Unisys & Surveillance Data, Inc.
Breakthrough: Surveillance Data, Inc. Delivers Business Intelligence
Imagine it.
A flexible, powerful, scalable IT infrastructure that keeps pace with a business that’s experiencing major top-line revenue growth.

Done.
Surveillance Data, Inc. (SDI) deployed Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers and EMC® Symmetrix® storage to deliver the power and agility needed to fuel its data-hungry business.

Seamless Business Enablement and Growth

SDI relies on Unisys ES7000/one servers and EMC Symmetrix storage to provide timely, accurate, robust data analysis solutions for its clients. Combing through a 20TB – and growing – Oracle 10g data warehouse, SDI analysts perform sophisticated SAS analyses that offer market, physician, consumer, and competitive insights to SDI’s customers.

 

Metrics

Business Challenge: Enabling Rapid Growth in a Data-Centric Business

Information is everything in today’s global marketplaces. That’s why the world’s top pharmaceutical, consumer product, and healthcare companies turn to Surveillance Data, Inc. (SDI) for high-quality data analytical and professional services.


“We assemble large sets of integrated healthcare data related to physicians and patients in a wide range of healthcare settings,” explains Don Ragas, chief information officer. “Our customers use this information to analyze their markets, products, customers, and competitors.”


SDI delivers highly business-relevant healthcare data products – a service that’s much in demand. In fact, SDI has seen its top-line revenue grow by more than 30 percent per annum in recent years and seeks to continue this rapid expansion in the future.


Powering continued growth means turning client requests around quickly. However, SDI’s IT infrastructure, founded on a scale-out server model, wasn’t meeting the challenge. IT Manager Chris McCaffrey explains: “Our data stores are large, covering time periods measured in years, and most data is granular. The majority of client projects start with an initial analysis and data mining effort that reads large percentages of that information. We needed a larger hardware infrastructure that would process terabytes of data at a time, rather than trying to scale out over smaller servers.”


Ragas emphasizes, “SDI must have a flexible IT platform that can scale with the business. It also needs to be reliable and provide 24x7 availability.”


Solution: A Powerful Platform for Data Warehousing and Analytics

To ensure the robust, scalable infrastructure it needed to grow, SDI evaluated server platforms from three vendors and selected Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers over the incumbent.

 

The Unisys team showed us how the ES7000/one could be deployed in our current environment without having to undo other infrastructure decisions.
Don Ragas
Chief Information Officer
Surveillance Data, Inc.

“We were not familiar with Unisys servers,” Ragas recalls. “The Unisys team showed us how the ES7000/one could be deployed in our current environment without having to undo other infrastructure decisions. They also established a test environment that allowed us to deploy, integrate, and benchmark the solution to confirm the system would work.”

 

SDI found the test bed to be a valuable resource for evaluating operating system choices. “Our goal was to find an OS that scales,” recalls McCaffrey. “SDI chose Linux to support our Oracle data warehouse because it performs very well, and is cost effective, easily manageable, and very stable.”

 

SDI deployed two, eight-processor ES7000/one Enterprise Servers to support its mixed operating system environment. One ES7000/one Server runs SDI’s Oracle 10g data warehouse under the Red Hat Linux® Enterprise operating system. The other ES7000/one server uses 64-bit Intel® Itanium® 2 processors to power SDI’s SAS business intelligence application, which runs in a Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 environment.

 

The solution includes a storage area network (SAN) using EMC Symmetrix DMX Series systems. Andrew Richardson, manager of technical operations, observes, “Our old scale-out server environment used direct-attached storage and entry-level SANs, which limited data access, raised security challenges, and proved difficult to manage. The EMC DMX is very scalable, reliable, and easy to manage.” Due to growth in data from 10TB to 20TB in just one year, SDI recently upgraded its EMC SAN.

 

An upgrade to 16 processors on the platform that supports its Oracle data warehouse has confirmed SDI’s decision to deploy ES7000/one Servers. “We doubled our data warehouse infrastructure and the install was completed in four hours. Otherwise, the ES7000/one has been up 24x7 for a year,” says McCaffrey. And SDI still has plenty of room for growth – its ES7000/one servers can scale to 32 processors.

 

Results: An Agile Infrastructure Supports a
Booming Business

The results from SDI’s scalable Unisys server- and EMC storage-based infrastructure have been impressive:

SDI enjoys faster reporting in the ES7000/one environment. For example, a weekly HIV data report runs in just 60 minutes, down from its previous 12-24 hour runtime. What’s more, the company can support up to 50 concurrent SAS users – significant given the large memory requirements of the SAS analytical engine.

 

Consolidation onto a scale-up solution has also proved advantageous. “There’s been a tremendous benefit from eliminating the manual effort in gathering data from multiple locations to create a customer deliverable,” explains McCaffrey. “Having most of the data accessible from one server allowed us to change our processes – giving us greater scalability even within our own IT shop, and the ability to deliver faster. Consolidating SAS data sets also improved security.”

 

Our new infrastructure lets SDI analysts perform more sophisticated data mining analyses and develop new products, which increases our value to our client base.
Chris McCaffrey
IT Manager
Surveillance Data, Inc.

Beyond the performance boost from deploying an Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based environment, the ES7000/one enabled SDI to expand client services using SAS. “Our new infrastructure lets SDI analysts perform more sophisticated data mining analyses and develop new products, which increases our value to our client base,” says McCaffrey.

 

Better insight and the ability to be proactive are other benefits. “The Unisys solution has enabled us to better predict our needs going forward,” says Ragas. “As SDI’s business grows, we can now see when we’ll reach threshold points that require an upgrade. This allows us to budget better going forward.”

 

The Relationship: A Partnership that Delivers
Business Value

“The value Surveillance Data, Inc. gets from working with Unisys is in the partnership,” says Ragas. “We consider our Unisys team to be part of our decision-making process. They understand our business, where we’re going, our management philosophy, and how we like to operate.”

 

Profile: Surveillance Data, Inc.

Solution at a Glance

 

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