TORN enables On Demand Business with Linux on IBM System z

TORN Sp. z o.o. provides strategic consulting services to a variety of companies in Poland. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Warsaw, TORN designs and implements complex IT systems for its customers, many of whom require high security in their business processes.

A number of TORN’s larger clients were aiming to reduce IT costs for their Web-based systems through server consolidation and the deployment of Linux®-based systems. For TORN, the key challenge was to find a robust, yet flexible, platform to support their requirements.

Says Tomasz Dec, CIO of TORN, “We wanted to move our Web portal software to an environment that could offer very high availability, reliability and security, while helping our clients to reduce their costs and increase their flexibility. From an internal perspective, the aim was to reduce the complexity of our IT environment by consolidating to a smaller number of physical servers.”


Efficient consolidation
TORN’s jPALIO software – a solution developed in-house to enable the rapid construction of Web portals and other Web-based systems – was running on a mixed group of servers, under different operating systems.

To meet the requirements to reduce costs and improve availability, TORN opted to redeploy its jPALIO systems on a new IBM eServer zSeries 890 server. The z890 runs multiple virtual Linux servers under the z/VM operating system, which enables TORN technicians to create new virtual servers within minutes, with the potential to manage tens to hundreds of Linux images quickly and easily.

IBM Global Financing helped TORN to acquire the new zSeries system with a deal structured to meet the company’s financial requirements.

Says Dec, “The zSeries 890 has given us the ability to consolidate multiple physical systems to virtual servers on a single piece of hardware. Since in our opinion the mainframe hardware offers much higher average utilisation than other platforms, it can support many virtual servers at low individual cost. So rather than having wasted “white space” on dozens of separate systems, we can use the full resources of a single physical machine and – very important – the full, ready-to-recover backup can be done in minutes.”


More room for growth
With z/VM on the z890, TORN can offer enormous flexibility to its clients, whose growth should no longer be restricted by the limits of the physical servers previously employed. If a particular client needs more power for a limited time, TORN can simply allocate more resources to their virtual server on the z890.

“The new zSeries solution offers us great flexibility in meeting our clients’ changing requirements,” comments Dec. “We can increase the computing power available to their systems on demand, enabling them to respond precisely to transactional peaks. During times of lower demand, we can scale their systems down, helping them to align costs with revenues.”

TORN uses the jPALIO software to create portal-like commercial systems, knitting together a customer’s existing applications to enable more efficient user interaction. The solution offers highly secure single sign-on mechanisms, and TORN clients can manage security for themselves, restricting the functionality available to any particular user through role-based profiles. In addition, thanks to the jPALIO SQL module, existing client databases can be used ‘as is’ in a newly deployed system, preserving their old functionality.

“Deploying jPALIO on the zSeries has enabled us to take advantage of features such as HiperSockets,” comments Dec. “This enables high-speed transfer of data between various systems that interact with the portal, and offers very high security – helping us to ensure that each client’s systems remain entirely isolated from other systems.”


A basis for the future
In the near future, TORN plans to migrate one of its biggest systems (with 1,000,000 existing users and 3,000 new ones per day), to Linux on the z890, and to implement jPALIO as an IBM WebSphere application on the new server. Says Dec, “The zSeries represents a significant investment, but the value it delivers is even greater. It has given us a robust, easy-to-manage platform on which we can build new services at low incremental cost.”

He concludes, “For our clients, the main benefit of our move to the Linux on the z890 is the flexibility they have gained. We can now respond very quickly to new requirements, potentially setting up entirely new systems within days or hours, without sacrificing availability or security.”