LVM Versicherung

LVM: Reliable IT for Millions of Insurance Customers

Around 3.4 million customers with over 11.2 million contracts place their trust in LVM Versicherung. With nearly €3.4 billion in premium income and over €18.2 billion in capital investments, LVM ranks among the top 20 primary insurance groups in Germany. Local customer service is provided by approximately 2,300 LVM agents and their 4,800 employees across Germany, supported by 3,600 staff at the company’s headquarters in Münster and in the field. The group offers a full range of products for both private and commercial customers. Through its own bank, Augsburger Aktienbank AG and partnerships with hkk, Aachener Bausparkasse and Federated Investors Inc., LVM also offers additional insurance and financial services.

Challenge

To ensure fast and reliable customer service, the insurance business demands high IT availability. LVM operates a high-availability storage solution based on IBM Spectrum Virtualize (IBM SAN Volume Controller). In an enhanced stretched cluster setup across two data centers, the IBM virtualization nodes are paired with storage packages consisting of IBM Storwize and IBM Flash systems.

This setup supports LVM in running its heterogeneous server landscape - including VMware, IBM Power Systems and all necessary applications - with high availability.

Monitoring system health plays a crucial role in this setup. Potential risks must be identified and mitigated early. Current workloads and latencies must be continuously monitored and compared against thresholds. This precise understanding of system demands is also used for growth planning, ensuring that storage systems and expansions are procured in a cost- and performance-optimized manner.

SVA Solution: BVQ°

The SVA solution Business Volume Qualicision (BVQ°) provides a unified, centralized and clear monitoring and analysis system. All key layers within the IBM storage virtualization and connected systems are analyzed for size, threshold compliance and critical factors. BVQ° Alerting helps automate this monitoring. Predefined favorites and analysis methods make working with BVQ° easy by highlighting critical areas that require continuous observation. Topological views, capacity-based displays and performance metrics are arranged in dashboards to provide a quick overview of all essential values.

“We use BVQ° because it’s the only tool that shows us values that could potentially lead to performance bottlenecks. It allows us to detect critical metrics before they become a problem!” - LVM IT Administration

If performance issues occur within applications, administrators can quickly determine whether the problems are storage-related or need to be investigated in other layers of the infrastructure. In the case of a storage issue, the structured performance analysis enables rapid identification and resolution of the problem. Often, comparing with historical load data - available at any time in BVQ° - also proves helpful.

LVM relies on BVQ° because:

• All critical parameters are monitored clearly and intuitively.
• Performance bottlenecks are analyzed directly and with high precision.
• Misloads, performance peaks and critical response times are proactively identified and avoided.
• BVQ° provides a high level of planning reliability for future IT landscape expansions.
• Collaboration with SVA is excellent and expert knowledge from their team is always available.