Fujitsu America

Fujitsu America found a reliable HA/DR solution in Assure iTERA HA

Fujitsu’s America BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina testing and production-staging environment (PSTAGE) used to run in a separate partition on the same physical server as the production applications. After a major upgrade to the core health insurance application an increase in transaction traffic overburdened the production server. To solve this problem, Fujitsu America needed an easy, non intrusive way to switch the staging environment to its disaster recovery (DR) server.

When Fujitsu acquired BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina’s data center, it assumed responsibility for protecting BlueCross’ data and ensuring the continuous availability of its systems. A service level agreement (SLA) promises that there will be no more than four hours of downtime. To meet this commitment without exception, Fujitsu needs real-time data and application redundancy that is easy to manage and use.

Even with this redundancy, Fujitsu continues to create regular data backups. If the backup jobs run on the production system they can slow or even stop critical business applications. Fujitsu must avoid this potential impact on operations.

A further challenge arose recently when Fujitsu upgraded BlueCross’ primary application, Power MHS, a health insurance application from DST Systems. Because a number of previous upgrades had been skipped, this represented a major change and required several revisions to external applications.

After the upgrade, the Power MHS application experienced much greater traffic, which affected performance. Fujitsu’s testing and production-staging environment ran in a separate partition on the same system. To alleviate the strain on production resources, Fujitsu decided to move this environment
to its DR server. It needed a way to easily perform the migration in a non-disruptive fashion.

When Fujitsu America acquired the data center of BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, it inherited the Assure iTERA HA solution that protected BlueCross’ data and applications. Assure iTERA HA replicates all data and applications from the production server to two secondary servers, one designated as a backup and the other as a DR server.