Case Study

Amentra Leads Migration from WebSphere to JBoss

Service:
Open Source Solution
Industry:
Insurance
Engagement
Campaign Management Assessment and Recommendation

Amentra Leads Migration from WebSphere to JBoss for Leading Insurance Company

Instilled industry-standard practices and led process improvements to enhance project delivery

Before Amentra

Prior to the migration to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), the customer utilized the WebSphere Application Server platform on hundreds of servers to maintain a web presence throughout all facets of the organization. The business-critical deployed applications included customer-facing sales, and policy maintenance, as well as internal applications to handle claims and payments. The existing WebSphere-based infrastructure had necessitated the acquisition of expensive hardware to mitigate scalability issues while simultaneously resulting in high licensing and support costs. The existing environment faced the following challenges:

  • Dramatically increasing hardware costs driven by performance requirements
  • Performance problems caused by overhead of the heavyweight application server
  • Difficulties in administration and troubleshooting due to the lack of standard practices and overly cumbersome server configurations
  • Unexpected behavior in customer-facing applications because of inconsistencies between development and production environments
  • Inefficient use of hardware resources due to poor alignment of business interests and IT requirements
  • High total cost of ownership (TCO) due to expensive licensing fees and support costs

After Amentra

Amentra led the migration from WebSphere to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, working with existing hardware and software tools to facilitate a seamless transition to the less expensive and more efficient infrastructure. Application servers were rapidly transitioned over two months as applications were certified for production use. Amentra carried out this migration using its standard JBoss EAP migration methodology and deep knowledge of both WebSphere and JBoss internals, significantly easing and shortening the transition process for the client. The tuned JBoss Application Server decreased memory and CPU utilization by 20%, allowing more efficient allocation of hardware.

Amentra's mentoring model was a key element of the migration effort and was used to ensure that the customer’s employees would have the expertise to administer the application servers and troubleshoot future issues at the conclusion of the project. Amentra consultants guided employees through a proven performance tuning methodology, mentoring them on required concepts and tools. In the future, these customer employees will be able to lead similar migrations based on the knowledge they gained during the project, a significant benefit not normally provided by Amentra’s competitors.

As a result of the Amentra-led migration, the company also reaps the following benefits:

  • A low TCO for an extremely scalable architecture that meets client business and IT requirements and offers the same functionality with higher performance than the retired WebSphere configuration
  • Increased customer satisfaction and more efficient business processes due to transactions that are 15% faster on average
  • Environments properly allocated and configured for performance testing
  • Realigned infrastructure to meet the needs of both business interests and IT stakeholders
  • Mentoring of operations groups to enable employees to identify underutilized hardware resources for evaluation and reallocation
  • Infrastructure optimized for performance and scalability, reducing projected hardware costs
  • Stakeholders familiar with the necessary tools and technology to maintain an efficient and scalable JBoss environment
  • Industry-standard practices documented and shared, resulting in increased employee productivity

Applied Technology & Expertise

The Amentra team worked with the client stakeholders while taking on several key roles within various application and operations groups to facilitate the migration. The team led the following key activities to achieve the specified results:

  • Led the deployment of JBoss Application Server to host projects utilizing other JBoss tools, such as jBPM, Hibernate, and JBoss Web
  • Integrated third-party JMS, caching, and performance monitoring services with the JBoss platform
  • Created and delivered tutorials and hands-on instruction explaining all of the technologies, development environments, and tools used by the development and operations teams
  • Developed and delivered tools for the deployment, administration, configuration, and maintenance of application servers
  • Worked side-by-side with the development and operations teams, demonstrating industry-standard practices, solving technical problems, and ensuring that the new technologies were used effectively
  • Guided clients through the process of analyzing application requirements and creating high-performance, stable configurations
  • Provided performance tuning and profiling expertise to ensure maximum utilization of resources
  • Reduced downtime for upgrades by assisting in the development of more efficient application deployment strategies
  • Served as expert resources to solve technical problems during the project lifecycle

Technology Used

  • JBoss EAP
  • Sun JDK
  • Tomcat
  • Apache Web Server
  • Wily Introscope
  • HP Diagnostics
  • Mercury LoadRunner
  • VisualGC
  • YourKit Java Profiler (YJP)
  • Tangosol Coherence