fujitsu Asia. “Furthermore, we decided to deploy the PrimePower 1500 because of its proven capability to meet the most demanding 24/7 business applications,” he added.
A pair of PW1500 servers (each equipped with eight 1.35GHz processors, 16GB of RAM and 3XPAR partitions), together with a few PW450 servers running on three 1.32GHz processors and 6GB of RAM apiece, were proposed.
PRIMEPOWER 1500
To validate the proposed configuration meeting the required performance requirements, Fujitsu Asia also carried out a load test using Mercury LoadRunner, the de facto industry-standard load-simulation solution. Carried out at the PrimePower Centre in Shinjuku, Japan, the simulation – a value-added service that no other vendor could offer – yielded results that illustrated the feasibility of the Fujitsu’s proposed solution.
The PW1500 and PW450 servers were then successfully integrated with:
- the Oracle 9iAS application server
- the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i software suite
- an enterprise backup solution comprising the Veritas NetBackup
- enterprise server and tape libraries from StorageTek
- the EMC Symmetrix enterprise storage system
- the Unicentre system management software from Computer Associates
- network components including firewalls from Check Point Software Technologies and switches from Cisco Systems
Great Eastern has not experienced with any problems with the system since the implementation 3 years ago. Last year, the company commenced the second phase of their legacy application migration during which existing servers were upgraded to boost product management functions.
Fujitsu is currently assisting the insurer in the third phase of the project, which involves migrating Great Eastern’s file system to Fujitsu’s Eternus 6000 storage solution using the Softek Transparent Data Migration facility (TDMF) software.
