CNA Insurance Selects HP to Provide High-Availability Solutions for Mission-Critical Applications; Clustered HP 9000 Servers Provide Faster Time to Market, More Flexibility than Mainframe Solution

Business Wire, August 6, 1996

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 6, 1996--Hewlett-Packard Company today announced that CNA Insurance, a leading provider of property, casualty and commercial insurance, is replacing its mainframes with HP 9000 servers configured in HP MC/ServiceGuard enterprise clusters for its mission-critical business applications and databases. CNA Insurance is a multiline company with $17 billion in annual sales and 20,000 employees worldwide.

CNA's Personal Lines Division, which employs almost 800 people at a processing center in Reading, Pa., is the first CNA division to implement HP's enterprise clusters.

"While doing a massive re-engineering of our business processes, we realized that the current technology would not be an enabler for the new processes we would be putting in place," said Monty Mohanty, CNA's director of business technology.

With design and implementation assistance from HP's Professional Service Organization, the Personal Lines Division is implementing a highly available distributed architecture based on the HP MC/ServiceGuard high-availability software solution. MC ServiceGuard is a software facility that is used to automatically detect errors or failures on one node in a cluster or to automatically transfer workload or applications to another active node in the same cluster. The first two clusters at Personal Lines run the division's new policy-management application from the company's agency management services as well as a direct-marketing application developed at CNA.

CNA said system availability was the most critical problem at the division's processing center in Reading. Any downtime on the mainframe meant that nearly 800 people were unable to complete their work. Restoring the mainframe usually took two hours or more. "Downtime was a major source of irritation, lost revenue and reduced service levels," said Mohanty.

To help ensure the highest availability, the clusters run HP OpenView system and network-management software and IT Operations, an HP OpenView management platform for advanced operations and problem resolution. In addition, CNA Personal Lines has HP Premier Account Support for its critical business applications.

CNA said it already has begun reaping the benefits of its new system. When a Personal Lines Division data-center employee inadvertently crashed one node, the system operated perfectly.

"This little accident was the acid test that let us know exactly why we chose HP's high-availability options," said Dwight Wolfe, senior manager of UNIX(R) systems. "With the redundancies that we built into the server vis-a-vis the RAID arrays and the replication back to home office, everything worked as it was designed to."

"High availability is the crucial pillar for mission-critical business applications," said Carol G. Mills, general manager for HP's General Systems Division. "CNA is an excellent example of how HP's high-availability portfolio provides a more flexible solution than a mainframe can for meeting customers' changing business requirements."

On completing its first phase of implementation in the Personal Lines Division, CNA said it expects to add nine more high-availability clusters running MC/ServiceGuard. CNA says it will deploy these additional servers in other divisions and will run additional mission-critical applications for data warehousing, claims and underwriting.

HP's high-availability solutions include enterprise cluster software such as HP MC/ServiceGuard, data-protection products such as RAID arrays, mirrored Disk/UX, HP OpenView network- and system-management software and the Professional Services Organization's consulting and support.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 108,300 employees and had revenue of $31.5 billion in its 1995 fiscal year.

Information about HP's products and services is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com. -0-

Note to Editors: UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open(tm) Company Limited. X/Open is a trademark of X/Open Company Limited in the UK and other countries.

CONTACT: Hewlett-Packard Company

Kim Daniel, 408/447-4587

or

Lisa Warren-Plungy, 408/447-6928

lwarren-plungy@hoffman.com REPEATS: New York 212-752-9600 or 800-221-2462; Boston 617-236-4266 or

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