INTTRA supports the global supply chain with a world-class IT infrastructure from IBM

Most of us don’t give much thought to how the products we use every day get shipped from one side of the world to the other. At INTTRA, it’s all they think about. INTTRA, short for “international trade,” was formed in 2000 for the purpose of providing a multi-carrier e-commerce platform for the booking and documentation of ocean containerized shipping. Based in New Jersey but with sales and support offices all over the globe, INTTRA serves 30 of the world’s leading ocean carriers and more than 20,000 customer locations around the world.

Prior to INTTRA’s founding, shipping was booked by phone, fax, and other non-standardized processes that were time consuming and manually intensive. INTTRA’s e-commerce portal has revolutionized the industry. “We’ve created a global, standardized network so that the world’s shippers and the world’s carriers can connect seamlessly to one another,” explains Ken Bloom, president and CEO of INTTRA. After growing 1100 percent in the last seven years, the company now accounts for 10 percent of the world’s containerized trade, originating 10.7 million containers in 2008.

Meeting the IT needs of a dynamic business like INTTRA is a tall order. “In a high-growth company like ours, where we’ve seen almost double growth every year, scalability in both our processing ability and our storage capacity is critical,” says Jeffrey Pattison, CIO of INTTRA.

“And when you’re processing over a million transactions every day, you care very much about performance in every regard,” adds Bloom. “Our entire solution depends completely on data, data processing, and the infrastructure that helps us run that technology.”

A state-of-the-art IT infrastructure from IBM
“INTTRA is a Software as a Service—or SaaS—company, and, as a result, the heart of the company is IT,” explains Anthony Costa, Managing Director of Global Infrastructure and Corporate Systems. “IBM technology is at the core of our architecture.”

In the past few years, INTTRA has consolidated their servers on IBM BladeCenter LS20, BladeCenter LS21, and IBM Power® 570 servers. They’ve achieved a 95 percent virtualization rate by virtualizing at every tier. “Virtualization has been a key driver,” says Pattison. “Not only is it good for the environment, but it’s also good for business. It’s given us a lot more flexibility.”

To facilitate storage virtualization, upgrades, and disaster recovery, the company relies on IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), which Pattison describes as the “lynchpin” of the company’s storage strategy. It’s part of a comprehensive storage solution which offers INTTRA the capabilities and cost-competitiveness they require as a mid-sized company offering enterprise-class services. With the SVC, aggregate storage utilization has risen 35 percent.

To meet the company’s burgeoning storage needs, INTTRA selected IBM System Storage DS8100 and DS8300 enterprise disk storage systems. These systems are part of a larger tiered storage strategy that currently provides capacity for 120 TB of data.

“As INTTRA has grown exponentially, so have our storage requirements,” says Costa. “We chose the IBM DS8000 storage platform because of reliability, scalability, and performance.”

To help implement and support these solutions, INTTRA looks not only to IBM but also to IBM Premier Business Partner VSS, Inc. “VSS has been a trusted partner of INTTRA since its inception,” recalls Costa. “VSS has brought skills and capabilities to the table that INTTRA otherwise would not have had access to.”

Protecting the global supply chain
For INTTRA, the ability to provide disaster recovery is an integral part of the service offering. By leveraging SVC Global Mirror technology from IBM, INTTRA was able to implement an industry-leading disaster recovery strategy that reduced their recovery time objective (RTO) from 72 hours to only four, with a data recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes or less.

“Our being down not only affects our carriers, shippers, and freight forwarders, but it literally can cause disruption to a large part of the global supply chain,” explains Pattison.

“The industry now depends on us,” echoes Bloom. “We can’t let the industry down by having anything less than the most dependable data center. And we deliver that with IBM technology.”

Leaving less of a footprint
INTTRA has seen significant benefits from their IBM infrastructure, especially given their continuing drive to consolidate and virtualize. For example, the company has reduced its data center footprint by 50 percent, despite doubling its growth each year. And this reduced footprint has contributed to new levels of energy efficiency, resulting in a 30 percent savings on energy costs.

CEO Bloom says these savings are particularly important in an industry like global ocean shipping, which has come under great scrutiny for its carbon footprint and power consumption. “We take advantage of all of the latest technology to make absolutely certain that each time we upgrade, we leave less of a footprint behind.”

“Phenomenal ROI”
The IBM solutions continue to deliver the reliability, performance, and scalability that INTTRA has come to rely on, at a cost that fits their budget. Just ask INTTRA CFO Valerie Rainey. “The IBM solution has great value-based pricing for small and medium-sized business,” she says. “And the ROI for us has been phenomenal.”

“Having one single vendor for servers and storage was key to having the lowest total cost of ownership,” adds Pattison.

In addition to saving on capital costs, INTTRA has saved on operational costs by keeping staffing levels constant despite the growth of the company. As Costa points out, “A true measure of the business benefit of technology is the ability for it to scale while containing costs. The IBM solutions and management tools have enabled us to maintain the technology staff at a static number for the past three years.”

Positioned for an ambitious future
Costa says the beauty of INTTRA’s IT infrastructure lies in its ability to provide the performance and scalability they require but at a price point that makes sense for a company of their size. “We are a mid-sized business playing in an arena which requires a Fortune 100-style technology implementation,” he explains. “With IBM and our partner VSS, we’ve been able to take class-one, Fortune 100 solutions and architect them to fit in INTTRA’s space and budget.”

INTTRA plans to leverage these IBM solutions for the foreseeable future as the company makes strides toward their long-term goals. “We plan to serve 25 percent of the world’s containerized trade by the year 2014,” says Pattison. “And we expect IBM to be there by our side.”

For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: ibm.com/systems

For more information about INTTRA, visit: www.inttra.com

For more information about VSS, Inc., visit: www.vss-inc.com