US insurer UICI is installing nine Unisys ES7000 servers to support its policy and claims processing operations, consolidating more than 40 commodity servers.
Texas-based UICI will consolidate most of its current farm of 40+ commodity servers onto eight Unisys ES7000s and will use the ninth for developing and testing.
The Unisys servers are powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors and run the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database and Windows Server 2003.
Glen Whitling, manager of database administration, UICI, says the SQL Server database is the core of the firm's imaging workflow, enterprise application integration and telephony/interactive voice response environments.
"Careful analysis and collaboration with Unisys, along with our own benchmark results, convinced us that the time is right to standardise on an Intel 64-bit platform with Windows Server 2003 for better scalability, performance and reliability at a lower cost," says Whitling.
Unisys says UICI's own tests demonstrated that its servers completed tasks nearly four times faster than was previously possible on commodity servers.
Tom Manter, database server program director, Unisys, comments: "UICI's selection of the ES7000 is further evidence of the trend for IT managers to consolidate and standardise large-scale enterprise data centres."