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Mainframe services case studies

Computacenter Mainframe Services:
Case Study - Bottomline technologies

Introduction

Bottomline Technologies has been a leader in document handling for over 27 years. By using efficient processes, economies of scale and their unique Webflo™ technology, it has enabled a wide range of organisations to make significant savings by outsourcing their paper processing. 

Bottomline Technologies offer leading-edge technology and processing expertise, allied with simple archive and retrieval systems.

Business Challenge

The Bottomline Transactional Centre, in Hertford, faced a data explosion from its document imaging. It also needed to identify which vendor would provide the best solution to meet its requirements, as follows.

  • A cost-effective scalable solution.
  • The ability to take ‘point-in-time’ copies, if required, in the future.
  • The ability to co-exist with Linux and Windows platforms.
  • The capacity to provide remote replication in the future for disaster recovery (DR) purposes.
  • Flexibility to choose the suppliers offering the most cost-effective disk product at any time. 

Solution

Computacenter spent several weeks working with Bottomline Technologies to understand its exact requirements, both at that point in time and moving forwards. This included a detailed capacity and usage audit of its current systems.

Once this information had been gathered, several solutions, along with their strengths and weaknesses, were explored further. Bottomline Technologies decided that the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) combined with an IBM DS4300 disk array, offered the perfect fit of performance, scalability, functionality, cost and freedom of choice, which it required.

On its own, the DS4300 offered an excellent solution for their storage requirements, and coupling this with the SVC, offered Bottomline Technologies the advanced functionality and freedom it required.

The IBM SVC is a virtualisation device which allows a single point of control, and a single set of advanced functions, over every device it manages. While currently attached to a DS4300, the SVC offered Bottomline Technologies the flexibility to consider disk arrays from other vendors in the future, without having to master another set of management software and advanced functions.

Result

Bottomline Technologies took delivery of the SVC and DS4300 in September 2004. It was set-up and commissioned by us, and we then spent a period of time rolling out the new storage to several new servers.

The SVC has been running continuously since deployment, and Bottomline Technologies now plans to set up a DR environment with a second SVC in the near future.

Benefits

“Bottomline Technologies chose the SVC as our centralised storage solution of choice partly on the recommendation of Computacenter, and partly from the good industry reviews we were getting for IBM Storage overall. It was implemented and rolled out by Computacenter, and is now providing storage to our production servers, offering the flexibility and performance we were promised.”