Government Employees Health Association With Violin Flash Array …

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that the Government Employees Health Association (GEHA), has selected its all flash array solution to accelerate the association’s primary business-critical claims processing application and to support the migration of all tier 1 SQL applications from a mainframe environment to an infrastructure deployed around SQL and VMware.

Using a Violin solution, GEHA was able to eliminate the storageI/O bottlenecks that previously caused hours or even a day of delays in claims processing. Read and write operations for huge amounts of data required for reporting, data extracting, and nightly batch processing no longer experience performance constraints.

As the second largest national health plan and national dental plan serving federal employees, retirees and their families, GEHA serves more than one million people worldwide. The organization’s core business function, processing insurance claims, requires a fast and reliable infrastructure in order to provide optimal customer service.

“We required an environment with proven uptime and reliability matching or exceeding that of the mainframe,” said Joseph Acosta, CIO, GEHA. “We understood that our VMware virtual environment was highly dependent on the performance of our storage architecture and that moving to a flash array would help us mitigate some of our performance concerns. Knowing that Violin was an innovator in this space we quickly engaged them to bring a solution on board.“

From a daily hands-on perspective, GEHA also observed a marked decrease in maintenance time, freeing up staff to perform more strategic tasks. In addition, storage previously used for claims processing has been repurposed for separate projects, providing more capital and operational savings. Following the initial Violin array implementation, GEHA has procured an additional array which will be integrated into its current DR strategy as well as lay the foundation for what will be part of their business intelligence platform.

“Many large organizations enjoy the reliability of traditional storage infrastructures, but then suffer from a performance gap caused by the requirements of modern applications, virtual infrastructure, and their end users,” said Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP, business development, Violin. “Violin meets the intensive data expectations of the largest enterprises with the additional benefits provided by an all flash array.“