February 2006 Newsletter

System Upgrades at Quadax

By: VP, Systems

Below is a brief summary of some of the Quadax system upgrades that we will be implementing in the upcoming year.

Storage Area Network

Continuing our efforts to insure the high-availability of Quadax systems, we have made the decision to invest in a SAN, or Storage Area Network. A SAN is a fully redundant data storage system, which will be used to store critical business data at Quadax. That means if any part fails, the data will still be available because each part of the SAN has a second identical part that will take over. All of the data on the SAN will be stored in a RAID configuration with "hot spares." This insures that if a disk drive fails, the data is safe, and the hot spare will take the place of the failed drive. Proactive support by our hardware vendor will most likely identify any hardware failures even before they happen.

Gentran Integration Suite

HIPAA mandates that insurance companies must process electronic claims, remittance, eligibility, and claim status information in ANSI-standard formats. In order to efficiently keep up with the demands of new payers and new transaction versions, Quadax uses a mapper and translator. Our current mapper and translator have been in place since 1998. This product has served us well and has processed millions of transactions for you; however, it has become dated. So Quadax has purchased a new state-of-the-art product, Gentran Integration Suite™ from Sterling Commerce.

Sterling Commerce is headquartered in Dublin, Ohio and is a stalwart in the areas of EDI and electronic commerce. We have chosen to use their latest EDI product, Gentran Integration Suite, because it provides us with an advanced toolset to streamline the business processes associated with EDI.

HP-UX rx4640

Many of you are aware that we have been working on a project to migrate the HARP software from the HP 3000 to another operating system. (See the related article, HARP Evolution.) Our initial project involved getting HARP running on HP-UX and Windows®. At this time, HARP is running on both of these operating systems. After months of evaluation, we have decided that HP-UX currently provides a better environment for the HARP application. Therefore, we have decided to proceed with the purchase of a new HP-UX production server. This machine, the rx4640, will use Hewlett-Packard’s latest and greatest Itanium® 2 1.6GHz processors, and it will run HP-UX 11i Version 2.

This new machine provides several times the processing power of our current HARP server and has the ability to use newer processors when needed. The rx4640 will be attached to the new SAN to insure the safety of all HARP data. These new systems will be implemented this year in gradual phases, allowing us to control the migrations and ensure quality service.