MultiPlan Accelerates Oracle Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence

MultiPlan, Inc. accelerates Oracle data warehouse and business intelligence with Maestro Acceleration from Violin Memory, Inc.

Customer
Based in New York, MultiPlan is the nation’s oldest and largest provider of healthcare cost management solutions. The company provides a single gateway to a host of primary, complementary and out-of-network strategies for managing the financial risks associated with healthcare claims. It has almost 900,000 healthcare providers under contract, an estimated 57 million consumers accessing their network products, and 110 million claims processed through their networks each year.

Challenge
The company differentiates itself from other healthcare networks by offering more choices and more value for healthcare payers and providers. A growing and diverse client base and an increasing number of choices translates to growth of databases, more users and more concurrent accesses to the firm’s databases. To keep up with the business, IT department strives to be agile and stay ahead of the curve on its IT infrastructure. With recent growth, business needs exceeded storage infrastructure capabilities – business intelligence reports were taking several days due to storage I/O bottlenecks, impacting timely decision making. Additionally, during peak usage periods the systems slowed down, affecting user experience and productivity. Given the 24×7 nature of their business, the firm needed a solution that did not disrupt their environment during deployment and ongoing operations.

Solution
MultiPlan determined that Maestro software running on the Violin Force Memory Appliance was the only non-disruptive solution in the market that addressed their needs. After installing two Violin GT-1100A Memory Appliances in an active-active high availability cluster, critical quarter-end reports completed five times faster while all other workloads and applications realized an immediate two to three times improvement in performance without any changes to the existing environment. By implementing a high-performance access layer in front of their existing storage infrastructure, MultiPlan eliminated the I/O bottlenecks that were making it a challenge to meet SLAs. Maestro lowered the utilization of the storage controllers allowing the storage arrays to take on additional loads/applications. Finally, given the transparent nature of the Maestro, the deployment did not require any changes to existing operational processes, a key requirement for MultiPlan.

Results and Benefits

Consistent performance during peak usage periods
Backups completing within allotted time windows
Maximized the usage of data assets by allowing concurrent access from multiple applications to
the same databases
Accelerated delivery of new business functions through increased productivity of developers
Saved $400,000 in CapEx compared to alternatives

“Violin’s Maestro provided us with a 2x-5x boost in application performance along with ample room to accommodate future growth,” said Keith Bush, SVP of IT and CIO, MultiPlan.

IT Environment

EMC Clariion CX4-960 (40TB usable)
Cisco 9513 FC switches
HP 9000 Server rp7410; HPUX 11.11
Single-node Oracle 9i R2