A $1 million hosting environment upgrade that will benefit clients through rapid storage expansion capability, redundant equipment, and enhanced security has been completed by IDP. The firm's Acies/one integrated insurance system, which operates on the .NET platform, along with all other vendor-maintained IDP systems now are hosted in the new environment.

The upgrade equips IDP with a cluster of blade chassis and blade servers; an EMC storage area network with VIP rerouting; as well as new switches and routers.

"Our acquisition of blade chassis and blade servers directly supports IDP's quick response imperative," says Gary Gilbert, president and CEO of IDP. "When clients have needs to add users, we swiftly can accommodate them simply by installing an additional blade server. Blade technology allows us to bypass the time-consuming tasks of evaluating existing hardware and determining whether there are needs to add ports. Our new target time for providing a client with all the increased capacity it might require is just a few days."