Health care benefits giant Aetna has just spent approximately $500,000 on a
data intelligence solution from CiRBA, internetnews.com has learned.
Patti Schlosser, head of server and storage services, said the expenditure
was justified by the company’s growth, which has been organic and through acquisition.
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The company reported revenues of over $22.5 billion in 2005, 12 percent higher than in 2004. Its IT department supports over 1,500 servers and 28,000 employees.
“With the growth of our business, the size, diversity and complexity of our
IT infrastructure have dramatically increased, requiring us to have a firm
grip on the management of the technologies and processes within that
environment.
“We view CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence (DCI) as a solution
that will immediately address Aetna’s configuration management and
compliance reporting requirements,” Schlosser said in a statement.
Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO at CiRBA, told
internetnews.com that the deployment will help Aetna’s IT department
gain efficiencies in server and storage resource management.
Aetna’s IT department currently supports a variety of platforms, including
IBM’s AIX, Unix on HP, as well as Sun Solaris, Linux, VMware and Windows.
The solution will provide Aetna with an inventory of all its hardware and
software installations, track workloads, conduct what-if analyses and
develop cohabitation indexes, all of which can help determine which servers
can be safely taken off line.
In addition to identifying opportunities for server consolidation, Hillier
said that DCI will provide Aetna with a range of other tools, including
diagnostics such as detailed change analysis to determine why a given server or
routine failed.
The tool will displace current manual processes and one-off, script-driven
activities, he said.
Compliance is also an issue, given the nature of Aetna’s business.
Sarbanes-Oxley-inspired regulations require public companies to prove that
their technology infrastructure is reliable, and that it can identify any
weaknesses when they occur.
According to Hillier, the data capture and reporting capabilities of DCI
will build greater rigor into production support processes and audit-control
compliance requirements.
“It provides detailed audits for compliance reporting,” he said. “They’ll have processes and measures to prove they’re compliant.”
Gerry Smith, president and CEO of CiRBA, said that efficiencies in
technology are particularly important for a health care organization, such as
Aetna.
“In health care, with changing regulations and IT budgets growing
consistently smaller, it is crucial to have full visibility into assets so
that no dollar is wasted and no resource under-utilized,” he explained.
CiRBA serves Global 3000 customers in a range of industries including
healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, oil and gas, technology
and managed services.
