With TCO an ever present factor in the future of IT implementations and services worldwide, the South African Revenue Services (SARS) recently announced the successful replacement of its mainframe local network controllers by I -Fusion Networks at its offices in Pretoria with Memorex Telex Controllers.
Benefits include the reduction of maintenance costs on the SARS mainframe due to the introduction of Memorex Telex partition controllers. "Operators are now able to control the various partitions through a single console, so they have less consoles to maintain and fewer controllers," says Ernie Risi, executive director at I-Fusion. The use of only a single console has also reduced the footprint of the operators station at SARS, as well as having made the operators` task easier.
"Before the installation of the Memorex Telex controllers the operators would have to physically move to a new console and workstation in order to perform maintenance on a particular partition of the mainframe. That has now changed, and the operators simply hotkey between the partitions processing the various applications, in order to access them," he says. The Hitachi mainframe runs various applications on the different partitions, of which there are currently 16.
The project also saw the successful migration of the mainframe to a new location in Vermeulen Street in Pretoria.
According to Risi the move to the new SARS premises ran smoothly. He accredits this to the professional team from I-Fusion, working closely with the SARS IT team. "The entire mainframe operation was transported to the new premises without problem because it was thoroughly planned and well executed by the SARS team working in conjunction with I-Fusion," he says. "Basically we reduced the total cost-of-ownership for SARS as well as transporting their system successfully to their new offices, without a single glitch," Risi concludes.
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