Nebo Systems, a Leading Healthcare Information Services and EDI Solutions Provider Significantly Increases Real-Time Transaction Processing Speeds While Maintaining Maximum System Performance

• Industry/Market:
  Healthcare Information Services
  
• Challenge:
  
  • Required a storage solution to ensure speedy, real-time processing of more than 10,000,000 transactions per month
  • Ensure application performance and rapid response times for thousands of simultaneous users
  • Improve server efficiency to support rapid transmission of large amounts of data
  • Reduce backup times to improve system availability
  • Cost-effectively extend investment in existing infrastructure
• TNIC Solution:
  Alacritech® SEN2002XT Accelerators
  
• Benefits:
  
  • Real-time transaction processing increased by 100%
  • Application performance and response times significantly increased for large and rapidly growing customer base
  • TCP/IP processing effectively offloaded from CPUs, CPU available for Web server and transaction processing
  • Large files of 100K or more in size rapidly transmitted
  • File copying speeds increased by 20-fold
  • Backup times reduced for increased system availability
  • Cost-effective server solution extends life of existing infrastructure avoiding costly alternatives

“With over 10,000,000 transactions a month, we wanted to ensure maximum application performance, speedy transaction processing, and rapid response times for customers. After installing the new dual-port Alacritech SEN2002 Accelerators, our system has been able to easily process and transmit any amount and size of data, without any slow down at all. Notably, our transaction speeds have improved by 100%, our file copying is 20-fold faster, and we’ve significantly reduced the backup times of our stored files. The Alacritech Accelerators enable us to cost-effectively increase the capacity of our existing servers, while maximizing our system performance and availability—the ultimate result is that our customers gain a much better user experience and are highly productive. "
    Andrew Yashchuk, Director, Network Administration
    Nebo Systems, Inc.

Business Overview:
Nebo Systems is a leading healthcare information service and solution provider and offers innovative EDI software to help hospitals manage their businesses better. Nebo Systems’ eCare® suite of products enable healthcare providers to facilitate and track every step of their revenue cycle and include: eCare® CMS/SQL® (electronic claims); eCare® ERA (automated cash posting and account maintenance); eCare® EOB (accelerated secondary billing); eCare® LMRP (Medicare compliance); eCare® (online eligibility and claim status); eCare® ELIG (integrated eligibility); eCare® Contract (contract management) and eCare® ReCon (experience report reconciliation). The eCare® software suite can either be integrated within the providers’ native Information System or accessed through the eCare.com site using a browser, or through a direct link via the NeboNet infrastructure, or both. Nebo Systems currently works with over 200 hospitals, many large clinics, and leading insurance providers including Aetna®, BlueCross® BlueShield®, Anthem®, Cigna®, Humana®, UnitedHealthcare® and many government insurers. Nebo Systems is a 15-year old company based in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois with additional offices in Illinois, Texas and Indiana. Business Challenge:
Nebo Systems’ NeboNet infrastructure supports 200 connections to data centers for large hospital chains which in turn support approximately 10,000 remote healthcare facilities. As a result, the NeboNet infrastructure supports over 16,000 individual users, with an average of 13,000 users accessing the system simultaneously each day to establish insurance eligibility, check claims status and conduct patient billing all in real-time. With over 10,000,000 electronic transactions per month, and increasing amounts of data to be accessed and stored, Andrew Yashchuk, Nebo’s director of Development, wanted to increase performance of his network and extend the life of the existing servers in the NeboNet data center.

“We have 25 HP servers in our data center, and during peak usage times, the CPU’s were saturated with network demands, transaction processing and serving Web pages,” said Yashchuk. “Ideally, we required the best of both worlds. First, to ensure rapid transactions and response times to our customers, and second, we wanted to speed file copying and backups on the back end—the clincher was that we wanted to do it all with our existing servers.”

With several dozen Alacritech 100x4 and 1000x1 Accelerators in his production environment, Yashchuk was already familiar with the unique performance and failover capabilities of Alacritech Accelerators. When he learned the company would be offering the new dual-port Alacritech SEN2002 Accelerator, he immediately requested the new cards for the new Windows Storage Server™ 2003-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances he was deploying to ensure increased application performance, speedy transaction processing, and rapid response times for his customers.

Alacritech Solution and Benefits:
The new Alacritech SEN2002 Accelerators are dual-port Gigabit Ethernet TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) Network Interface Cards (TNICs) that offload and process all TCP-based traffic including e-mail, Web, file serving, file transfer, backup and iSCSI storage to enable Windows-based networked applications to run significantly faster and more efficiently. The Alacritech Accelerators are based on the company’s patented, standards-compliant SLIC Technology®. SLIC Technology is a Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture that efficiently offloads and accelerates network protocol processing to free systems to focus on application processing by eliminating network processing bottlenecks including memory traffic, CPU interrupts and PCI traffic.

“We’re pleased to report that since we installed the dual-port Alacritech SEN2002 Accelerator, it seems our system can easily process and transfer any amount, and any size of data, without any slow down at all,” said Yashchuk. “We’ve gained the huge performance increase and systems efficiency we required, particularly in the transmission of data more than 100K in size. Overall, our transaction speed has improved by 100%, our file copying is 20-fold faster, and we’ve significantly reduced the backup times of our stored files.”

“Before, computers were only as fast as their slowest link, now utilizing Alacritech technology, the network component is on par with the system bus,” said Yashchuk. “The Alacritech Accelerators provide an extremely cost-effective way to increase the capacity of our existing servers, while maximizing our system performance and availability. Our customers are enjoying a much better user experience and notably higher productivity levels making them the ultimate beneficiaries.”

System Configuration