CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Leading German Insurance Provider Reduces Mainframe Downtime with BMC Software

R+V Insurance, one of Germany’s largest and most successful insurance providers, reduced the time spent on DB2® object changes by up to 80 percent with mainframe solutions from BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC).

Before the installation of the BMC Recovery Management for DB2® solution, R+V Insurance’s DB2 processes were complex and required an entire team of dedicated database administrators (DBAs) to manage the necessary change and recovery processes. With the BMC solution, R+V needs just two or three DBAs to manage its entire z/OS® infrastructure while also increasing data recovery and improving performance.

One challenge that faced the DBA team was changing low-level DB2 object attributes without compromising productivity. The normal processing could take hours and incur a period of downtime affecting critical business functions. The Transform, or High-speed Structure Change (HSSC), feature of BMC Recovery Management for DB2 enabled the team to make these changes in minutes with no business downtime and a performance gain of up to 40 percent in the production environment.

"BMC Recovery Management for DB2 is an important tool in helping R+V Insurance plan and generate its backup and recovery strategy,” said Rolf Schulz, lead DBA at R+V Insurance. "The solution increased the productivity of our DBAs and the reliability of DB2 objects and included fast utilities and other backup performance features that maximized availability.”

A key factor in R+V Insurance’s partnership with BMC has been the tools’ ability to fit within a diverse and large-scale technology infrastructure, which operates two IBM® x z10™ machines with two-way data sharing. BMC Recovery Management for DB2 provides integrated tools to back up and recover databases and to analyze logs, as well as unique functionality such as recovery time simulation and time stamp recovery.

This installation has been part of a larger strategy to support R+V Insurance in its drive to mitigate risk with automated disaster recovery. Automation is one of the primary ways to compensate for limited DBA resources, and using the integrated portfolio from BMC has increased efficiency of internal DBA staff and service delivery to external customers.

"We strive to align ourselves as close to our customers as possible and through this process with R+V Insurance we learned that, like us, the company has a proud tradition on being a technology innovator,” said Nick Glover, BMC’s vice president of EMEA sales and services for mainframe service management. "We have a longstanding business relationship with R+V Insurance, spanning more than 15 years and resulting in a two-way learning experience.”

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