Tokyo Gas Lease Co., Ltd.

"Performance has improved dramatically due to "ETERNUS DX60"'s abundant cache capacity in addition to increased disk capacity. There are about 60 ALIS users and about 30 of them are assumed to access ALIS concurrently. But we have never experienced any performance problems so far. In addition, we have eliminated affects on nightly batch transactions caused by degradation in data transfer speeds."

To achieve a low-carbon society, the role Tokyo Gas Lease plays, as a company leasing natural gas appliances, has become larger than ever. As a result, the company's lease management system (known as ALIS) supporting the core of its business was experiencing internal disk capacity shortages. This was due to the rapid data growth, following the application of new lease accounting standards. It also caused other serious problems such as its affect on night time batch transactions.

Thus, quickly overcome this situation and at limited cost, Tokyo Gas Lease introduced Fujitsu's entry-level disk storage system "ETERNUS DX60". Since installation, the ETERNUS DX60 has supported the expansion of leasing by providing sufficient disk capacity for the next five years as well as improved data transfer speeds.

System introduction background

Rapidly increasing data due to meeting the new lease accounting standards.

Natural gas has become a focus as a clean energy that helps achieve a low-carbon society. Tokyo Gas was the first in Japan to introduced Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) as a source of town gas in 1969. And now the part Tokyo Gas Lease (previously TG Credit Co., Ltd.) plays in the Group in promoting natural gas usage, has become large.

The company started its credit business from the time of its establishment in 1983. Since then leasing had come to account for two-thirds of its entire sales. To reflect this it changed the company name in October 2010. In addition to industrial gas appliances, the company leases high efficiency gas water heaters for rental housing complexes and domestic fuel cell cogeneration systems called "Ene-farm" which is featured in a TV commercial, as well as providing credit products such as "sunlight power generation loans" to match a wide range of customer requirements with a wide variety of products.

The company has a forward-looking attitude to the use of ICT. "We had used a self developed host system for long time but it became difficult for the system to keep pace with the rapid growth in leasing and the speed of new product development. In addition, by taking correspondence to the new lease accounting standards into consideration, we introduced an integrated mission critical system called "LEASING-1 Neo" in 2008 and using Fujitsu's Industry Standard server "PRIMERGY RX300" as its core component to manage leasing information." said Mr. Syouzo Nishina, Manager of Planning Division, Tokyo Gas Lease Co., Ltd.

However after installation, the company faced an unexpected issue when it was in server design phase. A data explosion, caused by correspondence to the new lease accounting standards which took effect in 2008.

Introduction requirements

Ensuring data capacity into the future and improvements in data transfer speeds were imperative.

The company's lease management system called ALIS is configured based on "LEASING-1 Neo". As the most critical system of the company, it manages the entire information generated in the course of a lease from quotation, contract, to closure. "ALIS had been expanded and enhanced many times to match with applications. Two years after its introduction, it was now an indispensable system for us. But the incorporated disk capacity of ALIS's database ran out unexpectedly. " (Mr. Nishina)

The database capacity had expanded due to a dramatic increase caused by correspondence to the tax practice and borrower disclosure requirements in a situation where conventional accounting transactions and new accounting transactions needed to co-exist. In this situation due to the increase in transactions and additional batch jobs, night time batch transactions came to be affected. TG Information Network Co., Ltd., a company which supports Tokyo Gas Group's ICT, suggested a solution based on configuring a SAN using an external disk storage system with the objectives of maintaining data capacity for future expansion and providing improved data transfer speeds.

"All the mountable internal disks of the ALIS server had been already used. In the initial expansion plan, we considered replacing the server with a new one that could hold more larger capacity internal disks. However, in order to realize this idea, we had to execute installation and setup of OS, middleware and applications. This would take time and we would have to stop operations during the process. External storage on the other hand, we would be able to introduce with minimum process and in a short time." explained Mr. Tadashi Nabata, IT Solution Division II, TG Information Network Co., Ltd., who suggested this process to Tokyo Gas Lease as an application maintenance system engineer of ALIS and actually executed migration of data.

Installation point

Considering external storage involved taking into considering all factors of scalability, performance, reliability and cost.

There were three major storage requirements. "First, to maintain the capacity based on the assumption for the coming 5 years. Plus having the capability to add disks easily without stopping operations. Secondly, to achieve data transfer speeds equivalent to or faster than existing internal disks so as not to affect performance of ALIS system. Lastly, to enable enhancement of fault tolerance and system performance by configuring the ALIS database server and the external storage redundantly with multipath configuration. To them, preservation of cache data in case of power failure was added." said Mr. Hiroshi Kooriyama, IT Solution Division II, TG Network Co., Ltd. a system engineer in charge of the infrastructure, who managed the overall infrastructure project including SAN disk installation and network arrangement etc.

As a system that meet these requirements, Fujitsu's entry-level disk storage system "ETERNUS DX60" was selected. In the decision, cost efficiency was also a focus. "In terms of smooth handling of any cause of failures and speedy maintenance, we considered that we would be able to have consolidated support from Fujitsu for both of servers and storage." added Mr. Nabata.

Migration started in the fall of 2009, installation was finished in December.
In addition, EUC, a database handling loan related information, and due for replacement, ceased operation as planned and its functions were included in ALIS with the aim of reducing installation and operation management costs.

Installation benefits and future expectations

Maintaining disk capacity for five years ahead while dramatically improving performance.

The new system was designed using four "PRIMERGY RX300" servers; two for main use, one for development/maintenance, and one for managing ledger sheet images, in the same way as the existing ALIS configuration. Both the main and standby servers can use "ETERNUS DX60" as shared SAN storage.

Asked about the benefits of storage installation, Mr. Kooriyama said "performance has improved dramatically due to "ETERNUS DX60"'s abundant cache capacity in addition to increased disk capacity. There are about 60 ALIS users and about 30 of them are assumed to access ALIS concurrently. But we have never experienced any performance problems so far. In addition, we have eliminated affects on nightly batch transactions caused by degradation in data transfer speeds."

The time required for large-scale annual overnight batch transactions has reduced by over 10%. Now data can be utilized in an easier way without changing data locations as a result of functionality integration.
Mr. Nishina speaks on future development. "Stable operation is the first priority. Based on that and looking to the International Accounting Standards, we would like to build a path to the next system development while reviewing the "LEASING-1 Neo" roadmap.
Having this time achieved maintainable disk capacity for use in the coming five years, we are now prepared for the expansion of leasing without worrying about capacity shortages. We will commit to provide further support to leasing while taking ROI into consideration in the future." said Mr. Nishina.

Together with the energy frontier Tokyo Gas, Tokyo Gas Lease is making its contribution to the "creation of environmentally friendly towns". Fujitsu will continue to support the company's business infrastructure with a combination of state-of-the-art technologies and our comprehensive strength.

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