Imagine being responsible for the management and tracking of 26 million vehicles, 22 million drivers, 93 million parking permits, and 42 million citations across hundreds of parking operations. The operational logistics are mindboggling, not to mention the associated data that needs to be stored, managed, and accessed reliably. T2 Systems Inc., a leader in cloud-based enterprise parking management solutions, does this flawlessly. With the help of some smart EMC technology, EMC VSPEX, T2 can ensure that its clients — spanning universities, municipalities, hospitals, airports, etc. across the U.S. — are able to easily manage their own parking facilities.
Jim Hutchins, T2’s CIO, compares the company’s customer requirements to what people expect from their utility providers. “People expect water from their faucet and don’t even think about the supporting systems and people behind it. It’s the same for us. We don’t want our customers to worry about the back-end technology that runs their parking operations.”
T2 processes more than one billion database transactions a day, a rate that’s growing by a half-billion transactions per month. The company is also rapidly expanding its client-base, adding over three-dozen new customers to its parking management system every year. The increasing transaction volume as a result of this growth was pounding T2’s Oracle database and putting service level performance at risk during peak parking times.
To avoid future performance issues, T2 decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure. As Jim said, “We never want to be in a position where customers are calling us because our systems are too slow.”
With the help of EMC Velocity Solution Partner, Integrated Data Storage, they considered solutions from HP, Dell Compellent, EMC, NetApp and Nimbus. Ultimately, T2 chose an EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solution including EMC VNX with the FAST Suite, EMC Data Domain, Cisco UCS servers, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization.
VSPEX fits perfectly with T2’s focus on keeping things simple. VSPEX is T2’s engine behind the company’s parking management software — storing permit information, data on customer parking behavior, payment history, capturing data when people enter and exit a parking facility, and so on.
As a fully integrated infrastructure, VSPEX has also simplified IT administration for T2 — whether it involves adding capacity or running backups. By replacing tape with Data Domain, T2 shrunk their backup window by 50% and restore time by more than 90%, from an hour to just five minutes. VSPEX’s physical footprint and energy is half that of T2’s previous infrastructure, thereby reducing complexity and costs. T2 achieved this data consolidation by purchasing fewer drives overall and rely on just 2% total Flash capacity to power 80% of their virtualized Oracle IO.
All of this allows T2 to ensure data is always captured and available in real time, which is critical because most parking operations are 24×7.
Jim summed it up: “The message we send to our customers is they can forget about the technology and focus on the business of their parking operations.”
T2 Systems can now ensure that they can deliver maximum performance and availability to their customers while simplifying their internal IT operations.
To learn more about T2, read the profile.
