Ivory Data Access Helps Minimize Data Congestion, Improves Reliability
Commonwealth Automobile Reinsurers (CAR) is the industry operated residual market and statistical agent for motor vehicle insurance in the state of Massachusetts.
In its residual market role, CAR provides access to private passenger and commercial motor vehicle liability and physical damage insurance to owners and drivers who are unable to obtain coverage through the voluntary market. In its role as statistical agent, CAR collects, edits, and processes Massachusetts private passenger and commercial automobile premium and loss statistics. The data is subsequently provided to the Automobile Insurers Bureau of Massachusetts, the Merit Rating Board, and the Highway Loss Data Institute. Any company writing vehicle insurance in Massachusetts is required to be a member of CAR.
As the repository for policy information and experience reported by the individual insurance companies, CAR works with huge volumes of data: they keep statistics on every automobile insurance policy in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Data quality and timeliness are of paramount importance, as the data is often used for rating purposes
Business Challenge
CAR regularly transfers data between its mainframe database and its SQL Server database residing on its midrange server platform. Most of the larger data transfers are performed on a nightly basis. As the volume of data grew, the transfer times increased exponentially, to the point where it could take over an hour to complete the entire process.
The growth and download congestion also led to an error recovery problem where any error during the transfer process would require a rerun of the entire job stream. These re-runs could take as much as 55 minutes, which meant that some reports were not available to users on time and CAR would not meet its service level agreements to the industry. Soon these situations began to occur more and more frequently which led CAR staff to the conclusion that their mainframe integration software was inadequate for the task.
Approach
At an industry trade show, CAR learned that a public agency from another state had overcome a similar problem with the same software setup. A systems programmer from this agency explained that its problems were resolved using Ivory® Data Access from GT Software, which performed much of their data transfers from mainframe tables to the organization’s midrange platform. After a CAR systems programmer had the opportunity to discuss corroborate this success, CAR contacted GT Software and soon began a two month Ivory Data Access proof of concept and free trial.
During the trial, CAR was able to run several data transfers, and the increase in speed was convincing and persuasive. “A five-fold performance improvement makes life a lot easier,” says Peter McCabe, Director of Applications Development. He was delighted with the results, and the decision was made to implement Ivory Data Access. Ivory was chosen for its ease of use and its superior performance to the product that CAR had been using to transfer data between its mainframe and SQL Server database on the LAN platform. In order to test the product fully, Ivory Data Access was installed on the CAR mainframe, an IBM z Series machine running VSE, while Ivory’s Administrative Console was installed on the Windows 2003 server that hosts Microsoft SQL Server; in addition the ODBC component was installed on both the CAR web servers and a number of the CAR user workstations.
Currently, the CAR mainframe is still used for heavy number-crunching, but all reporting is done via the web. Users at CAR have also benefited, as Ivory Data Access has improved their ability to query the mainframe tables using desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel.
At this time, data transfer at CAR is a two-way street. In many cases, data collection is accomplished on the web, and then uploaded to the mainframe, where batch programs can then perform the heavy-duty number crunching. The information is then made available to CAR’s customers (automobile insurance companies) on the web.
Results
In production, the improvements were as dramatic as in the trial, with an added benefit: if there is a problem in overnight processing, Ivory can recover in just five to ten minutes. So, morning deadlines are met. “Since implementing Ivory Data Access, we have not had an instance of companies not getting their reports on time due to a problem with the data transfer,” says McCabe.
“On average the execution time of our data transfers from the mainframe to the LAN platform realized a performance improvement of 500%. We have been very happy with the performance of Ivory Data Access. It is reliable and easy to use and has made life a lot easier for me and my staff, allowing us to be more responsive to our customers’ needs. At this time Ivory Data Access is a core product for CAR, we really depend on it. And, the user support supplied by GT Software has been outstanding.”
