By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
Health insurers, as well as other types of organizations in the medical field, are under increasing pressure to adopt new network management software and hardware technologies that make delivery of services more efficient. Yet, investing in this infrastructure is not a risk-free endeavor. It requires careful thought and weeding through what can seem like an overwhelming number of possible solutions.
Take Independence Blue Cross (IBC), for example. The largest health insurer in greater Philadelphia (3.3 million members, 5,500 employees, 25 million claims processed annually), IBC had successfully served the region for 70 years and by most counts (including rating from National Committee for Quality Assurance) continues to deliver excellent services.
Yet, this organization recently came to the conclusion that continuing to rely on an outdated system of network management software and hardware was a form of resting on its laurels—not a sustainable strategy. Despite the risks inherent in upgrading this legacy infrastructure, it was riskier to do nothing. Too much maintenance was required to keep the old system running.
So, IBC set out on an ambitious self-examination process, looking at its network management software and associated hardware, as well as DNS and DHCP infrastructure. Upgrade considerations included hardware changes, database conversion, OS upgrades, and possible conflicts between modules.
Central to all this analysis was a key question: would it pay off to switch to a different vendor, and if so which vendor was the best choice?
Recognizing that this important decision required outside expertise, IBC enlisted analysts from Forrester Research (News - Alert) to help narrow possible vendors down to a shortlist. Forrester helped cut the choices down to two. These vendors were then brought in for demonstrations of their solutions.
Ultimately, IBC decided to go with Infoblox (News - Alert), a network automation and control specialist.
“The biggest reason was that Infoblox had superior technology, simple appliance update procedures and a solid game plan for how to migrate from the previous solution,” said Darin Freeman, who heads up the distributed systems division at IBC, in a case study. “The Infoblox team worked closely with us, providing local customer references and an unmatched level of expertise that made our decision simple.”
With help from Forrester and Infoblox, IBC determined its technology requirements: an appliance-based solution with robust features, a secure OS, and highly available systems capable of sustaining mission-critical services.
IBC ended up purchasing eight Infoblox-1050 network appliances, along with a complete suite of network services, and Grid technology for internal IPAM, DHCP, DNS and TFTP. Four of the units were installed at a datacenter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Two were dedicated to disaster recovery in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The remaining two units are being used in IBC’s downtown Philadelphia facilities.
“Since installing Infoblox, we have reduced labor costs to maintain the system and eliminated all single points of failure,” Freeman said. “Failover is now automated, we
have vastly improved our disaster recovery capability and eliminated the need to do tape backups of the DNS database.”
To learn more about IBC’s successful computer infrastructure upgrade, read the full case study here. Even more information is available on Infoblox’s TMCnet channel, Network Management Software.