Earning the “Title” of High Availability in Mission-Critical Computing
One surprising aspect of the home market is that one company, First American Title, manages more-than 25 percent of the title insurance business in the United States. With products such as title insurance, property information, specialty insurance, mortgage information, and their First Advantage business solutions subsidiary, First American supports millions of Americans every year, through at least one of its corporate brands. It closed fiscal year 2006 with over $8.5 billion in sales, up from $6.7 billion in 2004 -- showing strong growth. 
To make that happen needed rapid access to property data, loan information, ownership records, and the highest-performing Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the business. With a 1.7 terabyte database and as many as 15,000 daily users in more than 1,300 offices requiring access to the same data, they needed a system with the highest performance and availability to maintain the highest responsiveness in this critical business environment. To meet these mission-critical needs, they turned to a solution built around the Intel® Itanium processor which offered several advantages that support high availability for this kind of business environment:
A key aspect of support is redundancy in the systems architecture, something supported in the past for this type of application by deploying cluster-based solutions. Unfortunately most of today's data warehouse, BI, CRM, Supply Chain Management (SCM), and ERP applications do not scale well across multiple servers, so clustering is not an option - even if there weren't other drawbacks to these kind of solutions as well. Solutions which support ease of scaling by adding more processors, adding memory, and installing additional I/O capability, make it easy to build a redundant, single system able to grow as computing needs do.
Intel® Virtualization technology, another key benefit, allows the system to optimize the utilization of each processor and manage system availability on demand by using physical partitions, virtual partitions and OS virtualization
First American's earlier solutions had more than 50 title and escrow systems and business processes running differently across the company, and evaluated some of its critical data manually, which causedup to a four-week delay in information delay. This contributed to difficulty in rolling out new products as needed.
They initially upgraded to an Intel server with 8 Intel Xeon® processors (later expanding to 32), but this was still not enough. By finally moving to an HP Integrity Superdome®, they were able to consolidate all applications in a single system - and improve performance at the same time.
Once the system was up and operational, First American saw an immediate 20 percent improvement in online response times. Further, because of the high system availability the company learned to rely even more on it, by standardizing processes and centralizing back-office production work, both in the title and escrow areas. As a result, not only has First American been able to grow its market through better deployment of services, more tightly-managed enterprise reporting, and more rapid creation of new products, it has also seen an estimated around $50 million a year -- because of the ability to consolidate in a single highly-scalable system.
All in all, the First American story is played out around the globe. Are your systems in need of an availability upgrade? When you're operating in today's always-on business world the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time can mean the difference between success and failure. Why not stack your deck with a system known for its high levels of availability?
All views expressed within this blog are those of the blog author and do not reflect the opinions of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, Itanium Solutions Alliance member companies or Intel Corporation.
"So, it seems as though the real companies who can get use out of these servers are very large. Is that generally the case?"
- Peter, Feb 28, 2008"
That's a good question.
Certainly a company like First American, with its 1.7 terabyte database and 15,000 users, will benefit a great deal from the high availability features Itanium-based servers offer. But smaller companies and smaller installations are a growing part of the user base as well, and for many of the same reasons. If anything, their IT departments are stretched even more tightly, making the desire to consolidate servers into one system even more important to the enterprise. When you do that, the issues of high availability, manifested in dynamic error correction plus processor and memory mirroring, can become even more important. Plus, the pure processing speed and scalability of Itanium-based systems also plays here as well, since the size of a company isn't always in proportion to their computing demands.
One example of a product offering for this part of the market is the new HP Integrity BL870 Server Blade, which supports up to four dual-core Intel Itanium 9100 processors and up to 96 GB of memory, per blade, all packaged into their BladeSystem c3000. The "Shorty" (nicknamed for its squatty, compact size) supports up to 8 blades. It also can be set up quickly using one of their pre-packaged software "Solution Blocks", so an IT department can get it running quickly and with a minimum of precious resource time. This entire product line was designed to bring the benefits of Itanium-based system computing into small and mid-size businesses, remote sites for larger businesses, and mid-size business needs.
As always, talking with an alliance member will get you the best advice for your application. But there's no question that companies of most sizes can benefit from the high availability, scalability, and raw performance capabilities of Itanium-based systems.
" - Brad Reddersen, Mar 5, 2008