ButanGas: modernisation of technology infrastructure to improve performance and service availability

The collaboration with IBM led to the adoption of IBM Power technology to increase the responsiveness of systems and improve business continuity.

Not only technology, but also young skills trained in the field thanks to the IBM i Academy

Milan, 1 December 2022 – ButanGas, one of the largest players in the Italian LPG market, has recently chosen to renew its technological infrastructure using the IBM Power platform to increase the reactivity of its systems by reducing all processing times and increasing infrastructure resilience and business continuity to support a growing business and increasing customer satisfaction.

ButanGas operates throughout the country through 15 branches, 15 operating units and 9 large product storage and bottling plants, including two coastal depots. ButanGas’ distribution network, which also extends to the most remote or hard-to-reach rural areas, has a fleet of 150 tanker trucks and 110 lorries, enabling it to reach 200,000 customers and more than 9,000 professionals from small and large companies. To be present in homes and businesses on a daily basis, ButanGas needs to be able to count on effective and efficient vehicle management as well as wide availability of services and high system responsiveness.

In order to guarantee consistently high performance, the company has chosen to equip itself with a mainly on-premise infrastructure, supported by SaaS services in the cloud for specific applications. Core business applications, such as ERP, vertical applications, and reporting systems, run on IBM i systems, which allow for high reliability and business continuity. The IBM Power infrastructure is managed for Italy, Austria and Germany by ButanGas’ in-house IT team, which is also responsible for the provision of all the Group’s Infrastructure & Security services, as well as that of the proprietary vertical application for the LPG world, through its software development division.

“The period we are currently experiencing is particularly complex also because of the highly unstable geopolitical scenarios, ” said Demetrio Moscato, Deputy General Manager, ButanGas. “This requires extreme flexibility, speed and the ability to embrace change in order to meet the challenges that even a sector like ours must face. One above all: the energy transition. We also want to play a leading role on the digital side where, partly as a consequence of the pandemic period, the real time response to our customers’ needs is increasingly becoming an unavoidable priority. Reliability, modernisation and innovation are the characteristics that led us to identify the IBM Power platform as the one most in line with our objectives. An efficient and resilient platform for the business, capable of delivering applications and insights securely, where and when they are needed“.

The process of renewing ButanGas’ technology infrastructure started in 2021 with the aim of increasing the responsiveness of the systems, reducing the time of each operation, from the simple drafting of a document to the processing of the most complex report, and making the infrastructure more resilient, with benefits also in terms of business continuity.

All this by integrating a technology solution that is scalable, stable and capable of evolving over time, and in perfect alignment with the company’s mission, which focuses on customer satisfaction through cutting-edge services.

After an accurate feasibility analysis conducted by IBM and its partner Labinf S.p.A, in agreement with ButanGas, the IBM Power platform turned out to be the most suitable solution to meet the needs that emerged, while enhancing the company’s already available assets.  With a high-performance, flexible and secure network connection (Dark Fiber at 10Gb) between the primary site and the Disaster Recovery site, a hardware infrastructure was chosen on-premise for ButanGas’ information system: two IBM Power servers, IBM FlashSystem 7000 and 5000 storage systems with solid-state disks, and a pair of Hardware Management Consoles (HMC) for the management and control of the infrastructure itself. The operating system used on IBM Power is IBM i, which is fundamental for its ability to enhance investments in favour of solidity, security, innovation and openness to market standards. This strategic choice has led to the integration of an increasing number of Open Source tools.

The collaboration with IBM and Labinf was crucial not only in the architectural study phase of the infrastructure, but also in its integration and commissioning. IBM Power technology was supported by IBM software solutions to make the infrastructure highly flexible and to optimise the use of IT resources, including Virtual I/O server (PowerVM) to virtualise the hardware resources to be assigned to the various IBM i instances, PowerHA Tools for IBM i – Full System FlashCopy to automate backups of IBM i partitions by reducing the need for system shutdown to less than 30 seconds and, finally, storage replicas to transfer data between the primary site and the Disaster Recovery site, drastically reducing the RPO (Recovery Point Objective) to less than 5 minutes and, therefore, lowering the risk of possible data loss in the event of a disaster.

A modernisation project cannot disregard the skills required to enhance the investments made and integrate them with innovation components on an ongoing basis. ButanGas, aware of the value that adequately trained company resources can have for the success of a technological project, wanted to identify new professional figures who could deal internally with the management of the IBM i platform. This need was also met thanks to the IBM i Academy, a free training course aimed at young new graduates conducted by IBM and focused on Power with IBM i. This allowed ButanGas to add a new resource to the team dedicated to the IBM Power world, who was adequately trained in the Academy.

“The successful union between ButanGas and IBM has deep and long-standing roots. Since the 1980s we have been supporting and flanking ButanGas in its technological evolution process through solutions and services that are always at the cutting edge,” says Marco Ballan, Infrastructure Sales Manager of IBM Italy. “Today, IBM Power’s open and secure platform, our skills and those of our partners are even more than in the past addressing the need to respond faster to changing business environments and demands, while protecting information security and gaining new insights from data, all with high reliability, availability and increasing attention to environmental sustainability“.

Benefits: digitisation for faster processing of transactions

The results were immediately evident. Firstly, in terms of performance: execution speed has increased significantly, transaction execution has improved by 20-30%, reaching peaks of 40-50% in the case of complex reports and procedures, all without saturating the machine’s resources.

Backup times were halved, the RPO (Recovery Point Objective) was reduced to less than 5 minutes and the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) to less than 30 minutes. This means that the time required to restore service after an interruption, without putting the network infrastructure under stress, was significantly reduced. This made it possible to fully achieve the initial objectives while maintaining a margin to further improve this performance should the need arise.