Hed: Title Insurance Giant Migrates to HP Superdome to Automate and Centralize Title and Escrow Services
Dec:
By First American Title Insurance Co., one of the largest title insurers in the United States, recently realized that it had run out of head room on its database server"and that one if its most critical applications needed more space. In fact, the company's FAST Transaction System, its fully integrated, browser-based solution which automates and centralizes title and escrow settlement services, was driving its current 32-processor Intel Xeon server to the breaking point.
"The Fast system gives us a significant advantage over the competition, which doesn't have a single scalable enterprise-wide system," said Larry Godec, chief information officer for parent-company First American Corp., Santa Ana, Calif. "It is clearly critical to our business that we support this system."
The company, which has 15,000 employees in1,200 offices worldwide, had implemented its FAST system in order to decrease the overall processing time for title and closing procedures. "We were pushing the box that housed our SQL Server to over 90 percent CPU utilization and that was impacting user access times, particularly at the month end," said Godec. "We have 11,000 users that log in every single day, and we found that we were simply out of gas and needed to look at other alternatives. "
To find the right solution, the company did a "technology bakeoff" in which it benchmarked several server brands and processor types. It used the WinRunner Automated Software Test Tool from Mercury Interactive to simulate how each system would perform running its FAST application. "HP's Superdome came out on top," said Godec, adding that performance, scalability, stability and price were all factors in the decision.
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