Why First American Title Uses Commodity Hardware for Mission-Critical Applications

First American Title Insurance has switched its core business system off an HP Superdome to standard x86 blades and resisted pressure to change one of the largest known implementations of Microsoft SQL Server--its First American Software Technology (FAST) application--into an Oracle database system.

That means First American recently became dependent on what some would call commodity systems, not always associated with high availability operations.

But CIO Larry Godec said he can depend on SQL Server 2008 and his set of HP Proliant servers running in what HP calls its Converged Infrastructure. CI integrates workload balancing, virtualization, disaster recovery, networking, and storage. HP committed in November to move Superdome reliability characteristics down into its CI running on Proliant servers.

Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek