Allianz Consolidates All European Batch Scheduling in Germany

Customer Snapshot
Company: Allianz Shared Infrastructure Services SE (ASIC) 
Business: Financial services
Specialty: IT infrastructure
Headquarters: Munich, Germany
Website: www.allianz.com

At a Glance

The Challenge

• Replace multiple legacy scheduling tools with one company-wide scheduler
• Find a scheduler capable of reliably handling high job volumes with high performance
• Migrate 350,000 existing jobs to the new platform in 5,000 project days

UC4 Solution

• Works across z/OS, UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms
• Delivers high performance, managing more than 4 million jobs per month
• Integrates file transfer and a flexible scripting language
• Completes huge migration project on time and on budget

Benefits

• Enterprise-wide workload control, using a single scheduler and management console
• Significant operational savings from lower annual software license fees
• Reduced error detection/resolution times; no more “workarounds” to resolve legacy scheduler problems

Allianz wanted to replace its four job schedulers with a single solution that could manage workloads across platforms. With UC4, Allianz now has a single, high-performance, company-wide automation platform that it can manage through a central interface.

Solution
Allianz Shared Infrastructure Services SE (ASIC) provides IT services to European affiliates of the Allianz Group, a leading global provider of insurance, banking, and asset management with operations in 70 nations. As one of the largest in-house IT service providers in financial services, ASIC is consolidating Allianz Group’s IT infrastructure throughout Europe. ASIC currently manages IT infrastructure for 15 Western European Allianz companies. Russia and seven Eastern Europe companies were scheduled to come under ASIC in 2009. ASIC employs a staff of around 1,450 and is one of the biggest users of IBM mainframes worldwide.

The Challenge
ASIC had previously utilized four job scheduling tools from three different providers to manage workloads on its IBM z/OS, HP-UX, Sun Solaris and Windows server platforms. With some 265,000 defined jobs on the mainframe and 87,000 in the client-server environment, management concluded that switching to a single product to manage workloads across all platforms would greatly enhance productivity. Consolidating onto a Linux-based solution running Oracle RAC also would reduce annual maintenance fees.

“We pursue economies of scale by consolidating our IT environment,” states Martin Fuchs, ASIC’s Head of Team Application Operations Procedures
and Automation. “Standardisation and automation of IT infrastructure are key to this strategy. Using multiple job schedulers was less than ideal, and a standardized approach can significantly cut costs.”

ASIC sought a scheduler to manage workloads across operating system platforms, with easy configuration and monitoring. Due to the high volume of jobs on mainframes, the solution had to deliver the performance and reliability immediately. Furthermore, ASIC needed to a scalable scheduling architecture that could migrate existing job definitions and handle future growth.

The UC4 Solution
ASIC evaluated six different job scheduling systems before selecting UC4. UC4 performed superbly in our tests,” states Fuchs. “It was the only product able to meet all of our requirements with a user-friendly interface and extremely effective job management. What ultimately set UC4 apart were the integrated file transfer feature, simplified user interface, flexible UC4 script language, easy-to-use configuration tools and cost.”

Then ASIC faced the daunting task of migrating 350,000 legacy job definitions from four different job scheduling systems to the UC4 platform in
5,000 man-days.

The Migration Project
With the full support of management, ASIC assigned up to 30 employees at times to the migration project and eventually involved more than 200 people. ASIC took advantage of UC4’s migration tools, training and consulting services in migration support.

The two-year migration was finished on time and on budget. In the first year, 39,000 jobs on distributed systems running on 1,670 Windows, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris servers were migrated to the UC4 scheduler. The remaining 48,000 client-server jobs were successfully transferred in the second year. ASIC migrated mainframe jobs in stages, one business unit at a time, achieving rapid ROI.

Importantly, standardizing job definitions allowed ASIC to reduce the total number of jobs by 32%, helping the company streamline its process for configuring and administering the UC4 scheduling environment.

ASIC has developed a company-wide scheduling platform to run more than 4,000,000 jobs per month, 48% on client-server systems and 52% on mainframes. The entire workload is administered and monitored using a central user interface.

Allianz plans to integrate its European subsidiaries, which currently run their own mainframe and clientserver systems, into the Munich-based data center. ASIC is working closely with UC4 to ensure a successful migration.

“A high-performance scheduler is absolutely necessary to further optimize these processes,” states Fuchs. “Quality, security, and costeffectiveness
are key to any good IT infrastructure – and UC4 has delivered what it has promised. Our new IT infrastructure allows us to deliver the quality  services at our customers demand.”