Postel – Poste Italiane Group

Story Details

Postel uses many business applications in its heterogeneous operating environment, including ones from Oracle and SAP. It also uses Millennium, an in-house application for bulk printing. With growing demand, Postel wanted to increase its productivity and efficiency, so it began to look at server consolidation.

Following an in-depth market analysis and a preliminary multivendor test phase, Postel decided to use the high-end, 64-bit Sun Blade 8000 Modular System from Sun Microsystems for two projects, because of its advanced technological and architectural features. "Postel handles a huge volume of data in electronic format," explains Bruno Mojana, Demand Manager in the Chief Financial Office of Postel. "To meet the processing requirements of our two critical projects, we chose the Sun Blade 8000.”

The first project involved developing, tuning, and consolidating the processing platform for Millennium. The application receives electronic information from customers, constructs addresses from variable information, and performs other operations that support printing and envelope preparation.

As additional servers were added to the processing architecture for Millennium, the system became less efficient, which limited business expansion and increased time-to-market. "One of the critical points in this process is the SLAs that our customers request," explains Mojana. So Postel needed to address the inefficiency.

Postel implemented an "Oracle Farm" between two sites in Rome and Milan (Melzo), with consolidation and virtualization on a single chassis. The company used two Sun Blade 8000 Modular Systems for the implementation. Each was equipped with five four-processor blade modules, three servers operating in a VMware environment and the other two dedicated to an Oracle rack server in a Linux environment. At all sites, the systems were supported by a SAN.

"The Sun solution met our requirements for modularity and scalability. It allowed us to reorganize our processes through a virtualized approach, instead of reorganizing processing chains tied to dedicated hardware. We increased processing capacity—and therefore productivity,” says Mojana.

The second consolidation project, an ERP project that involved the SAP Infrastructure Application (SIA), required the rationalization the SAP environment. The company deployed a third Sun Blade 8000 Modular System, also equipped with five blades, for this solution.

For the second project, Postel needed to accommodate the huge volume of data from 1,3 billion items of correspondence that it receives annually. Each piece of correspondence generates an accounting data item.“The Sun solution allowed us to reorganize our ERP system to deal with the new workloads,” Mojana says. “It also let us take advantage of pricing opportunities, and through virtualization we can achieve load balancing to deal with our monthly work peak, in the best possible way.”

Postel management found the Sun x64 architecture guarantees better results than other solutions for performance, flexibility, and reliability. “The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System was the most advanced. Sun was the only vendor to offer the required modularity and the dual-core four-processor blades,” says Paolo Piaggio, System Administrator in the Chief Information and Operating Office of Postel.

The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System architecture also makes it easy to install new cards,with four Gigabit Ethernet network points that are standard on each blade. Postel management liked the dedicated bus architecture, hot swappable disks, and the USB interface, as well. Sinergy, a Sun Systems integration partner, helped to implement the Postel projects.

Because the Sun Blade 8000 solution is modular, all elements can be managed within a single chassis—from the power supply system to the input/output system—with blades that include processors and disks. What’s more, there is no integrated network switch in the chassis of the Sun Blade platform, which means customers can manage connectivity however they want. In addition, Postel could use its existing network switches, which allowed it to implement a configuration that simplified management. “If we had needed to insert internal switches to interact with our storage system and the fiber channel switches,we could have introduced a critical point,” says Piaggio.

The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System architecture is an open architecture, so it supports running Unix and Linux side by side with Windows and VMware environments and provides a good foundation for the future. Every chassis can be expanded by inserting up to 10 server modules inside each one. “We were highly satisfied with the results achieved,” Mojana concludes, “and we intend to gradually extend the architectural model adopted in these projects to the other Postel services.”