VMware has announced that Independence Blue Cross (IBCis using VMware's industry-leading datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, to improve the efficiency of its business operations.

IBC covers 3.4 million members and processes more than 32 million claims each year. As the company has grown, IBC found its computing environment becoming increasingly cumbersome and expensive to maintain. Server sprawl was eating up space and increasing power consumption at unsustainable levels, and the cost of acquiring and managing so much hardware was pushing IT budgets to the limit. To reverse these trends and take control of its infrastructure, IBC turned to VMware.

IBC has virtualized approximately 70 percent of its Windows-based applications, including business-critical systems involving claims authorization and processing, billing, and member enrollments. Specific applications that have been virtualized include Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server as well as PeopleSoft and Oracle 9i.

VMware DRS and VMotion -VMware capabilities - aggregate hardware resources into logical resource pools and allocate them to applications that need them most. When a virtual machine experiences an increased load, VMware DRS automatically allocates additional resources by redistributing virtual machines among the physical servers in the resource pool. The live migration of virtual machines across the resource pools is executed by VMotion.