Priority Health operates as a health insurance company offering managed-care health plans, employer group health insurance plans, and Medicare approved plans. They service nearly 8,000 employers in 55 counties in MI with approx. 500,000 members and more than 12,000 health care providers.

Priority Health wished to physically segregate their production network from their test and development network. The challenge was to identify application interactions between networks in order to understand what would happen when the production, test and development networks were no longer able to interact with each other. Because the number of applications evolved over time into the hundreds, and the infrastructure evolved into hundreds of servers on three different networks, there was no way to manually understand or map which server or storage device each application was accessing in the daily routine.

HP’s Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory application (DDMI) provides an accurate picture of the IT Environment through reliable discovery and inventory techniques. The application identifies both physical and virtual IT assets. The device discovery capability of HP DDM Inventory automates the discovery, classification and documentation of every network-connected device, including workstations, laptops, mobile devices, servers, routers, hubs, switches, printers, IP phones and firewalls. In-depth inventory and usage information is collected via agents from a large range of platforms, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris ™, Linux and Windows®, as well as for legacy platforms such as OS/2 and DOS. Graphical output allows easy identification of interoperability between applications and hardware, and allows “what if” senarios to perform impact analysis in the event of a change or failure.

Preserved customer uptime - prior to this solution, the plan was to systematically shut down servers and move them to the new, physically separated environment and wait for downed users to call and complain, because IT just didn’t know what would be affected with the server shutdowns and network moves. The output generated by DDMI provided a graphical depiction of Priority Health’s environment of servers, storage and application layers so IT could mitigate unplanned downtime by isolating applications to the desired locations before the physical split of the networks occurred.