"As the NIRS2 system will be operated over a seven year period, a key requirement was to design the architecture to be flexible and scalable enough to cope with increases in data volumes, processing work load, and changes in Government policy over its operational lifetime. Entegrity's PC-DCE products allowed us to do that."

Ian Watmore, Managing Director - Accenture

One of the largest and most complex relational database projects in Europe, containing 62.5 million records, has gone live at the United Kingdom Government's Contributions Agency (CA). The National Insurance Recording System 2 (NIRS2) was the first major IT contract to be awarded under the UK Government's Private Finance Initiative.

NIRS2 will replace NIRS1, the existing batch-based system that was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It records all National Insurance (NI) payments made in the UK, calculates entitlement to contributory benefits, bills and collects all Class 2 NI payments, and maintains records for all outsourced and personal pension scheme memberships. Over $60 billion of contributions are recorded and accounted for annually.

The first release of the NIRS2 system went live on February 10, 1997, less than two years from the award of the contract. When fully rolled out it will support over 5000 users at the central CA in Newcastle and over 100 local offices throughout the UK.

The system went live with 400 Gbytes of data that will double to 800 Gbytes throughout its seven-year lifetime. This equates to an initial disk capacity of 1 Terabyte increasing to over 2.4 Terabytes. The system has been designed to handle over 105 million online transactions and 100 million batch transactions per year. With 32 million pages of printed output annually, this makes it one of the largest client/server systems in Europe. The client/server system has been built using Hewlett-Packard (HP) UNIX servers, the Sybase relational database, DCE distributed computing services from Entegrity Solutions and HP, and the Encina Transaction Processing (TP) monitor from Transarc Corporation.

"NIRS2 is vital to the CA to help us introduce new pension legislation, to improve service to our customers, and to provide value for money to the taxpayer," commented David Slater, strategy director, the Contributions Agency.

To provide the highest possible levels of reliability, the NIRS2 architecture needed to ensure that the processing load be balanced evenly across the application servers. In the event of one of the application servers failing, processing can be routed to the other application servers still available. To meet these requirements, Accenture chose DCE as the infrastructure on which to build NIRS2.

Accenture, who designed and built the open-architecture system at its own cost, will operate it for a period of seven years and will receive payments on a per-usage basis. "As the NIRS2 system will be operated over a seven year period, a key requirement was to design the architecture to be flexible and scalable enough to cope with increases in data volumes, processing work load, and changes in Government policy over its operational lifetime," commented Ian Watmore, Accenture partner in charge of the project. "Entegrity's PC-DCE products allowed us to do that." The NIRS2 system will be operated, across the Government Data Network, at the new Accenture client/server data center in Warwick, United Kingdom.

In the first year, as more functionality is added to the NIRS2 applications, two additional database servers and four more application servers will be added to accommodate the additional processing requirements. The DCE-based client/server architecture is significantly less expensive than a traditional mainframe solution and is flexible enough to cope with future changes.