Farmers Insurance Group Case Study

Farmers Insurance Achieves 24x Scalability Improvements With Azul Technology

Farmers Insurance Group of Companies is the country's third-largest insurer, offering automobile and homeowners insurance as well as a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. Farmers operates primarily in 41 states across the country and has approximately 20,000 employees. In addition to these employees, Farmers exclusive and independent agents are responsible for servicing more than 15 million customers.

The Farmers Insurance First Notice of Loss (FNOL) is a targeted application responsible for obtaining key client data after an incident has occurred. FNOL is a rules-based engine from Pegasystems that is focused on Collision, Comprehensive, Tow-Only and Non-Auto Liability. The application is currently used by internal employees, however the company would like the flexibility to provide external access.

Usage Growth Creates Challenges

Since Farmers launched this application, usage has grown dramatically and has proven to be highly variable. The company’s two application instances are only able to handle 90 concurrent users each before garbage collection pauses noticeably slow processing, but peak loads are reaching 2000 concurrent users. To attempt to work around this issue, the IT organization has overprovisioned the existing systems, causing low utilization outside of peak periods. Farmers planning process has determined that they need to deploy up to 20 servers to handle the load which is expensive and creates additional management headaches.

The Azul JVM Eliminates Application Pauses

The unique capabilities of the Azul solution enable applications to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in throughput and scalability with consistent response times, without changing the application code or architecture. For Farmers, each Java application instance is now able to use much larger heap sizes (up to 100x) without garbage collection pauses that slow response times. This allows Farmers to handle many more users per instance:  2000 vs. 90 on the existing architecture.

An added benefit of Azul scalability is a wide, smooth operating range that enables consistently fast response times regardless of load.  Using the Azul JVM, the Farmers application was able to scale 24x while providing an outstanding user experience.

Azul technology achieves this breakthrough scalability with unique capabilities such as Pauseless Garbage Collection, which eliminates the impact of garbage collection-related application pauses, and instance elasticity, that allows individual Java instances to smoothly consume up to dozens of cores and hundreds of GBs of heap memory.

Preparing for the Future

Farmers Insurance anticipates continued growth in usage and wants to have the business flexibility to offer external access to the First Notice of Loss application.  Using Azul, Farmers is able to achieve these goals.  The Azul JVM removes classic Java barriers to scalability and provides a consistently outstanding user experience regardless of load.  As Farmers continues to prepare for the future, the Azul JVM will be core to their plans, providing the flexibility they need to achieve their business goals.
 

INDUSTRY

Insurance and Financial Services

CHALLENGE

Deliver consistently fast response times, even as usage spikes from 90 to 2000 concurrent users

SOLUTION

Using the Azul JVM, Farmers achieved a 24x increase in scalability and throughput that provides an outstanding user experience and business flexibility