Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Founded in 2010, GetCard provides payment gateway services, acting as an intermediary between businesses that take card payments from their customers and the financial institutions that receive these payments.
To meet rapidly growing demand for secure, efficient, and intelligent payment services, GetCard decided to build its own data center at its headquarters in Maringá in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. When the data center achieved PCI-DSS certification, GetCard was able to become the first payment gateway in Brazil to integrate directly with Banco Itaú, one of the country’s largest banks.
Next, GetCard created two subsidiaries: GetTI Services, which manages the group’s technology platforms and markets cloud, infrastructure, security, and software services to other businesses; and SonicHost, which offers web hosting services. Today, GetTI’s infrastructure not only processes 12 billion GetCard payment transactions per day, but also supports the core systems of 8,000 other businesses and around 5,000 SonicHost websites.
Challenge
GetCard’s core payment systems must be able to process thousands of transactions per second with less than five milliseconds of latency, while also maintaining high levels of availability and resiliency. To meet these requirements, ensure high levels of customer satisfaction, and maintain the company’s growth rate, GetTI upgrades its technology landscape on a three-year cycle.
In mid-2020, the GetTI team saw the need to increase storage capacity and performance, since its existing Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 storage array was nearing the limits of its capacity. Upgrading the storage environment would also help GetCard to eliminate performance bottlenecks and get the maximum benefit from its Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 and SR650 servers, which are powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
Why Lenovo? Robust Systems, Outstanding Support
After working with its local distributor to evaluate several options, GetTI selected the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE6000H Hybrid Storage Array as its new storage platform.
According to Franciello Aguilieri, GetCard's project director, the company's technical infrastructure was already built on Lenovo technologies, and its long-term partnership with Lenovo was a significant factor in the decision for the new storage platform.
“The ThinkSystem DE6000H offered the best value for money, but it was the excellence of Lenovo’s support and the high resilience of the solution that really made it stand out from the competition,” says Aguilieri. “That robustness means that our team has more time to focus on customer service, which increases customer satisfaction and attracts new business through referrals.”
Marcelo Schunck, President of Lenovo ISG, believes that responsive systems and proactive support are crucial to enable the growth of companies such as GetCard. “Lenovo is a world-leader in server resiliency. The high availability of our systems, when compared to other platforms, generates more savings for customers and eliminates problems that unplanned outages can cause. Lenovo support proactively works to identify system failures and acts quickly to fix them. In this way, our customers have more freedom for their technology teams to focus on their projects and contribute to the growth of the company.”
Boosting Performance with a Rapid Implementation
After selecting the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE6000H as its new storage solution, GetCard worked with Lenovo to implement the solution rapidly. After purchasing the solution in March, the system was up and running without issues before the end of May. The DE6000H storage array now supports a landscape including 70 physical servers and 13 switches, as well as approximately 2,000 Linux and Windows virtual machines.
“Our team can spend less time managing systems and more time delivering high-quality services. That allows our customers to concentrate on their business, instead of worrying about the infrastructure, as well as significantly reducing the cost of outages.” —Franciello Aguilieri, Project Director, GetCard
Among the technical improvements, the project increased the storage environment’s system memory from 16 GB to 128 GB and doubled the throughput capacity of its I/O ports from 16 GB to 32 GB. This helped to reduce latency from 13ms to less than 5ms and increase the number of inputs/outputs per second (IOPS), improving overall performance.1
In addition, the new storage landscape is more resilient, enabling the GetTI team to deliver more reliable service to its internal and external customers, and reduce time spent on storage management and maintenance.
Results
With the new ThinkSystem DE6000H array at the center of a technology architecture powered by Lenovo servers and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, GetTI has the robust, high-performance infrastructure it needs to support GetCard’s annual growth rate of 80%. Meanwhile, the company’s excellence in technical services has lifted its customer satisfaction score above 90%.1
Even so, GetCard is already planning its next technology upgrades—for example, the company intends to improve its disaster recovery infrastructure and upgrade its firewall over the coming months. In the longer term, GetCard aims to build a second data center with Tier 3 and ISO27000 information security certifications, which will increase availability and redundancy, as well as providing additional capacity to support new customers and launch new cloud services.
- 80% annual growth supported by Lenovo infrastructure1
- 90% customer satisfaction due to fast, reliable IT services1
- Over 60% lower latency, enabling 5ms response times1
“We have an obligation and commitment to our customers to keep our systems running, and Lenovo delivers the resilience and availability we need.” —Franciello Aguilieri, Project Director, GetCard