TIVIT boosts outsourcing competitiveness with IBM server and storage infrastructure

Why Become an On Demand Business?

In the outsourced IT business, a flexible, scalable, highly available IT infrastructure is critical to success, especially when processing business-critical information. TIVIT enhanced its ability to change service levels quickly, which helps set it apart from the competition.

On Demand Business Benefits

• Improved server and storage capacity helps enable TIVIT to meet existing customer requirements
• Exceptional infrastructure scalability provides the headroom to add many more customers
• Industry-leading IBM high-availability functions provide attractive business continuity benefits for customers outsourcing business-critical processing—potentially enhancing TIVIT’s revenue prospects
• Faster application performance improves customer satisfaction and enables TIVIT’s largest customer to reduce batch processing windows, so it can serve more of its customers in less time

As one of Brazil’s leading outsourced IT services providers, TIVIT provides data center, business continuity and help desk services, as well as installation, management and maintenance services for data networks. TIVIT is committed to providing unique solutions for its customers through variable pricing arrangements and support from strategic partnerships.

TIVIT—which boasts annual revenues of almost US$150 million—is a part of the larger Grupo Votorantim conglomerate. Currently holding the number five spot in IT outsourcing services in Brazil, TIVIT’s goal is to be among the three largest IT companies in the country by 2010. The company plans to achieve this objective by differentiating itself through its solid methodologies, respected business partners, clear value proposition and a complete portfolio of products and services.

It is TIVIT’s agility that helps it compete against global outsourcing giants. “Because we are a 100-percent domestic company, we can make faster decisions than the multi-nationals,” notes Valdir da Mata, manager of storage system support at TIVIT. “In the fiercely competitive IT arena, this speed is very attractive to our customers.”

But perhaps most importantly, TIVIT differentiates itself through its IT infrastructure. “We operate two class-five data centers approximately 300 miles apart—one in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro,” explains da Mata. “These two sites give us the ability to provide exceptional resiliency in case of outages or disasters. That makes us unique in Brazil.”

Growing customer puts new demands on the infrastructure
One of the great advantages of being a TIVIT customer is that you can obtain increased levels of service very quickly. Recently, one of TIVIT’s largest customers needed substantially more server processing power along with faster storage performance and greater capacity. The customer—a large credit card processing company in Brazil—counts on TIVIT to provide the servers and storage needed to process over 850,000 transactions per hour. Plus, the company expects transaction volume to increase 20 to 30 percent per year.

Given the importance of the data, the customer asked TIVIT to add high availability and disaster recovery capabilities that would help protect operations even if a data center were lost. Says da Mata, “Our value to this customer goes well beyond processing transactions—we provide an IT infrastructure that can evolve quickly to support its growing business.”

“Our existing mainframe server and our preview storage system supplier could not provide the performance, scalability and functionality needed to meet our requirements,” explains da Mata. Thus, the TIVIT IT team began to investigate how best to upgrade the existing infrastructure.

IBM and TIVIT build a scalable platform for high-availability services
After evaluating alternative approaches, TIVIT engaged IBM to redesign its entire server and storage infrastructure. “IBM offered an end-to-end solution, which would keep our integration costs to a minimum. If we had problems, it would be IBM’s responsibility to resolve them. In addition, IBM offered better price/performance for our solution,” states da Mata.

Both the mainframe and the storage infrastructure were upgraded. Two IBM eServer zSeries 900 servers running the IBM z/OS® V1.6 operating system were deployed—one in each data center. For exceptional scalability, IBM configured the z900 servers with IBM Capacity Upgrade on Demand, a feature that enables TIVIT to activate additional processing power as necessary, thus avoiding the delay in adding hardware when its clients require additional capacity.

To help provide high availability for TIVIT customers, Global Mirroring and Metro Global Mirroring replications are offered for customers’ critical data. There are two sites in São Paolo and one in Rio de Janeiro, about 300 miles from the primary site. Thanks to this functionality, TIVIT is now the first company in Latin America to offer such business continuity and disaster recovery services. Depending on a customer’s availability needs, TIVIT is able to offer a tailor-made solution that can fit cost and performance requirements.

Next, the IBM Integrated Technology Services team helped TIVIT upgrade the storage environment with one IBM System Storage DS8300 and four IBM System Storage DS8100 high-performance storage subsystems with approximately 98TB of capacity. Three DS8100 and one DS8300 systems were installed in São Paolo and one DS8100 in Rio de Janeiro. The DS8000 systems—which help TIVIT safeguard critical financial transactions—are connected through fibre channel connections using IBM FICON® Directors, accessed by the z900 servers.

High-performance systems support the need for speed
Since engaging IBM to design and deploy the new server and storage infrastructure, TIVIT reports that its customers are extremely pleased with the vastly improved application performance the system delivers. “The previous storage system had an average response time of around eight milliseconds,” notes da Mata. “The DS8100 has drastically reduced that time. This enables our customers to process more transactions without having to upgrade their applications—helping them to grow revenue with a minimal investment.”

These performance enhancements are particularly beneficial to the credit card processing company, which relies on speed to serve as many customers as possible around the clock. “Throughout the day, our customer executes several batch jobs. At the end of each batch window, it delivers consolidated transaction files to its clients,” states da Mata. “Previously, each of these jobs windows took about 65 minutes, but the new IBM infrastructure has helped us reduce that to about 35 minutes. As a result, the credit card company can now serve more customers faster.”

Flexible IT infrastructure lays the foundation for growth
With the new IBM server and storage infrastructure in place, TIVIT is not only able to meet and exceed the requirements of its large customer. It also has the infrastructure to offer similar high-availability services to other customers—helping the company compete in a very competitive market. Notes da Mata, “Our new data replication capabilities are particularly attractive to other financial services organizations in Brazil.”

Thanks to the exceptional scalability of the IBM servers and storage systems, TIVIT can also now quickly increase the capacity of its infrastructure to accommodate new customers or the expansion of service-level agreements with an existing customer—enabling the company to tap into new revenue streams. Explains da Mata, “Thanks to features like Capacity Upgrade on Demand, we can quickly add server and storage capacity as we grow. The IBM infrastructure presents impressive capabilities for expansion and upgrades—giving our business a better future position.”

With a flexible IT infrastructure, the sky is the limit
Looking to tap the flexibility of the z900, da Mata and his team plan to explore the feasibility of adding a Linux® environment to the mainframes. Two Integrated Facilities for Linux on the z900 servers would support new applications. “Running Linux on the IBM mainframe will enable us to offer new services to our customers—providing them with even greater choice,” concludes da Mata. “Our mission is to provide high-quality, flexible solutions for our customers in an outsourced model. With the help of IBM, we are expanding our offerings to customers while maintaining competitive prices. That is how both we and our customers win.”

For more information
For more information, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us on the Web at:

ibm.com/ondemand/
ibm.com/systems/z
ibm.com/storage