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LogistiCare Ensures Availability of IBM DB2 withSteelEye LifeKeeperHeadquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and operating 27 offices across 15 states, LogistiCare® (www.logisticare.com) is the nation’s leading transportation management solution, offering complex transportation programs tailored to government and commercial call centers. As a single-source solution, LogistiCare manages call center operations, eligibility screening, scheduling, dispatch, billing, and quality assurance. It also manages local transportation networks of commercial, nonprofit and public transportation providers, including a network of nearly 1,000 nonemergency transportation providers who deliver the actual trip service.

LogistiCare accomplishes all this through the use of its proprietary software platform, LogistiCADSM. LogistiCAD handles an average of 14,000 reservations and schedules an average of 44,000 trips daily. LogistiCAD represents the next generation of LogistiCare’s platform which replaced EMTrack, the company’s legacy system whose widespread success and market acceptance fueled LogistiCare’s evolution to become a total outsourcing solution provider. Because of its role as a 24/7/365 service provider, LogistiCare must ensure high availability of its platform, as even a few moments of downtime can jeopardize customer or partner satisfaction and greatly effect the quality of service it provides to clients.

“We are a 24 by 7 business and everything we do in IT reflects that,” noted Robert Cornell, Chief Technology Officer, LogistiCare. “We strive to put together an environment with two of everything, from hardware to connectivity, all the way to our data.”

New Platform, New High Availability Requirements

LogistiCare’s research and development centers in Gainesville and Jacksonville, Florida undertook the task of rewriting the company’s flagship application, EMTrack. As part of the design of the new LogistiCAD platform, the team elected to use IBM DB2™ for its expanded functionality and improved performance. In addition, LogistiCare’s development team elected to run Linux® as the platform to host IBM DB2.

“We wanted to protect our databases from downtime that could be potentially caused by the known vulnerabilities on the Windows platform – malware, viruses, the like – there are just fewer on Linux,” commented Cornell. “Basically, Linux offered us a more secure, more robust operating system and the open architecture we were seeking.”

Once the main architecture of the platform was complete, the LogistiCare development team sought a way to assure the application would be available to end-users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This was a key requirement for the “always open” company. One of the back-end disadvantages of the legacy application had been a very resource-intensive and slow process for assuring databases were up-to-date and creating an optimal backup mechanism. The IT team experienced major difficulties in moving data between primary and secondary data stores and it often took days to resynchronize clusters to achieve full replication.

As the team looked into the tools that were native within IBM DB2 and other components of its platform, it became evident that implementation of a high availability cluster would be the best way to assure uptime while avoiding a great number of ongoing maintenance and manual tasks.

Finding the Right Solution

LogistiCare’s development team undertook a careful search for applications that could provide high availability assurance within an environment made up of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM DB2. LogistiCare’s development team researched various offerings, finding most of them through Internet searches. In addition, LogistiCare noticed within IBM’s developer website that SteelEye Technology, an IBM Partner World company, provided a recommended solution called LifeKeeper.

Upon evaluation, LogistiCare found that compared with LifeKeeper, competitive solutions fell short, providing fewer configurable options and generally not demonstrating the robustness they sought.

“We tried a few Open Source clustering solutions, but they just wouldn’t do,” said Andrew Winner, Architect for LogistiCare. “At that time, all the other solutions would

only failover if there was a hardware failure – if DB2 shut itself down, often the clustering solution wouldn’t even know it. We needed something for high availability that was designed with DB2 in mind – and the fact that SteelEye was among the few recommendations from IBM made the decision even easier.”

LogistiCare elected to implement SteelEye LifeKeeper for DB2. By monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access, LifeKeeper assures high availability of DB2 databases. Hardware component or application faults are detected in advance of a full system failure through multiple fault-detection mechanisms.

LifeKeeper monitors applications at several levels through the use of intelligent agents and multiple heartbeat signals. In detection of any problem in the application stack, LifeKeeper initiates an automated recovery operation. Depending on the failure condition and policies which have been set by the administrator, this operation may include restarting services on the same server or initiating a failover to another cluster member. Clusters can be built in active/standby or active/active configurations with up to 32 systems in a single cluster. Servers clustered by LifeKeeper can be physical, virtual or any combination.

Implementation

LogistiCare began its first implementation of SteelEye

LifeKeeper for IBM DB2 at its Atlanta headquarters location. The development team was impressed by the simplicity of setup.

“SteelEye representatives came out to help us get initially set up and took the time to really understand the architecture and to train us for future implementations,” noted Jason Sweatt, software engineer. “After that, we were able to do the installations inhouse, with support from SteelEye for some of the configuration settings that had to be tuned for each individual application. In about a week we were up and running and we handle all new installations from here.”

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Within a year, LogistiCare expanded the implementation and rolled out LifeKeeper to its Norton, Virginia location that houses a large call center, adding two high-availability clusters. A third call center location in Wallingford, Connecticut was added most recently. These additional implementations averaged less than two days to complete, and the company foresees rolling out future implementations at other locations.

Results

Providing true high-availability assurance with LifeKeeper has helped achieve near zero downtime for the LogistiCAD application. By providing automatic failover capabilities, LogistiCare is confident in its protection against unforeseen downtime. In addition, the application helps with assuring continuity during planned maintenance windows.

Before LifeKeeper was implemented, the team estimates it took an average of 30 minutes just for the changeover between primary and secondary servers in order to accomplish the task of bringing down a server for maintenance to make planned changes. Now, they estimate that it takes less than five.

“For example, recently we had to add a new CPU on one of our servers, so we needed to take it down for a short time. I didn’t have to sit there and assure a clean shutdown of DB2, move all the services, and so forth. LifeKeeper handled it all and made it easy to move from one server to another because it handles both the hardware and the DB2 at once,” stressed Winner. “About three clicks of a mouse, and we were done – that’s a nearly seamless change window.”

LogistiCare’s IT team also values the ongoing support for and updates to the LifeKeeper product.

“We’re getting ready to do an upgrade that will allow us to tap into one of LifeKeeper’s newer features - dual failover paths,” noted Cornell. “Now, we can leverage two storage processors on our SAN, with two controller cards and two connections. If anything fails on one, it will automatically failover to the other, adding another layer of continuity protection.”

“The small cost to implement LifeKeeper has paid for itself many times over.”

In all, LogistiCare is extremely pleased with LifeKeeper and considers the implementation a major success. “The small cost to implement LifeKeeper has paid for itself many times over,” summarized Cornell.

LogistiCare System at a Glance

• Dell PowerEdge 6400 and 6600 servers

• EMC CLARiiON storage arrays

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• IBM DB2 UDB Enterprise Edition

About LifeKeeper for IBM DB2 UDB

With support for active/active configurations, intelligent failover and multiple fault-detection mechanisms for detecting and recovering from hardware, operating system or application faults, the SteelEye LifeKeeper for DB2 UDB solution prevents application failures at a fraction of the cost of traditional HA solutions. Its key benefits include a higher return on investment by eliminating the need for idle backup servers, significantly reduced staffing requirements through an easy-to-use centralized Java GUI, support for both shared storage and replicated data configurations, protection of applications in both physical and virtual server environments and functionality to protect end-user applications as well as the DB2 UDB database itself.

About LogistiCare

LogistiCare implements and manages complex transportation programs to help our clients achieve their business objectives. LogistiCare provides outsourced transportation services for a number of diverse clients including government agencies, managed care companies, self-funded insurers, hospitals, transit authorities, and school boards.

The LogistiCare team includes logisticians, multimodal transportation specialists, call center specialists, software developers, nurses, paramedics, financial analysts, social workers, certified trainers, IT systems specialists, and field monitors.

LogistiCare was founded in 1994. The company and its 685 employees reported annual revenues in 2005 of $250 Million. LogistiCare operates 26 locations across 14 states with six network operations centers. For more information, visit http://www.logisticare.com