Financial services processing giant TSYS deploys Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for mission-critical data compliance and performance.

1. S U C C E S S S T O R Y
“I can’t say enough about the TSYS
pre-work that went into making INDUSTRY Banking/Finance
this project such a success. The
due diligence, the service and SOLUTIONS Enterprise Platform, Storage Management, Business Continuity and Replication
the knowledge provided by the Hardware — Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform
Software — Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP), Hitachi Universal
Hitachi team surpass any we’ve
Replicator (HUR), Hitachi Command Suite
ever encountered in the industry. ” Services — Residency Services provided by Hitachi Data Systems
Global Solution Services
Mark Holt
Senior Director of Distributed Technologies,
Operations
TSYS

2. S U C C E S S S T O R Y 2
The data being managed, its security and
Financial Services Processing Giant TSYS Deploys Hitachi availability is mission critical to TSYS, and
ensuring the access to and protection of
Virtual Storage Platform for Mission-critical Data its clients’ transactional information is of
Compliance and Performance premium importance. As a company that
handles sensitive cardholder information
TSYS is a Fortune 2500 company that orchestrates end-to-end for major credit, debit and corporate cards,
TSYS is required to comply with data
commercial credit card processing and information management security standards issued by the Payment
for some of the world’s biggest financial institutions and their end Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards
Council, a global oversight forum ac-
users. To exceed its own global objectives for persistent data countable for increasing controls around
growth, encryption of at-rest data and substantial performance im- cardholder data to reduce card fraud.
provements, TSYS implemented Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. “The Golden facility is at the heart of
monitoring across all of the distributed
Today’s marketplace is global, with an processing, TSYS is a full-service organi- application suites. It’s where we synthesize
infinite number of online purchases and zation specializing in secure, web-brows- the end-user experience across all core
paperless payments happening anywhere, ing services and products with real-time products and client-facing web interfaces.
at any time. Behind more than 50 million functionality and 24/7 access. Among its Organizations such as ours that process
daily financial transactions is a hardwork- products are CentreSuite and Credit Care, financial information must be PCI certified,
ing company dedicated to providing a which are designed to improve client prof- which requires encryption of at-rest data.
better experience for buyers and sellers. itability and customer retention. We also have a very limited floor space
TSYS provides a wide range of electronic footprint there, and must remain cognizant
payment solutions for merchants and their Focus on Data Growth of our heating, cooling, power and space
customers, including consumer finance, consumption. We needed to collapse the
TSYS has a primary production and
credit, debit, healthcare and loyalty pro- storage footprint yet increase the capac-
corporate card processing facility located
grams, as well as prepaid, chip and mobile ity at the same time. On the performance
in Golden, Colorado, where many of the
payments. front, we wanted to dramatically reduce
company’s technical support staff and
storage latency to provide better response
Headquartered in Columbus, Georgia, with software developers reside. The site also
times across the database and application
offices throughout the Americas, Europe, houses a network operations center and
environments,” explains Senior Director of
Middle East, Asia and Asia-Pacific, TSYS help desk for clients, consisting of more
Distributed Technologies for Operations at
supports payment services across 85 than 650 servers that support 9 key plat-
TSYS, Mark Holt.
countries for approximately 300 clients forms and hosted services.
and has a relationship with more than half Stored business data at TSYS has been
of the top 20 global banks. From actually steadily growing at 35% year over year,
producing the plastic credit cards to han- keeping pace with industry averages.
dling online card activation and statement
“We needed encryption technology for at-rest data, less physical
footprint with greater storage capacity, and performance
improvements for database responsiveness. The Virtual Storage
Platform gave us all that and much more.”
Mark Holt
Senior Director of Distributed Technologies, Operations
TSYS

