Reale Mutua Assurances Improves Connectivity and Fail-Over Options with Visara SCON Console Concentrators

Real Mutual Assurances is the largest insurance agency in Italy and controls 9 other companies in Italy and Europe. Real Mutual Assurances has over 350 Agencies in Italy, while the Mutual Real Group includes approximately 850 agencies worldwide.

After analysis of its existing information systems, Reale Mutua Assurances decided to consolidate all of their subsidiaries and individual companies on a single platform. To complete their migration from a legacy to a TCP/IP environment, Reale Mutua Assurances safeguarded its existing investments and significantly reduced operations expenses by choosing a console consolidation solution.

Giulio Liberati, Director of IT Services said, “With the transition to the new environment, we have consolidated significantly. After analyzing our existing infrastructure, with ten 3x74 control units connected to the mainframe, we decided that this was a good time to consolidate. We also wanted to obtain a working environment with complete failover options with units connected by coaxial.

A single concentrator,” Liberati continues, “really appeals to us. The Visara SCON 22L has the capability to manage 32 coax connections, offers full support for the StorageTek library and also has the ability to manage 16 logical system partitions, giving us room to grow.”

In fact, the actual configuration has three partitions on the mainframe, an IBM z990 T-REX model 2084, that they can increase with the potential addition of other departments in the company. (The company currently leads the insurance market in Italy and controls assets in banking, financial services and real estate.) The current network infrastructure includes over 400 UNIX, Windows and NT servers and more than 2500 customer workstations.

Business Continuity

“There are two Visara units,” Liberati continues, “used to replace the old units - with the second to provide backup protection and redundancy. They serve the three logical partitions, with each one connected to the StorageTek unit, for a total of six connections. The StorageTek machine is active on one of the two SCON systems, and in case one system fails, the other unit can be ready to take over.”

The consoles are accessed via a networked NCT 1783 unit and 21 inch monitors are used to view the three console sessions simultaneously. Always ensuring complete failover options are in place, two standard 3270 coax terminals are also connected to the Visara units. These terminals operate in multi-session mode and represent alternative consoles to the ones on the LAN, preventing a disruption if the LAN connections are interrupted.

“In addition to the remarkable recovery of space and savings on electric costs,” remarks Liberati, “the new configuration based on the SCON solution allows us to save over 22K Euro in maintenance for one year.”

Overall, the whole infrastructure becomes simpler to manage and significant points of failure are eliminated from the network.