With smarter computing from IBM
NorthgateArinso™ (NGA) provides payroll and human resource services to global corporations. From hosted systems through to fully outsourced solutions, NGA offers a complete range of services to match each customer’s needs.
Business need:
NorthgateArinso needs to deliver the same impeccable level of service to clients regardless of underlying fluctuations in business volumes. Supporting multiple systems to meet varying customer needs with separate physical servers proved expensive to procure and support.
Solution:
Consolidated to an architecture based on IBM Power and IBM BladeCenter technologies. Data storage is provided by IBM System Storage DS8100 and DS4800, configured as a SAN and managed by IBM SAN Volume Controller. The entire infrastructure is controlled, monitored and managed using IBM Tivoli software.
Benefits:
The single shared infrastructure is easier to manage and more flexible in handling fluctuating workload, enabling NGA to adapt its IT response to fit the business need. The company can also follow a single set of governance policies, offering provable regulatory compliance.
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Case Study
Designed for Data
The data generated by the IBM Tivoli software is written to the Tivoli Data Warehouse, and histories are analyzed by Tivoli Common Reporting for trends and service management forecasting. The information generated by Tivoli allows NorthgateArinso to report on service delivery to customers, and to help plan likely growth in capacity needs.
Tuned to the Task
Extensive server virtualization permits simultaneous operation of three operating systems, meaning NGA no longer needs dedicated systems to run high speed applications. The company can assign each customer the most appropriate platform and processor capacity for the agreed service levels and transaction workload
Managed in the Cloud
The solution enables NGA to add instances as required and treat processors, memory, network and storage as a single resource pool; masking the complexity of the underlying components.
Driving Innovation
Leveraging Capacity on Demand agreements with IBM allows NGA the headroom to expand resources by 40 percent in the event of an unexpected surge in demand.
NorthgateArinso™ (NGA) provides payroll and human resource services to global corporations. From hosted systems through to fully outsourced solutions, NGA offers a complete range of services to match each customer’s needs.
Business challenge
Much of the transaction workload is highly time-specific. Customers, not to mention their employees, expect wage calculations and bank transfers to be completed on time, every time. Peak workload varies both predictably, such as at the end of the tax year, and unpredictably, such as during periods of high seasonal demand or temporary staffing. The NGA customers expect the same impeccable level of service delivery regardless of underlying fluctuations in business volumes.
Customers have widely varying needs: some want very fast processing of tens of thousands of employee records, some want more comprehensive analysis and human resource management services. The result is a broad range of payroll and human resources applications and databases, running in the IBM AIX, IBM i and Microsoft Windows operating environments.
In the past, supporting the multiple applications, databases and operating systems would have resulted in separate physical servers and unconnected storage devices. This architecture was expensive to procure and support, and complex dependencies made it difficult to ensure that disaster recovery, backup and archive solutions would perform as expected, raising data governance issues.
Description of solution
To manage these demands, NGA has consolidated to highly integrated primary data centers in London and Brussels, each one twinned with a failover data center. Built with integrated IBM Power and IBM BladeCenter technologies, with extensive server virtualization to permit simultaneous operation of all three operating systems. Data storage is provided by IBM System Storage DS8100 and DS4800 disk arrays, configured as a SAN and managed by IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC). The entire infrastructure is controlled, monitored and managed using IBM Tivoli Systems Manager and related Tivoli software.
For example, an NGA application runs on the IBM i platform, providing very high speed payroll processing. Previously this would have typically required a standalone server running the IBM i operating system with dedicated storage. Now, NGA runs the IBM i operating system as a virtual server on a machine that also runs, simultaneously, IBM AIX. The NGA software makes use of existing processor, memory, network and storage infrastructure, which is itself included in the data center’s comprehensive data backup, archive and disaster recovery solution.
Using virtualization, NGA assigns each customer the most appropriate platform and processor capacity for the agreed service levels and transaction workload. At seasonal peaks such as Christmas, NGA has Capacity on Demand agreements with IBM that allow processing capacity to be added temporarily, by activating additional processors for defined periods. For example, in the UK the primary IBM Power 595 server has 17 POWER6 processors active out of a total of 24 installed, representing an instant 40 percent extra headroom if demand surges unexpectedly.
Similarly, NGA uses SAN Volume Controller as the gateway to the DS8100 and DS4800 devices, making the total storage capacity available to all systems regardless of application or operating system. SVC allows NGA to direct data to the best storage device for the task at hand, without having to make costly or time-consuming changes at the application level.
For example, benchmarking new user services only makes sense if during the test period they are configured for real-world running. Virtualization allows the processing capacity to be adjusted and high-performance disk to be allocated for test duration, and then released to the pool on completion.
Tivoli Monitoring provides a single view of performance, covering file systems, disk capacity limits, processor response and more. The data generated by Tivoli is written to the Tivoli Data Warehouse, and histories are analyzed by Tivoli Common Reporting for trends and service management forecasting. The information generated by Tivoli allows NGA to report on service delivery to customers, and to help plan likely growth in capacity needs.
Benefits
With shared processing and storage capacity, NGA has created an integrated platform that allows it to adapt its IT response to fit the business need. Multiple separate standalone servers, applications and databases have been replaced with a single shared infrastructure that is easier to manage and more flexible in managing very large swings in transaction workload.
Data governance policies and procedures, critical for a company handling payroll and personnel details for international corporations, can be imposed globally on a single architecture. NGA complies with Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations (commonly abbreviated as SAS 70) and ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS) standards, much of which would be difficult in a fragmented environment.
David Gibson, Enterprise Systems Manager at NGA comments, “IBM Capacity on Demand gives us the ability to respond to customer needs from a single platform in a variety of ways. Trial Capacity on Demand allows us to add processors over a defined period to test our need for a larger base load configuration. On/Off Capacity on Demand allows us to add processors at short notice for smaller time periods, to weather the storms if required. Exception Capacity on Demand allows us to activate every processor in a disaster recovery scenario to ensure we are not held back by capacity issues at critical times. Capacity on Demand gives us a flexible way to adjust capacity at any level we choose, assigning the additional power to a specific application or to a range of virtual servers, ensuring we meet our service delivery commitments.
“The ability to run IBM i as a guest operating system has led to the resurgence of high-speed applications such as the one we use for payroll processing. We no longer need dedicated systems to run this application, and for some customers it offers the ideal solution. We can add instances in a very cost-effective manner, sharing processors, memory, network and storage, which makes it a very attractive proposition commercially.”
“Data governance is very high on our agenda, because sensitive Personal data requires that we follow the correct operational procedures. The shared services model in our data centers allows us to follow a single set of data governance and security policies across the infrastructure, offering greater ease of management and provable regulatory compliance.”
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