3. S U C C E S S S T O R Y 3
Process New Ways to Manage TSYS Credits Hitachi Technologies of encrypting data while at rest, with XTS-
and Services AES 256-bit encryption at the hardware
To adeptly manage its storage growth and
level and no overhead. VSP also combines
meet regulatory and industry demands, Prior to implementing its new storage
with Hitachi Command Suite v7, which
TSYS wanted to expand server virtualiza- solution, TSYS worked with Hitachi Data
delivers a comprehensive management
tion and disaster recovery capabilities, Systems Global Solution Services to
suite and common interface to help TSYS
while gaining greater simplicity and scal- thoroughly scope the project. Holt decided
unify storage, achieve highest levels of op-
ability. “We have heavy storage consump- to also leverage Residency Services with
erational efficiency and facilitate a greater
tion and utilization. The typical content we project manager Daniel Erickson from
virtualization landscape.
manage is rich and diverse: lots of images Hitachi Data Systems for managing the
and PDF records, which can be very project and migration onsite and accelerat- “With this project, we’re collapsing up to
demanding to manage and provide instant ing the deployment. “I can’t say enough 150 physical servers and moving to 30
access to clients. Consequently, we’ve about the pre-work that went into mak- VMware servers that will function in 4-node
been somewhat limited to what historical ing this project such a success. The due clusters. VSP enables us to fully realize
data we can offer online. I manage centers diligence, the service and the knowledge our virtualization initiatives and speed the
all over the world. Part of my overall IT provided by the Hitachi team surpass any delivery of moving from physical to virtual
strategy is to enable our virtual 1st initia- we’ve ever encountered in the industry. environments. The reduction in physi-
tive, which is to consolidate our physical From conducting onsite analysis of exist- cal equipment translates into immediate
footprint by taking advantage of virtualiza- ing infrastructure and understanding our savings in heating and cooling costs and
tion,” Holt says. unique needs, to managing the configura- the recovery of valuable data center floor
tion, migration and build-out, our Hitachi space,” Holt furthers.
Disaster recovery is currently being out-
onsite resident and all the services staff
sourced to a colocation facility. The long- The company is already taking strides to-
we’ve engaged throughout this effort have
term disaster recovery goal is to be able ward its long-term disaster recovery goals
been outstanding. They’ve been key to
to replicate data from Golden to wherever with VSP implementation. TSYS will soon
TSYS being able to implement so quickly
it needs to, and to migrate applications be using Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR)
and smoothly,” states Holt.
online without disruption to users. Holt software to replicate production data
also wants to unite storage for the Golden TSYS selected Hitachi Virtual Storage directly from Golden to Columbus, and
production data. “By moving to 1 platform, Platform (VSP), an economically superior teeing up VMware Site Recovery Manager
we will gain a single command center for storage architecture designed to ad- and VMware vMotion for the data migra-
managing and scaling production storage. dress the dynamic data environments and tion. “The Virtual Storage Platform and
Greater scalability may help us to extend changing business requirements with 1 HUR software give us the flexibility and
client offerings and provide additional platform and many cost efficiencies. VSP footprint we need to do site recovery and
functionality more quickly in the future,” provides 3-dimensional scaling to dynami- allow production data to live in multiple
continues Holt. cally scale up, out and deep, combining locations, while allowing data movement
with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning to lever- in real time with transparency. With this in
With the new PCI compliance deadline
age substantial throughput. place, we’ll be able to eliminate the cost of
looming and growing concerns around
the colocation facility. VSP helps to give us
database responsiveness, Holt enlisted the “Dynamic Provisioning is really the corner-
the depth we envisioned for our disaster
help of Hitachi Data Systems. “We needed stone of how we’re storing data on the
recovery and restore capabilities,” he says.
to be able to meet the PCI requirements VSP. It’s the throughput that enables a
without taking an outage or interruption of large number of transactions to be handled
Activate an Array of Cost
production systems. That meant mov- simultaneously on a smaller footprint, and
ing 40TB of data without impact to our
Efficiencies and Capabilities
able to scale to tremendous size without
client base, in a very short period of time. impacting performance,” says Erickson. The Virtual Storage Platform has only
The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform had been deployed at the Golden facility a
everything we were looking for in a solu- At TSYS, the VSP was configured with short time. However, the implications of
tion. We needed encryption technology 300TB of usable capacity across 4 racks its success are significant. “So far, we’ve
for at-rest data, less physical footprint with and varying performance-level disks, been able to dramatically collapse our
greater storage capacity, and performance including high-performance SAS drives on physical footprint and double our storage.
improvements for database responsive- Tier 1 and Tier 2, and 2TB SATA drives on Golden is our primary location for VMware
ness. The Virtual Storage Platform gave us Tier 3. To satisfy the annual PCI certifica- proofs of concept and virtualization. Plus,
all that and much more,” he says. tion, TSYS is using the back-end directors to date we’ve virtualized 40% of produc-
internal to VSP. The directors are capable tion servers and 90% of development

4. S U C C E S S S T O R Y
servers. Storage latency has decreased “We have an optimal framework at Golden
10-fold, from 60 milliseconds to fewer than now along with a more advanced suite
5 milliseconds, and testing with the new of capabilities. We also have standard-
hardware shows a 200% improvement in ized hardware and software that allow us
database reorganization and maintenance to manage larger environments without
times,” says Holt. increasing staff. The VSP lets us scale much
larger and invoke a greater number of proj-
The entire back end of TSYS monitoring
ects, enabling us to extend our offerings for
solutions now sits on VSP. Longer term,
clients and end users. For example, we can
all the office systems will also dwell on the
now go deeper into providing additional rich
system. Because space is at a premium in
content and historical statements or data.
Golden, the existing storage systems have
The performance improvements and versa-
been reassigned to non-production storage
tility are visible across all our core solutions.
in the Columbus center.
I would definitely mark this experience as a
“We’re going into peak season with heavy tremendous success,” finishes Holt.
database activity. The VSP is handling it
all very well, enabling the workloads to
be distributed across RAID groups for
the dynamic pools. The implementation
with VSP and dynamic provisioning and
VMware seemed so easy from our end. We
were able to leverage all the capabilities of
virtualization, and rolled this out in 60 days
instead of what normally might have been 6
months. This is the pilot program for future
migrations at TSYS,” adds Erickson.
Corporate Headquarters Regional Contact Information
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www.HDS.com Asia Pacific: +852 3189 7900 or hds.marketing.apac@HDS.com
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© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved. SS-335-A DG February 2012