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Nth Generation and HP Ensure Success at MetLifeTo build a powerful and flexible information-technology infrastructure, and bring its products to market quickly, MetLife Investors standardized on StorageWorks™, OpenView™ storage solutions and ProLiant™ servers from the new HP. MetLife Investors' chose Nth Generation Computing, Inc. to implement its new Hewlett Packard solution, helping MetLife post sales of nearly $1.5 billion in its first 12 months. "We selected HP products because of their reputation for scalability, reliability and adaptability." Technology investments pay steady dividends for insurance firmThe advice remains pertinent in boom years and bust: Those who hold fast to a balanced investment program remain well positioned to take advantage of future opportunities. Perhaps the same can be said of those adhering to a standard computing platform; MetLife Investors thinks so. The Newport Beach, Calif.-based company is a new division of MetLife Inc., a leading provider of insurance and financial services. During its first 12 months in production, MetLife Investors tallied sales of $1.5 billion.Before the new division could bring its portfolio of variable and fixed annuity products to market in early 2001, it needed to build a solid computing infrastructure - fast. Company leaders entrusted Mike Stansbury with the job, and he summoned the proven capabilities of Nth Generation and Hewlett-Packard. "Our challenge was to build an information-technology (IT) infrastructure from the ground up - with a small staff, under extremely dynamic conditions and in a very short time," says Stansbury, MetLife Investors' director of network operations. Flexible SAN architecture adapts to volatile IT demandsTo get the business going, MetLife Investors began its network operation with two ProLiant DL380 servers from the new HP functioning as an e-mail server and a domain controller. Nearly a year later, the network includes more than 130 ProLiant servers and two StorageWorks storage-area networks (SANs) from HP. "We chose StorageWorks SANs because they perform well and are easy to configure and support," Stansbury explains. "They enable us to manage our data more effectively and control where the data resides throughout the enterprise. StorageWorks systems can quickly adapt to business changes."Two StorageWorks Enterprise Storage Array 12000 systems anchor the production and development SANs. MetLife Investors deployed its 1.08TB production SAN in an Irvine co-location facility, while its 2.3TB development SAN resides in Newport Beach. SAN-attached ProLiant servers run the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Exchange messaging system, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Call Center applications, customized financial software and various company-developed Web applications leveraging the Microsoft .NET platform. The production SAN uses ProLiant DL760 servers in an active-passive Microsoft Cluster Server configuration to host the company's centralized data repository. "ProLiant DL760 servers supply the best performance for our database," Stansbury explains. "The HP PCI-X extended, split-bus architecture is optimal for a clustered-server configuration of the database. We built the repository platform on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 technology, and the platform tightly integrates with MetLife Investors' back-end mainframe systems, transaction processing systems and various data repositories located throughout the enterprise. The central repository seamlessly links internal and external users as well as clients to valuable information that was previously unavailable or difficult to find." The development SAN accommodates the rigors of application development. "Our IT staff supports several development teams," Stansbury says. "StorageWorks systems from HP afford us immense flexibility in server configuration and use. We are able to provide a development and quality assurance infrastructure that closely mirrors the production environment, but still allows us to configure and test changes in an isolated environment. We can quickly allocate storage when and where we need it during development test cycles." Stansbury and his talented, knowledgeable staff built, configured and deployed the SANs with assistance from HP reseller Nth Generation. "The SANs are easy to manage with a small staff," Stansbury affirms. "HP Services provides us with CarePaq™ Services, including excellent extended warranty service. We get replacement parts easily, and the system warranty uplifts are very useful for ongoing investment protection." Robust computing delivers broad portfolio of optionsMetLife Investors hosts several public Web sites for its customers and dozens of intranet applications for its sales and operations workforce. The HP infrastructure currently supports approximately 2,500 internal users, with plans underway to conduct Web transactions with potentially tens of thousands of external clients. Designated for internal usage currently, the extranet sites averaged 360,000 hits per month during the initial pilot rollout. Their internal applications averaged 9.2 million hits per month. The company expects these transactions to increase significantly as new products and features are more widely released.To complete these Web transactions, the company deployed ProLiant DL360 servers running Microsoft Windows Network Load Balancing clusters for redundancy and scalability. "The ProLiant DL360 model is an ideal Web server," Stansbury notes. "It is small, powerful and resilient. We can quickly build and deploy additional ProLiant DL360 servers on the front-end as needed to handle increased Web traffic and transaction volumes." Mature system-management tools bring peace of mindMetLife Investors uses a host of HP management and backup solutions to ensure its IT systems remain online and in good working order. "We use HP storage-management tools such as HP OpenView™ Virtual Replicator and Enterprise Volume Manager software," Stansbury notes. "These tools enable us to access production data quickly for reports, backups and disaster-recovery exercises - all while maintaining data availability."To detect trends and balance resources through automated reporting, the IT staff deployed HP OpenView Storage Resource Manager software. Stansbury plans to use the software to predict growth across the storage infrastructure, including the independent servers with direct-attached storage. This will enable the staff to decide whether stand-alone systems should be placed on the SANs. Thanks to the wealth of HP management utilities, the small support staff at MetLife Investors can maintain incredibly high service levels. StorageWorks Command Console enables administrators to configure and monitor storage assets and controllers graphically from a single management console, while Insight Manager™ monitoring software from HP alerts them to potential trouble spots with a server or their SAN hardware. Insight Manager software proved particularly useful during the construction of the company's permanent data center. MetLife Investors needed to temporarily place five racks of HP servers in a makeshift data center that had limited electricity and air conditioning. "Under these less-than-ideal conditions, we used the Insight Manager utility to monitor environment thresholds," relates Stansbury. "We also had to contend with the rolling blackouts during this time and experienced several unplanned outages. ProLiant servers were resilient in these conditions and always recovered without any problems. Today we use Insight Manager to remotely monitor our production environment in Irvine and the servers located in our new data center in Newport Beach." MetLife Investors also deployed a StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution (EBS) with Veritas Backup Exec software. The StorageWorks EBS solution fosters resource sharing among the storage arrays and servers over a Fibre Channel connection. Stansbury's staff can schedule all backup and restore jobs from a single server, which simplifies management of these activities. The IT staff built the backup solution with StorageWorks TL891DLX DLT Libraries and recently added a StorageWorks MSL5026SL Library, the mainstream tape library with enterprise-level features. The StorageWorks EBS with the MSL5026SL Library, using hot-plug SDLT drives, delivers exceptional capacity and performance in a compact size. "The speed and performance of the MSL5026SL Library cut our backup time in half," Stansbury states. Standard computing infrastructure nets big gainsStansbury is planning to use the development SAN as a hot-fail over environment for the production SAN, improving his company's chances of weathering a disaster in the data center. Standardizing on HP technology ensures that MetLife Investors can continue to grow without risking precious capital.Stansbury concludes: "HP enabled us to deploy new systems very quickly - with little cross-training and overhead. HP hardware has proven to be reliable and scalable in our environment and simplifies the management and operations of our IT infrastructure. We are confident our computing platform will provide many opportunities for future scalability and growth." Business results:
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