IBM said it has been selected by National Company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, the largest railway operator in Central Asia, to provide hardware and software to enable Kazakh Railways for its freight and passenger operations.
IBM will work with Kazakh Railways to establish a system based on two disaster-proof data centres in the city of Astana, which includes an IBM z10 mainframe computer.
The new data centres will not only enable Kazakh Railways to consolidate core freight and passenger management applications but also increase the reliability of systems.
The new system will enable Kazakh Railways safeguard and recover information and reduce possible downtime in the case of a systems failure through its recovery capabilities.
The offering includes a new IBM z10 mainframe and the upgrade of Kazakh Railways’ existing z9 mainframe connected by a Parallel Sysplex, and its softwares include IBM DB2 and WebSphere technologies.
It also includes two high-end DS8700 disk storage subsystems, FICON/SAN directors and two TS3500 tape libraries, and IBM Tivoli NetView, System Automation and GDPS technologies to take care automatic application recovery.
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The new offering from IBM will enable the railways to reduce the potential downtime related to a systems failure from several hours to as little as 20 minutes in order ensure uninterrupted transport operations.
The National Company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy vice-president for business development Ermek Keyzatov said reliable and fault tolerant systems are crucial for their company’s operations, and even the smallest systems failure can lead to enormous financial losses.
IBM country general manager in the Commonwealth of Independent States Mikhail Seregin said IBM has been selected to enable the national railway of Kazakhstan to become efficient and reliable to lay the foundations for a rail network in the country that can predict demand and optimise capacity to handle the increasing volume of rail traffic in the country.
The contract was signed in August 2010 and the project is slated for completion in the first half of 2011.
