Wisconsin Physicians Service Corp. in Madison, Wis., last year processed more than $7 billion in claims for policyholders in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. That alone could tax its IT infrastructure, but the real test comes each January and July when more than 3 million people sign up for new policies or renew current ones. In an effort to ease the burden during its two busiest months, the insurer Friday will switch its E-mail, Web, and directory servers from Compaq's Intel-based servers to Linux.

The apps, running on mainframe partitions, will run in parallel with the Intel servers until April 1. By October, 40 servers will be switched to Linux partitions. The goal of the switch is to save time and money. Jim Hwang, director of enterprise network systems at WPS, says it takes him two to three minutes to configure an app on a partition on IBM's z900 mainframe. A comparable configuration on an Intel server would take two to three days. The apps also run two to three times faster than they do on the Intel-based servers, he adds.

Randy Lengyel, senior VP of management information systems at the insurer, decided to replace a complete Hitachi infrastructure, including server, tape library, and storage system, when Hitachi got out of the server business last spring. He wanted an infrastructure that could provide time and cost savings as well as the flexibility needed to handle the company's busiest months and slower periods. "If we can move work easily between server platforms to support our busy times," Lengyel says, "we won't have servers sitting idle most of the year."

The z900 gives him the flexibility to move between Linux and zOS, and the Enterprise Storage System with 11 terabytes of capacity will store data from all systems. In addition, the IBM Magstar tape library takes two hours and 20 tape cartridges to get a daily snapshot of all the company data, including open systems that generate images of 1.6 million documents per day. In comparison, its Hitachi predecessor took six hours and 430 cartridges to get a snapshot of the mainframe data only.