The PVA is the country‘s largest pension or retirement income provider with more than two million retirement accounts. To help the agency take advantage of potential synergies in the IT field, Atos (Siemens IT Solutions and Services) consolidated the agency’s data centers and standardized its software solutions.

Business Challenges

• Before the merger of the pension institutions for salaried employees and wage earners, two separate data centers were responsible for retirement account maintenance and pension payments.

• The two data centers had to be consolidated into a single PVA accounting system.

Solution

• Linking the ‚new‘ location at Schiffamts-gasse (PVA Backup Center) with Friedrich Hillegeist Strasse (PVA Data Center) via a fiber-optic line

• Upgrading the mainframes

• Replacing the mainframe ESCON connections with fiber channel connections

• Integrating the system into a SAN concept

• Upgrading the Symmetrix 5930 to a Symmetrix DMX 1000

• Modifying the internal infrastructure to gigabit switches

• Accelerating the data backups

• Integrating the open systems (AIX and Win2k servers) into the SAN concept

Benefits

• SAN integration of legacy computer systems

• Centralized backup for BS2000 and open systems

• High reliability through redundancy of all essential system components

• Powerful mainframes

• Fast connections between PVA locations over fiber-optic lines with data speeds of 2 GB/sec

• Siemens carried the overall project responsibility

• One single service partner for BS2000 hardware and software at the PVA data center

“Based on our many years of successful cooperation with Atos (Siemens IT Solutions and Services) as a general contractor, we had no doubt that they would be able to successfully implement this strategically important project.“

Dir. Hloupy, Pensionsversicherungsanstalt (PVA)

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