Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Who is the Municipality of São Leopoldo?
São Leopoldo is the oldest metropolitan region in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Founded in 1824 by German immigrants, today São Leopoldo is a major hub for industry and technology.
In the municipality, 19 secretariats work together to deliver local government, health, education, housing, transport, and other vital public services to São Leopoldo’s 240,000 inhabitants.
The Challenge
The municipality of São Leopoldo is committed to continuously improving services for those who call the city home and recognized that online services would be a powerful way to improve accessibility and convenience for residents. However, an aging IT infrastructure stood in the way of the digital transformation goal. The municipality struggled with performance issues for back-office applications and databases, as well as disaster recovery.
Maricler Sobral, IT Coordinator at the Municipality of São Leopoldo, confirms: “Our previous environment was outdated, with legacy technologies that could not support the addition of new digital services. As a result, most municipal services were largely paper based. We looked for a new platform to enable residents to access information and services
"Seamless knowledge transfer from Athenas Datacenter and Lenovo helped us get to grips with the new solutions very quickly, enabling us to get the best performance out of our Lenovo infrastructure."—Maricler Sobral, IT Coordinator, Municipality of São Leopoldo
Modernizing IT
Following a public tender, the municipality of São Leopoldo engaged Athenas Datacenter—a local systems integrator with 24 years of experience—to refresh its data center infrastructure with state-of-the-art Lenovo systems.
With support from Lenovo, Athenas Datacenter deployed four Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 V2 servers, powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors optimized for demanding data center workloads, and one Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5100F all-NVMe flash storage system, connected by Lenovo ThinkSystem DB610S SAN switches.
The Athenas Datacenter and Lenovo teams also provided extensive instruction and training to the municipality’s IT team.
Hardware
- Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 V2 Rack Server powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5100F SAN Flash Storage Array
- Lenovo ThinkSystem DB610S Gen 6 FC SAN Switch
Software
- VMware vSphere
Services
- Lenovo Hardware Installation Services
- Lenovo Warranty Upgrade
Results
With modern Lenovo and Intel® technology underpinning its back-office applications and databases, the municipality of São Leopoldo has seen a huge increase in compute and storage performance, accelerating key processes and improving the experience for municipality staff.
“Backed by Lenovo technology, we are transforming our citizen services for the digital age.”—Maricler Sobral, IT Coordinator, Municipality of São Leopoldo
Backup times have also improved, now running five-times faster than before on average. One database backup window went from 30 hours to just one hour, slashing both the municipality’s recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), and reducing the risk of service disruption.1
Crucially, the new Lenovo infrastructure will support the ongoing digitalization of municipal services.
Maricler Sobral comments: “We are moving more and more of our services online, dramatically reducing paperwork, and removing the need for citizens to present documentation in person at city hall.”
- 5X reduction in backup times on average1
- Faster response times for key back-office applications
- Solid foundation for digital transformation
“The strong commitment and positive attitude of the municipality’s IT team helped to make this project such a success.”—Paulo Martins, Technical Director, Athenas Datacenter
Why Lenovo?
In addition to meeting all technical requirements, the Lenovo and Athenas Datacenter proposal delivered the best business case, offering the greatest value for money for the municipality of São Leopoldo.
The municipality’s IT team was also impressed with the experience of the joint project team, giving them confidence that Lenovo and Athenas Datacenter would deliver a smooth deployment.