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When Clive Osborne joined Norwich Union
in 1998, the company’s Capacity Planning
activities were focused solely on their
mainframe environment. Eighteen months later
and with twenty Unix servers running a variety
of increasingly important applications,
the decision was taken that a managed service
should be introduced to include full capacity
planning for the mid-range environment.
Norwich Union’s existing approach
to mainframe Capacity Planning which was
used to drive the budgets for all the spend
on this type of system was taken as the
model. The search began to find the most
appropriate Capacity Planning tool for the
company’s wide mix of Unix systems.
Clive Osborne: “We
did some initial research in-house in
order to help us clearly define our requirements.
Four key points emerged. The software
would need to be able to track key metrics
and enable us to build a historical database.
We needed a tool that would enable us
to carry out modeling, and finally it
was essential that the chosen product
should have as low an impact as possible
on the servers that we were measuring.”
A request for proposal
was prepared and sent to a dozen potential
suppliers; some of them were eliminated
immediately because of their inability
to support Norwich Union’s
Sequent servers. Following assessment of
the remaining responses, proposals from
five companies were compared and ranked
according to their match with the original
requirements document. Clive Osborne: “It
soon became clear that for our particular
environment, the best approach would be
to buy two separate tools – one for
Capacity Planning and one for performance
monitoring.”
Two companies’ products
were short listed for the Capacity Planning
requirement and after a two week test
period, analysis of the results and some
further questioning, Metron’s Athene
was selected as the
‘best fit’ for Norwich Union’s
Unix-based UK-wide Capacity Planning needs.
Clive Osborne: “We went through
a very rigorous testing and assessment
process. We wanted to make absolutely
sure that whatever we spent our money
on would give us exactly the information
that we needed to make Unix capacity
planning as successful as the mainframe
model had been. Athene was selected because
it would run on nearly all our Unix servers
and where this wasn’t possible,
we could use the CustomDB module (which
collects data from non-standard systems
and inputs into Athene) to work around
this. The product also appeared to be
easy to use, with a good Windows interface
and little requirement for any configuration.”
Athene was installed in the company’s
Norwich datacentre in July 1999. Its role
was to handle the Capacity Planning on
all twenty Unix servers, all the time.
At this stage, the Unix servers were running
a range of general ledger, accounting and
HR applications. However a number of business
critical applications were also being introduced,
including a large pensions administration
system.
Clive Osborne: “During
the first six months following our purchase
of Athene, we spent some time developing
the structure of our monthly reports.
These were made available on the web
and after some further refinement, we
were able to automatically produce chart-based
reports which provided useful information
to both technical and non-technical staff.
Reaction to the monthly reports was good
as we were providing information that
had previously been impossible to produce.”
At this time in
Norwich Union’s development,
the life and pensions, and insurance businesses
were responsible for their own IT infrastructures
and any related spend. The reports produced
by Athene were used to identify problems
and then applications for appropriate funding
would be submitted based on Athene’s
findings.
In mid-2000, Clive
Osborne transferred to Norwich Union’s
mainframe Capacity Planning team with the
aim of creating a unified group, spanning
both system environments. The role of capacity
planning for the mid-range systems also underwent
a major change with the decree that all IT
spend should be agreed in an annual budget,
which would be based on information derived
from Athene. |
Clive
Osborne: “My job was to go to the
different business areas within Norwich
Union and obtain details of their plans
for the coming twelve months in terms
of how many new users, any new applications,
targets for growth, etc.
“In the early
days this was quite a cultural shock
as most groups were only used to planning
for a three month period. However education
and persistence paid off and by January
2001, we were able to publish our first
complete annual capacity plan using Athene
which would drive the IT budgets for
the year ahead.”
Norwich Union now has over one hundred Unix
servers, based in Norwich and York. The
range of applications running on these has
grown both in number and in importance.
Administration systems for pensions and
insurance are amongst the critical systems
now running on Unix servers.
The company’s
annual capacity plan lists each server
and based on information from individual
businesses and subsequent analysis by
Athene, projects forward twelve months
in terms of CPU and DASD growth. Trends
for the subsequent four years are also
produced using Athene.
Clive Osborne: “Each of the life
and pensions, and insurance businesses has
a ‘key buyer’ whose role is
to agree and sign off the capacity plan.
The plan then sets the budget and the related
IT spend. When a department or group wants
to buy any IT equipment or systems, their
request for funding has to match the approved
plan, although there is some flexibility
in terms of bringing forward or delaying
an investment.”
Monthly and quarterly reports ensure that
the annual capacity plan is kept up to date
and accurate.
The use of Metron’s
CustomDB module supports the collection
of data from non-standard systems and
their subsequent input into Athene. This
ensures that a comprehensive picture
of the complete IT systems environment
can be produced by the Capacity Planning
team.
Athene automates the process of collecting
data and producing the relevant reports
for IT budgets, an activity which Clive
Osborne confirms would be impossible to
try and undertake manually.
And given the level
of automation provided by Athene, he
and members of the Capacity Planning
team are able to use their skills to
work on special projects. Recent work
has included using Athene to model the
impact of new systems. “One of
our early models was about 93% accurate
in its prediction of the effect on response
times following an upgrade. This reinforced
our confidence and our modeling has
continued to be very successful.
Norwich Union is also using Athene to size
servers and validate supplier proposals
as existing Sequent-based systems are moved
to new environments, and as part of a series
of server consolidation projects. Cost-saving
is key to the Norwich Union philosophy,
and Athene plays an increasingly important
role in ensuring that every single system
is used to its maximum potential.
Clive Osborne: “Automation
and overall reliability are key features
of Athene, together with the ability
to deliver web-based reporting.
“Norwich Union is competing in a
1% world, by which we mean that for pensions
and CAT standard investments the maximum
annual charge is 1%. To continue to develop
Norwich Union as a successful business given
these extremely stringent profit margins,
we need to be very cost conscious. Athene’s
role in setting the budgets for IT spend
is fundamental in helping us to achieve
this objective.”
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