MEMIC (Maine Employers’ Mutual Insurance Company)

ITS developed a business continuity and disaster recovery solution to help this leading workers' compensation insurance company achieve four key objectives:

• improve overall operating efficiency;
• control budgets;
• reduce the time needed for data and application recovery; and
• facilitate consistent customer service.

 As an IBM Gold Business Partner, ITS employed IBM Power 720 Express servers and an IBM Storwize V3700 device.

Location: Portland, Maine, United States
Industry: Insurance
URL: MEMIC.com

Client BACKGROUND:

Headquartered in Portland, Maine, where it was founded in 1993, MEMIC is the leading workers' compensation insurer for employers in Maine. The MEMIC Group has additional offices in Manchester, NH; Glastonbury, CT; Albany, NY; Weehawken, NJ; West Conshohocken, PA; and Tampa, FL.

MEMIC offers its products through independent agents. In addition to selling policies, the company has made a major commitment to safety training, and has succeeded in dramatically reducing workplace accidents, thereby controlling the cost of workers’ comp.

BUSINESS NEED:

To better manage compliance with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requirements, the MEMIC Group needed a disaster recovery site that was a specific distance away from its headquarters in Maine. While its business application was highly customized by an in-house team of industry experts, the complexity of developing an efficient business continuity and disaster recovery solution fell beyond the company’s expertise, requiring help from a trusted IT services provider.

Solution:

ITS worked directly with MEMIC’s senior IT management team to design and implement the solution, which comprised the following resources:

• a virtualized system environment using IBM Power 720 Express servers;
• the Power System running i 7 operating system with the POWER VM Virtualization feature and a third party application mobility solution;
• an IBM Storwize V3700 storage array and replication solution;

 The solution supports extensive use of the IBM Power 720 Express servers by establishing multiple logical partitions for production, development and quality assurance. MEMIC uses the solution to complete replication of its production environments and to increase storage capacity.

BENEFITS OF THE SOLUTION:

The business continuity and disaster recovery solution improved MEMIC’s overall operating efficiency through data sharing, resource sharing and high flexibility, which helped the organization meet budget limits.

Further, the solution met the client’s needs for disaster recovery and high-performance application support. Consequently, the client gained the ability to deploy and recover applications and data in an acceptably short time. Finally, this resilient multisite solution gave the MEMIC team a highly reliable IT environment, facilitating consistent customer service.