Caremark Rx (PCS Health Systems)

"With Solid Data's solid-state disk, performance is fast at all times, freeing me to work on other projects. The solid-state disk effortlessly handles our highest loads--even during peak periods."

Kevin Smolkowski
Senior Systems Engineer
Caremark Rx (PCS Health Systems)

Overview
As a leading information-driven health solutions company, Caremark Rx (PCS Health Systems) manages and monitors 300 million individual prescriptions each year representing $10 billion in drug expenditures. PCS customers include 4 million people under the Federal Employees Program (FEP), 12 million HMO/PPO members, 14 million employees of self-insured companies, more than 100 insurance carriers, and more than 40 Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans. Like many other successful companies experiencing rapid growth, a high volume of concurrent users began to put a strain on PCS' OLTP mail-order pharmacy application.

The company's Informix system was experiencing an I/O bottleneck that was slowing performance during peak periods. When the system would hit a peak number of I/Os per second, a slowdown in system response time would occur, sometimes resulting in a virtual gridlock. "It was a high priority business issue that we addressed immediately because excellent customer service is very important to the company," explained Kevin Smolkowski, Senior Systems Engineer at PCS.

Smolkowski diagnosed the issue and knew how to solve it. "We could tell that we were fast running out of capacity and traditional disk I/O speeds would not be able to handle the traffic generated by our rapid increase in business," he said. Smolkowski researched possible solutions such as striping, faster disk drives, and a faster RAID system, but these alternatives would provide performance gains of only 20% to 30%. He found that for a similar cost, he could purchase a solid-state storage system that would improve performance tenfold. Smolkowski eliminated the I/O bottleneck by installing a 900 Class solid-state disk system and moving their temp space onto the system. He saw an instant payback on PCS' investment when performance immediately improved. "We're happy to be providing superior service for our customers. The solid-state disk delivers consistently fast performance at all times and can handle the added traffic as we continue to grow," said Smolkowski. "And it's a very cost-effective solution. Because of our successful results, we're looking into adding capacity to our current system and purchasing another unit," he added.

Summary
Due to PCS' success and rapid growth, the company was experiencing an I/O bottleneck that affected the performance of their Informix OLTP mail-order pharmacy application. System response time was slowing during peak periods as a high volume of users were accessing the system concurrently. Alternative solutions were researched, but none matched the performance gains provided by solid-state storage. The 800 Solid-State Disk solved the I/O bottleneck very cost-effectively. Installing the Solid Data solid-state disk provided dramatically increased performance for PCS' customers, resulting in consistently fast response times, even during peak periods.

Caremark Rx (PCS Health Systems) Case Study PDF: 16 KB (pcs.pdf)