| Amount invested: |
$100M plus |
| Organization: |
Automobile Insurance Company |
| Original Plans: |
To sell and service automobile insurance over the telephone using a low
cost Unix application package and a single Unix server. The application was
to be expandable as the business grew, eventually supporting up to 1,000
concurrent users at peak times. |
| Unanticipated problems: |
The new application could not support more than a
dozen users with an 'acceptable' response time of 2-3 seconds.
The system also crashed almost hourly. Consequently the application was rewritten and
customized for that Insurer. The new application still required
multiple Pyramid Nile servers to support a 40GB database and a maximum of
100 users per application with 400 in total. Response times were variable,
up to 30 seconds when heavily loaded, and the system still crashed on a
weekly basis when heavily loaded. |
| Project Status: |
To handle the business growth this Insurer tested EVERY
available Unix platform but could not find one to support 750 concurrent
users. They installed a mainframe class system running a proprietary
version of Unix to meet this level of use but still experienced 30 second
response times and frequent outages. Their cost per policy has been
measured at over six times that of a rival company that was using a
S/390 based system.
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