Correos

Story Details

Correos has been providing postal services across Spain for more than 300 years. During the Middle Ages, when the service belonged to the crown, teams of royal couriers transported messages between the nobility. Then in the 18th century, King Philip V turned Correos into a state service, making it available to all citizens for the first time. Throughout its history, Correos has needed to adapt to change, yet nothing from the past could prepare it for the rise of the Internet.

Instead of using traditional postal services, people are increasingly turning to the Internet to communicate and complete tasks such as paying bills and filling out forms online. Correos, however, saw a way to add value to Internet-based communications and create a business proposition that was attractive to citizens and business customers alike. The idea was to build a highly secure email service that included data encryption and time stamps, so users received certification that a message had arrived at its destination.

Correos decided to develop the service in phases, the first of which was to provide up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. The technology behind the new “Electronic Post Box” service, Apartado Postal Electrónico (APE), had to be reliable and scalable enough to handle new offerings. Apart from having flexibility built in, the technology also needed to be expertly managed to maximize performance.

Correos looked for an IT solutions provider to design, deploy, and manage the platform’s data storage infrastructure. Even though it had a long-standing relationship with Sun, Correos considered other solution providers including HP and IBM. However, it selected Sun as the preferred supplier because they were able to guarantee the reliability of the email service. José Marcelino Pérez, e-business manager at Correos, says, “The stability, reliability, and scalability of Sun’s technology would enable us to offer a growing number of online services for citizens and companies. Thanks to Sun, we could meet future demand and service growth, and respond quickly to our clients’ needs.”

With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos devised and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform. A Sun Fire T2000 and a Sun Fire T1000 server, both featuring UltraSPARC T1 processor technology and running the Solaris 10 Operating System, work as load balancers at the front end. In tests, the Sun servers performed better with Correo’s Critical Path email application than competitive systems. Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers, running backup software, sit at the back end of the platform. Two Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays, one located at the organization’s main data center and the other at a disaster recovery site, store email data, which is archived to a Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system. To maximize availability, Sun Professional Services deployed Solaris Cluster software. This protects the integrity of application data and services across the cluster's nodes, which are divided between the main and disaster recovery site.

Today, APE is delivering a secure and reliable email service to citizens, companies, and government offices throughout Spain. With the Sun-based storage infrastructure, Correos is providing 5 MB worth of storage for its 140,000 mailboxes. Marcelino Pérez says, “APE and Sun technology are helping Correos meet the challenges of a transition from paper correspondence to Internet-based communication.” Correos also has peace of mind knowing that the infrastructure is protected by a SunSpectrum Platinum support plan and storage and backup systems are being well maintained by Sun Remote Operations Management. As part of the agreement, a Sun engineer will start to resolve any issue within 15 minutes after the problem has been reported. The organization estimates that Sun's Remote Operations Management will reduce the TCO of its email system by 40%. Crucially, the service hasn’t suffered any downtime since it launched in October 2008, and Correos has achieved its goal of creating an email service that it can continue to enhance.