ARMONK, N.Y., Oct.
21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced
that Stuttgarter Strassenbahnen AG (SSB), a leading German public
transportation company has turned to IBM Cloud, Software Defined
Storage and Flash to improve business application performance and
customer response times.
SSB, the principal public transportation organization in the
City of Stuttgart, operates a
broad network of light rail and buses that serves more than 171
million passengers a year. The greater metropolitan area of the
city has grown to 5.3 million, causing SSB's data volumes to grow
at 10 percent annually. As a result, access to corporate data
slowed, the performance of its extensive SAP applications waned and
the company's ability to meet service level agreements and maintain
its robust 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."
That's when SSB turned to IBM for a top-to-bottom infrastructure
overhaul that included the renewal of the preexisting IBM Power
Systems, and adoption of IBM Software Defined Storage,
Virtualization and Flash.
The company deployed IBM Power Systems to help consistently
manage the ever-growing data loads and increase availability. It
also established private clouds on IBM Power Systems servers
running PowerVM to run its SAP ERP applications, including Human
Resources and Financials.
SSB saw significant improvements in overall application
performance. For example, its Human Resources department was able
to reduce 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.
To speed data response times for both it SAP applications and
its array of online services, SSB adopted the IBM FlashSystem 840
and integrated it with SSB's existing IBM SAN Volume Controller
storage virtualization software. With the integrated solution,
known as Software Defined Flash, SSB achieved consistent uptime and
the ability to weather peaks and valleys in internal and online
business – all while keeping management overhead to a minimum.
"Our customers expect high availability around the clock and
extremely quick response times," said SSB's Wagner. "FlashSystem is
so flexible that we can promptly respond to changing performance
requirements and, when needed, dynamically accelerate the
systems."
About Stuttgarter Strassenbahnen AG
Stuttgarter
Strassenbahnen AG (SSB) is the largest transport company in the
capital city of Baden-Wurttemberg with more than 2,900 employees.
http://www.ssb-ag.de/
Contacts:
Mike Zimmerman
IBM Media Relations
+1-914-766-4935
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com
Hans-Jurgen Rehm
IBM Deutschland GmbH
Unternehmenskommunikation IBM Deutschland
Tel: +49 7034 151887
Mobile: +49 171 5566940
hansrehm@de.ibm.com
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, IBM FlashSystem, IBM Power
System, and IBM PowerVM are trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.
Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other
companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, please see
www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO
To view the original version on PR Newswire,
visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/german-public-transportation-co-adopts-ibm-software-defined-storage-to-tackle-big-data-797591235.html
SOURCE IBM