IBM is supplying Cloud, Software Defined Storage and Flash to Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen (SSB), a German public transportation company, to improve business application performance and customer response times.
Since SSB’s data volumes grow at 10 percent annually in the Stuttgart city, access to corporate data slowed, the performance of its SAP applications waned and the company’s ability to meet service level agreements and maintain its online customer services degraded.
“Our data challenges were affecting our business,” said Roland Wagner, Team leader for System Technology at SSB. “It was clear our IT issues were not relegated to a single system or component, but the infrastructure. It was simply not tuned for the volumes and expansion we were experiencing and projecting.”
SSB deployed IBM Power Systems to help manage the growing data loads and increase availability. It established private clouds on IBM Power servers running PowerVM to run its SAP ERP applications, including Human Resources and Financials.
SSB saw significant improvements in overall application performance. SSB Human Resources department reduced wage-processing from six hours to six minutes.
“Increasingly, organizations like SSB are realizing the positive impact that a strategic IT infrastructure can make on business results,” said Jamie Thomas, general manager, Storage and Software Defined Systems, IBM Systems & Technology Group.
SSB adopted IBM FlashSystem 840 and integrated it with SSB’s existing IBM SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization software. Software Defined Flash enabled SSB to achieve uptime and the ability to weather peaks and valleys in internal and online business, while keeping management overhead to a minimum.
