MADISON NATIONAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, INC.
ALACRITECH CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

Growing Life Insurance Company Extends Life of Servers, Significantly Increases Employee Productivity and Cuts Backup Times by 80%

• Industry/Market:
  » Insurance
  
• Challenge:
  » Reduce latency and increase data throughput in corporate network
  » Increase employee productivity by speeding access to critical, networked applications
  » Reduce number of hours required for backup
  
• Solution:
  » Alacritech Quad-Port Server Accelerator
  
• Benefits:
  » Rapid communication with production servers
  » Network bottlenecks eliminated
  » Backup time using Veritas Backup Exec 8.0 reduced by 80%
  » Use of existing technology; costly new infrastructure avoided

"Madison National Life's MIS department strives to deploy cost-effective, yet leading-edge technology to ensure our systems and employees are able to quickly convert and administer even the most sophisticated policies. Judging by the incredible results we've achieved with just two Alacritech Server Accelerators, we're very much looking forward to installing the company's new Gigabit Accelerators in up to 15 of our production servers."
     David Zanesco, Network Manager
     Madison National Life Insurance Company, Inc.

Business Challenge:
Madison National Life Insurance Company, Inc., is based in Middleton, Wisconsin. For 35 years, Madison National Life has provided, primarily to the mid-Western states, group long-term disability and group-term life insurance policies to school districts and municipalities; and credit life and disability coverage through affiliate credit unions. Recently, Madison National Life Insurance began servicing the military and civilian government employee markets, and is now licensed to distribute whole life policies nationally and in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Madison National Life has a staff of 200 total, 70 of who work on site in Middleton, Wisconsin, and nearly all managers and sales people access the company's Web site, network and applications from remote locations. The employees of Madison National Life rely primarily on Freedom Accounting software, LifePro life insurance software and a SQL database. The company's network (Token Ring) consists of a SAN box with 15 Windows 2000-based servers. All 15 servers are used as primary production servers, and one server houses Veritas Backup Exec 8.0 for tape backups.

As the company began to grow, and additional insurance services and customer markets were added, office workers experienced slowness in their applications and network access. David Zanesco, Network Manager, also noticed a slower response time with the servers and increasing network latency. In addition, nightly backups of 470 Gigabytes of crucial customer insurance policy applications and information would begin at 8:00 p.m. and run throughout the night, ending at 7:30 a.m. - a total of nearly 12 hours.

Alacritech Solution and Benefits:
Zanesco began to search for ways to increase the performance and efficiency in his servers and speed data throughput in the network. "We're on a token ring network, so we looked at high-speed token ring cards including the Olicom's 100 Mbps card and Madge Networks' offering. Both companies had products, which were very good. However, we were more impressed with the information we found on the Internet about Alacritech and its specialized server acceleration cards, so we decided to give them a call. Once we received the Alacritech Quad-Port Server Accelerator cards, we were able to install them in less than 20 minutes with absolutely no down time at all."

Alacritech server accelerators use a patented ASIC for protocol processing. This ASIC offloads network protocol processing from the host CPU. Alacritech accelerators are based on SLIC Technology® and are designed to improve host processor efficiency, increase data throughput and reduce network latency.

"From a technical perspective, installing the Alacritech cards enabled us to avoid laying down costly new infrastructure. We increased the performance in our servers and network, and we dramatically reduced the time we spent backing up our data by about 80% - from 12 hours to just two," said Zanesco. "From a business perspective, this technology decision was key as it has provided our employees with faster network and database access, thereby significantly increasing their productivity and enabling them to service customer needs more efficiently - something we pride ourselves on here at Madison National Life. In the future, we're looking to install Alacritech's new Gigabit Ethernet Server and Storage Accelerators on all the production servers, which would connect to our IP Ethernet switch. We'll also plan to have the cards on our tape backup servers. All totaled, Alacritech technology ensures our servers process data efficiently in a way that avoids bottlenecks and our network is fast. Our 200 employees are now highly effective and I'm not having to field any more complaints."

System Configuration: