Medicare y Mucho Más (MMM) is legally obligated to retain insurance claim data for 10 years. With rapid business growth, its storage systems could not scale to meet the data volumes required. MMM established performance bench-marks, then integrated the IBM®XIV®Storage System in a virtualized server environment, seamlessly migrated all data and retired its old systems.

1. IBM XIV Storage System
Case Study
Insurance
Overview
Challenge
Medicare y Mucho Más (MMM) is
legally obligated to retain insurance
claim data for 10 years. With rapid
business growth, its storage systems
could not scale to meet the data
volumes required.
Solution
MMM established performance bench-
marks, then integrated the IBM® XIV®
Storage System in a virtualized server
environment, seamlessly migrated all
data and retired its old systems.
Benefit
● Tripled performance at lower
overall cost
● Exceptional ease of use and flexibility
● Increased scalability and availability
MMM promotes patient
well-being with self-
healing IBM XIV storage
Established in 2001, Medicare y Mucho Más (MMM) is a health main-
tenance organization that provides high-quality Medicare Advantage
health plans for nearly 130,000 elderly and special needs populations in
Puerto Rico. With satisfaction rates reaching 99 percent, MMM leads
Puerto Rico by offering integrated health management services that are
cost-effective and, most importantly, improve each member’s quality of
life. MMM also offers special needs plans, covering chronic obstructive
pulmonary diseases, pre-end stage renal diseases, congestive heart fail-
ure and diabetes. Its mission is nothing less noble than promoting the
well-being of its members.
Ive Velez, assistant vice president for IT Operations and
Infrastructure, comments: “We handle everything that deals with
health insurance plans. We are under legal obligation to retain every-
thing for 10 years—so there is a lot of data that we have to handle.”
“Two years ago, all our data was stored locally on individual servers, so
we decided to create a SAN and consolidate our storage,” explained
Velez. “We bought EMC CLARiiONs with 25 terabytes of capacity,
but within a year had outgrown them.” Added Sigfredo Garcia, IT
Operations director, “With the old storage, we had a lot of problems:
We didn’t have the ability to grow quickly like a company wants. We
needed more space, but couldn’t grow in the same box because it was
too expensive, and if we wanted to add space or grow on the server, it
took a lot of administration time. We needed to take maintenance win-
dows because of the performance issues.”
“One of our objectives is to have an agile IT department that can pro-
vide the business users and our clients with the services they need,”
continued Velez. “We were implementing VMware virtualization at the
server level and were also looking for virtualization at the storage level.
That’s when we found IBM XIV.”

2. 2
Case Study
Insurance
IBM XIV Storage System
“…the only way other
people will catch up to us
is if we react too slowly
to new opportunities.
With the XIV and
VMware, we’re able to
deploy new solutions
faster—within minutes
rather than days—
which help us to secure
and maintain our first
place in the market.”
—Juan Arill, vice president for IT, Medicare y
Mucho Más
The IBM XIV Storage System delivers high-performance, virtualized
storage. Its revolutionary architecture stripes data across a grid of
high-capacity SATA disks, massively parallelizing reading and writing
processes to deliver better performance than a traditional Fibre
Channel disk storage system, at greatly reduced overall cost.
Proving the concept
“IBM XIV is a leading-edge solution and some of the features it offers
just don’t sound credible if you are thinking in terms of traditional
storage technology,” says Velez. MMM carried out a proof of concept.
“We performed stress tests and found out that the IBM XIV could give
us 30,000 IOPS [on a particular database] when the other technology
was only capable of 10,000 IOPS. I was astonished that it was possible
to provide three times the performance on a box that consists of SATA
disks instead of SCSI or Fibre Channel.”
“Even as we increased the amount of data stored on the XIV, there was
no degradation in performance,” he adds. “This is a huge advantage
because we don’t have to worry about growth in data volumes affecting
response times for end users.”
Ease of use “a dream”
MMM implemented a full-rack (79 TB) IBM XIV Storage System and
migrated all data from its incumbent systems. It then decommissioned
the old systems, freeing up four racks in the data center, and reducing
electricity and cooling costs.
Raphael Santiago, service administrator, comments: “Deploying the
XIV was incredibly simple. We just connected it to the [former sys-
tems] and used the XIV migration tool to replicate the data…in the
background… we didn’t really have any downtime.” MMM has con-
nected its Oracle and Microsoft® SQL Server database servers to the
XIV, as well as its file servers and Microsoft Exchange email system.
Velez adds: “When you look at the XIV user interface, it doesn’t look
like a storage system. It’s so easy to manage and create volumes.”
Added Garcia, “Every person that sees it almost always says, ‘Wow, is
that the administration tool?’ I just tell them that it’s the easiest and
best SAN that we ever had.”
Noted Garcia: “Talking about ease of use, XIV’s reporting capabilities
are an absolute dream for any administrator. In one second, you can
see all you need: How much space you have allocated, which volumes

3. 3
Case Study
Insurance
IBM XIV Storage System
IBM Solution components:
Hardware
● IBM® XIV® Storage System
“I was astonished that it
was possible to provide
three times the perform-
ance on a box that con-
sists of SATA disks.”
—Ive Velez, assistant vice president for IT
Operations and Infrastructure
IT Environment
Operating systems
● Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008
Databases
● Microsoft SQL Server
● Oracle
Applications
● Microsoft Exchange Server
Virtualization
● VMware vSphere
are attached to which hosts, I/O statistics for the last month... Also,
using snapshots is a huge help with debugging and problem solving,
because you can work on the clone while leaving the production
system running.”
Most of the company’s servers are virtualized using VMware vSphere;
the IT team has found the IBM XIV virtualization capabilities to
be a powerful fit. “To set up a new environment, you just create the
VMware server, select a storage pool, click ‘add new volume,’ enter the
name and the size, and click ‘okay,’” says Santiago. “There, you have a
LUN. Then you right-click the LUN and assign it to the VMware
host. That’s it!”
Staying healthy
“It is very important for us to have a technology that is self healing
and can give us the assurance that it will not fail,” explained Velez.
“The IBM XIV has the ability to repair a one-terabyte failed disk in
less than 30 minutes. That was a big factor in our decision to go with
the IBM XIV.”
Added Juan Arill, vice president for IT: “It’s one of those systems that
you install and forget.”
Keeping pace in first place
Commented Garcia: “Our IT peers outside the company don’t know
about the miracle that is the IBM XIV. Our machine is quicker, faster,
and better—just what our company needs to grow and move and
change fast with changes and technology. As MMM grows, we will
need to expand our storage capabilities, and the XIV brings us the
facility to grow in space in a minute.”
Arill concludes: “With the XIV and VMware, our IT team can easily
manage and extend the server and storage environments themselves,
without waiting for specialist help from external consultants or needing
to procure additional hardware. This eliminates delays and has a gen-
uine impact on business agility. One of the most critical factors for our
business is time to market; right now, we are the leading company in
our sector in Puerto Rico, and the only way other people will catch up
to us is if we react too slowly to new opportunities. With the XIV and
VMware, we’re able to deploy new solutions faster—within minutes
rather than days—which help us to secure and maintain our first place
in the market.”

4. Please Recycle
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit us at: ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/xiv
For more information about MMM, visit: mmm-pr.com
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Produced in the United States of America
August 2010
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