A leading U.S. healthcare organization sought to enhance its mainframe operations to improve performance, ensure disaster recovery compliance, and optimize costs. 

Challenges  

The client needed to standardize their mainframe hosting environment to improve continuity of operations and ensure compliance with disaster recovery standards after an OIG DR finding. 

Additionally, they required improvements in processing efficiency, capacity management, and overall performance, as they were falling short of both business objectives and budget expectations.  

Our solution  

We transitioned and deployed four Logical Partitions (LPARs) with 11,000 MIPS, ensuring the use of standardized software and mainframe tools across the infrastructure. Each LPAR was equipped to manage over 125 interactive started tasks, including CICS regions, database instances, and MQ services. 

To further enhance performance, we deployed customized SMF / RMF reporting and trending tools, enabling continuous performance monitoring and improvement. We executed comprehensive disaster recovery plans across all LPARs, including annual drills with full end-user testing. 

Business outcomes 

Our solution improved application availability, reduced costs, and increased compute performance. We achieved a 99.97% monthly mainframe application availability, exceeding industry standard SLAs. 

By standardizing software tools, we reduced costs and maintained sub-second (0.05 to 0.3 MS) response times for over one billion CICS transactions per month. We further implemented satellite DR and storage replication to resolve the OIG DR finding. 

Finally, we reduced FTE support needs from 5.5 to under 3 per application instance, driving significant operational efficiency.