GEICO MIGRATES TO JBOSS ENTERPRISE APPLICATION PLATFORM

COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: US

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Existing middleware platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: 28 bands (1 band = 32 CPUs), Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Consulting, Amentra

HARDWARE: 50 Dell servers

BENEFITS: Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 30%, throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform, overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware

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COMPANY BACKGROUND

GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States based on the latest 12 months written premium. GEICO provides auto insurance coverage for nearly 9 million policyholders and insures more than 14.4 million vehicles.

In addition to auto insurance, GEICO also offers customers insurance for their motorcycles and homes. Commercial auto insurance, boat, ATV, RV, personal umbrella protection and life insurance are also available.

GEICO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, is rated A++ for financial stability by A.M. Best Company and ranks at the top of several national customer satisfaction surveys. For more information about GEICO, go to www.geico.com.

BUSINESS AND/OR TECHNICAL CHALLENGE

In 2007, GEICO’s enterprise architecture team recognized they were facing several challenges with their existing middleware platform. The platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

More detail on the challenges with the existing middleware is documented below.

- Cost – GEICO’s license agreement was a “time bound licensing agreement” for the number of application servers deployed during the time frame. Since GEICO experienced significant growth during this time frame, the cost to “true up” and pay for the additional licenses was significant.

- Performance – When GEICO upgraded their Java Application Platform JDK from version 1.4 to 1.5, they saw no improvements in either machine (CPU/Memory) usage or application response time. After eight weeks of performance testing and tuning, they were finally able to configure the upgraded platform to match the earlier version’s performance. The upgrade was not only cumbersome but was also expensive since they had to engage professional services to accomplish the upgrade.

- Memory leaks – The current JDK experienced unexplained memory leak(s). Developer load and memory testing returned misleading results unless the developer knew how to work around the leaks and complete certain types of tests.

- Documentation/Support – GEICO found it challenging to identify and understand the Java API in the current JDK environment due to lack of documentation. They also had challenges in acquiring tools to identify memory issues, debug leaks, etc. For every instance of a high severity issue such as memory leak, external professional services had to be engaged to identify and fix the problem.

- Staging – – Some of GEICO development teams adopted JBoss for the developer workstations and built the code on JBoss. It was a complex and redundant process engaging operations to make configuration changes on dual platforms.

VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS

GEICO conducted extensive research and identified Sun’s GlassFish and Red Hat’s JBoss as potential solutions that were suitable for GEICO’s application and infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Middleware was selected based on their market share and extensive support from Red Hat. GEICO conducted a proof-of-concept, and installed JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as the current middleware application platform in a cluster of servers (POC environment). Performance and load tests were conducted using various tools for a selected business application on both platforms.

The results from these tests were astonishing. A few highlights are listed below:

- User page transition time decreased as much as 19 seconds

- During the proof-of-concept 1,749 additional business processes were created on JBOSS

- On the same hardware and environment, JBoss required 70% less CPU resources than the current platform

- Performance tuning JBoss was accomplished in 40 man hours versus 1440 man hours for the current platform

GEICO also conducted multiple reference checks with organizations that were of similar size and industry. The reference checks were extremely positive about Red Hat.

SOLUTION

The solution consisted of acquiring the licenses for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JEAP). The initial deployment environment consisted of 17 bands. An additional 11 bands were added at a later date. (1 band = 32 CPUs). A plan was put together to aggressively migrate 2 out of 3 mission critical applications in a time span of 3 months. GEICO also acquired the TAM license (Red Hat Technical Account Manager dedicated to GEICO) as part of the contract.

BENEFITS

By implementing the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, GEICO was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by more than 30%.

The added benefit was a throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform. The overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

RED HAT SUPPORT, TRAINING, AND CONSULTING SERVICES LEVERAGED

One of the challenges for GEICO was the time bound migration process. GEICO’s middleware team was trained on JBoss for a week. With the support of Red Hat and Amentra (a Division of Red Hat), they successfully migrated not only the planned 2 out of 3 applications but all 3 applications. This was a clear demonstration of expertise in Red Hat Consulting services and the ability of GEICO’s middleware team to adapt rapidly.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COMPANIES FACING A SIMILAR BUSINESS CHALLENGE

“Open-source does not translate to unsupported”. Don’t be afraid of change. GEICO had initial concerns about support, stability and deploying open-source software for its mission critical applications. The market maturity and the premium level of support offered by Red Hat made it very easy to make the change to an open source solution. If your organization has been slow to consider adopting open-source solutions, the competitive advantage that can be gained based on the lower cost of ownership and utilization of efficient/best of breed products can be lost.