The Four Hundred

IBM last week announced that it has sold its first iSeries Model 890 "Regatta-H" server in Europe, and like the first one installed in the United States, the machine has ended up at a healthcare service provider. And like that first iSeries Model 890 sale that IBM announced back in July, this one involves an existing OS/400 shop that wants to consolidate multiple data centers and many AS/400 servers onto a single iSeries to cut overhead and personnel costs.

That European Model 890 customer is Union National des Mutualités Libres/Landsbond van de Onafhankelijke Ziekenfondsen (UNML/LMOZ), which is one of a number of financial clearing houses for the Belgian public healthcare system. UNML/LMOZ provides healthcare claims processing for millions of Belgian citizens (about 16 percent of the country's population) and reimburses some 250 hospitals that participate in the regions it has dominion over. UNML/LMOZ has seven regional offices, which each used to have their own mix of Model 6XX and Model 7XX AS/400 servers running a mix of home-grown RPG applications and which manage some 750 insurance claims offices in Belgium.

Pierre Laporte, the CIO of UNML/LMOZ, says that the healthcare service provider embarked on an ambitious plan in 2000 to re-architect its AS/400-based RPG applications to move them to the Web and eliminate copious amounts of paperwork. Consolidating those seven regional data centers into the remaining eighth central data center was part of the plan, which cut down on operations and support costs and also resulted in lower hardware and software costs. He says, in fact, that UNML/LMOZ will chop about 40 percent out of its IT budget for hardware, software, maintenance and personnel by moving to the central Model 890 from those regional Model 6XX and Model 7XX servers which supported at total of 2,000 users and about 1,250 concurrent users at any given time.

Consolidation was the reason to look at a Model 8XX server, but the prospect of running Java applications and IBM's WebSphere middleware--both of which love fast processors, big cache memories, and high bandwidth--was why UNML/LMOZ ultimately went with the Model 890. Initially, working with HEARIS, an iSeries business partner that specializes in the healthcare sector, UNML/LMOZ was ready to acquire a fully loaded 24-way Turbo Condor Model 840-2418 server, which uses the 500MHz I-Star PowerPC processors. The interactive capacity on that machine was equal to the aggregate interactive capacity that supported its users on those distributed Model 6XX and Model 7XX servers, and the batch capacity on the Model 840 machine was about 10,000 CPWs. This machine has a U.S. list price of about $3.1 million in a base configuration without disks. After seeing the Model 890, HEARIS suggested that a 16-way Regatta-H server would offer the same interactive capacity (for $4 million at list), but have twice the raw CPWs to apply to batch jobs and non-5250 applications like the Java applications it hopes to develop in the coming years as it re-engineers its RPG applications. UNML/LMOZ is, like other services companies, heavily batch-oriented, so having that extra power is important. Batch windows on the older AS/400 servers were hitting 24 hours and backups were taking eight hours. The Model 890, which is configured with 64 GB of main memory and 4.5 TB of disk capacity, can process batch jobs in one-third the time and backup all of its data in half the time--and do it all in one place.

Laporte says that UNML/LMOZ is using IBM's Domino knowledge management programs (but not the application server or email servers) as part of this re-architecting, and is similarly going to use IBM's WebSphere application server and MQ Series message queuing software as the core of its Web-enabled applications and its WebSphere Content Manager for scanning in and managing paper documents, which it is trying to eliminate from its business operations to the greatest extent possible.

The first Model 890 that IBM sold was to Apria Healthcare, a home healthcare equipment and services provider based in the Los Angeles suburb of Lake Forest. Apria has over 1 million patients using its products and a direct sales force of about 460 people, who work from over 400 branch offices in the lower 48 states, and in the past few years, Apria has consolidated 175 data centers, using AS/400 and iSeries servers, down to 40 data centers. Exactly what configuration of iSeries Model 890 server Apria acquired--or if it bought more than one--is unclear.