"The HP-UX 11i Host Intrusion Detection System feature is a valuable tool that should exist in any system administrator’s security toolbox. It does a great job of data collection and analysis to keep customer data safe. It also helps our auto club customers satisfy Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards." – Dave van Nierop, Technology Services Manager, Campana Systems Inc.

Campana Systems, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, is an international leader in information solutions for the auto club and health care industries. Since 1988, the company has enabled clients to achieve their ongoing business objectives using Campana’s in-depth industry knowledge and trusted technology solutions. AXIS, a division of Campana Systems, maintains its leadership position by providing an evolving suite of integrated software and service solutions to 22 auto club customers affiliated with the American and Canadian Automobile Associations (AAA/CAA).

All of these auto clubs run their businesses on Campana’s premier AXIS information management system—a software suite for managing member relationships and providing travel, point-of-sale, marketing, and emergency road services. By integrating a suite of applications into one system, Campana is able to focus on member relationship management (MRM), one of its major initiatives.

Campana’s success shows that its focus is in the right place. In addition, Campana has progressed by engaging active user groups and leveraging strategic technology partnerships to maximize efficiency. The company’s relationship with HP is one such partnership, enabling the company to certify its integrated AXIS solution on a cost-effective, proven platform.

Unlike competitors that use multiple systems on heterogeneous hardware to help auto clubs manage their services, Campana drives its market-leading solutions on HP Integrity servers and Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running the HP-UX 11i v2 operating environment with the HP-UX Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS). This approach promotes compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, provides security monitoring, eliminates complexity, reduces the cost of maintenance and support, and meets auto clubs’ reliability and performance requirements.

Auto clubs drive their services on HP Integrity servers
An HP reseller, Campana first began using HP 9000 servers in 1991. Attracted by an opportunity to capture cost-performance advantages and needing to recharge its server environment, Campana carefully evaluated Integrity servers with Itanium 2 processors in April 2005. Campana staff also attended an HP-Intel developers workshop to evaluate the functionality of its AXIS products on Integrity servers. This was an important evaluation because auto clubs follow Campana’s hardware recommendations.

“Our customers have been pleased with the solid performance of HP 9000 servers,” notes Pierre Lapalme, Director, Sales and Marketing for Campana. “When we compared our existing HP 9000 platform with the dualprocessor HP Integrity rx1620 Server, we realized we could achieve an attractive cost-performance and that few changes were necessary to make our AXIS products work on the Integrity platform. Therefore, it was a win-win situation for us and our customers to adopt HP Integrity servers.”

Consequently, Campana deployed an Integrity rx1620 Server for development, for hosting its IBM UniVerse database, and for monitoring customer servers against security breaches. Campana also installed Integrity servers as AXIS application servers at five customer facilities and intends to migrate the additional 17 auto clubs to the Integrity platform.

“Once a club understands the cost-performance benefits of migrating to Integrity servers, the choice is easy,” declares Dave van Nierop, Technology Services Manager for Campana. “All of our clubs that have migrated to Integrity servers comment about the unexpected performance gains; added memory; and bigger, faster disk drives.”

The performance upswing is difficult for auto clubs to believe. Lapalme recalls a customer’s initial reaction: “An auto club staff member remarked that she was unsure if the data had transferred from the old system correctly. A report that previously took hours to generate now only takes minutes on the new Integrity server and all the data is included. End-of-day membership processing now completes in 30 minutes instead of one hour.”

Similar outstanding performance has been noted in Campana’s and five auto club IBM UniVerse database environments, which function in conjunction with the AXIS applications. van Nierop acknowledges: “We are obtaining excellent performance for the IBM UniVerse database on the Integrity platform. And our customers experience the benefits immediately—database processes that access shared memory segments run faster.”

Transitioning UniVerse to Integrity servers was easily accomplished due to the HP and IBM software alliance and the joint development efforts of both companies. “IBM’s willingness to continue developing their products for the Integrity platform and HP’s integration support for IBM software have gone a long way in our acceptance of this newer platform and have given us confidence that the solution will work smoothly and consistently,” says van Nierop.

Also prompting the adoption of Integrity servers is CPU and processor expandability, which enables Campana to fulfill various auto club needs and budgets. “Our customers range from fairly small to large clubs,” Lapalme notes. “With HP Integrity servers, we can give the bigger auto clubs the top performance they need, and the smaller clubs can still get a high-value platform at a cost they can afford.”

HP-UX 11i features act as a roadblock against security breaches
The accessibility of the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system was another chief driver in Campana’s server decision. The company has enjoyed the robustness of HP-UX for several years and wanted to retain their investment in this operating system environment.

“HP-UX 11i v2 helps us maintain high levels of system availability through the use of dynamic kernel tuning,” explains van Nierop. “We can create alarms that tell us when we’ve exceeded certain HP-UX kernel resources and tune the parameters without rebooting the operating system. Some of the HP-UX features, such as dynamic kernel parameter management, have been a welcomed addition, helping Campana optimize UniVerse database performance for each customer.”

An important feature of HP-UX 11i is HIDS, which enables Campana staff to monitor auto club servers in near real time for signs of potentially damaging intrusions. Campana engineers configured the Integrity rx1620 Server as an HIDS host server, and auto club servers as clients.

“The Host Intrusion Detection System implementation has provided our technical services department with distributed monitoring capabilities,” explains van Nierop. “If we were to log on to each auto club server and check alerts/log files manually every day, it would become a monotonous, full-time job. HIDS is a valuable tool that should exist in any system administrator’s security toolbox. It does a great job of data collection and analysis to keep customer data safe. It also helps our auto club customers satisfy Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.”

Campana’s engineering team tailors HIDS detection templates to suit each customer’s security policies and surveillance schedules. The base security package offered to auto clubs includes the Bastille Hardening Program with HP-UX 11i and HIDS. All customers run the same configuration on Integrity servers—models ranging from rx2620 to rx7620—which are supported by HP StorageWorks systems. Campana’s method simplifies the documentation of operating system security and customer support.

Beyond providing surveillance capabilities, Campana’s distributed monitoring system helps auto clubs satisfy data protection mandates imposed by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover. Their PCI compliance measures are prompting more and more auto clubs to request HIDS surveillance to monitor user and HP-UX kernel activity. Additionally, by using Campana’s surveillance service and compliance validations, auto clubs are not obligated to maintain the security certifications themselves.

A single solution streamlines IT support and keeps Campana accelerating on the road to success
Campana takes care of another customer concern— how to keep their business-critical systems operating smoothly. “By using HP Integrity servers as our standard, we’re not going in multiple directions trying to certify our applications for all kinds of different environments. This approach simplifies systems maintenance and support,” explains Lapalme.

Complementing Campana’s support expertise is HP Instant Support Enterprise Edition (ISEE), a remote monitoring, fault detection, and notification solution installed on HP systems. “In a couple of cases, HP technical support has phoned our auto clubs before they were aware of a hardware failure. Campana and our clubs have been very impressed,” acknowledges van Nierop.

Impressing customers is Campana’s way of maintaining a competitive edge and growing high-value relationships. An impressive portfolio of all the right tools in one package, backed by HP technologies, will certainly help the company make further inroads into its market. Lapalme concludes, “The success we enjoy can be attributed to our reputation as well as high-quality product and service solutions. HP technologies are important in how we merge innovative solutions with excellent service.”

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