MetLife Saves by Using Disaster Recovery System for Life Insurance and Annuity Financial Reporting
 
 

MetLife Saves by Using Disaster Recovery System for Life Insurance and Annuity Financial Reporting

Printer View Printer View

MetLife, Inc. is a leading global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefits programs, serving 90 million customers in more than 50 countries. Through its subsidiaries and affiliates, MetLife holds leading market positions in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.

MetLife wanted to reduce the cost of supporting its PeopleSoft environment. Its previous architecture used Oracle Data Guard to maintain one copy of the PeopleSoft database for disaster recovery, and there was no option of offloading PeopleSoft reporting from the transaction system.

MetLife determined that Oracle Active Data Guard provided a load balancing and scalable solution where a single copy of the Oracle Database could serve for both disaster recovery and Peoplesoft reporting. The final implementation improved the disaster recovery options by adding two Oracle Active Data Guard standby databases, simultaneously using the standby systems as MetLife’s PeopleSoft reporting environment. The simplicity of Oracle Active Data Guard reduced MetLife's administrative overhead and maintenance costs.

MetLife also found that it could increase the performance of its PeopleSoft reporting environment by using Oracle Advanced Compression. While previous nightly extracts, running on MetLife’s previous reporting system, would take as much as twelve hours to complete, with the combination of Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle Advanced Compression, MetLife can complete this process in four hours.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from MetLife, Inc.

  • “Oracle Active Data Guard is not an idle backup system waiting for a failure to occur; it delivers real value every single day. We use Oracle Active Data Guard to reduce IT complexity―cutting the administrative effort needed to support our PeopleSoft reporting environment and reducing maintenance and license costs.” – Asha V. Santosh, Lead Database Administrator, MetLife, Inc.

  • Reduce IT complexity and management costs by streamlining the company’s disaster recovery environment, which ensures the availability of enterprise data, including financial information related to the insurer’s lines of business
  • Optimize IT investment while ensuring a highly available disaster recovery environment to protect the insurer’s financial and operational information
  • Ensure efficient and accurate financial reporting for annuity and life insurance lines of business to help the company meet stringent insurance-industry compliance requirements

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Used Oracle Active Data Guard to create a streamlined environment that includes one active database to write information from the company’s PeopleSoft transaction system, and one standby/replication environment for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that also serves as the company’s daily environment for financial and ERP reporting
  • Eliminated idle redundancy in MetLife’s Peoplesoft environment by offloading financial and ERP reporting to the standby system with Oracle Active Data Guard thereby reducing licensing costs, IT complexity, and management burden
  • Ensured a highly available financial reporting and disaster recovery environment that is now used daily, optimizing MetLife’s IT investment
  • Used Oracle Active Data Guard to replicate data in real time while the standby database is open for access, something that is not possible with storage remote mirroring
  • Cut the effort needed to support Oracle’s PeopleSoft environment and reduced maintenance costs, due to fewer PeopleSoft reporting environments
  • Reduced the time needed for batch-trail processing and maintenance
  • Optimized disaster recovery environment investment as MetLife now uses the environment daily to support important financial reporting operations—including facilitating year-end financial analysis—as opposed to simply relying on the environment in the event of an outage
  • Ensured long-term ability to off-load additional read-only processes to the standby database to conserve resources on the primary database
  • Improved environment continuity and resiliency with automatic block corruption repair—an Oracle Active Data Guard feature, whereby data block corruptions on the primary database are automatically repaired using a good copy of the blocks obtained from the standby site
  • Used Oracle Advanced Compression to reduce database size and enable MetLife to run nightly extracts in just four hours—a process that previously took 12 hours, daily

Resources