National Government Services Agency

It is every government’s responsibility to consider the well-being of its citizens. For this national governmental agency, that means forward-thinking solutions that ensure that citizens eligible for government benefits can access services when they need them the most. The organization asked us to develop new benefits solutions to help them move forward strategically into the future, with special attention to the needs of the country’s aging population and the growing stress on the health care system. They needed to plan for greater demands on their services, while also lowering the costs of maintaining their current mainframe systems.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency relief legislation caused application demand to triple from many channels, which exceeded the agency’s available computing capacity. Within a short period of time, additional legislation led to a total load increase of four times the usual peak. The organization needed a quick solution to handle the increased demand and stabilize their systems.

Results

In conjunction with senior engineers from the government, the Rocket R&D team had previously implemented creative, cost-effective solutions that allow the agency to leverage IBM’s mainframe specialty engines to manage data and workload distribution, extend processing capacity for workloads, and provide valuable data-serving capabilities—all using Rocket Model 204. With the ability to handle large databases and transactions, Model 204 answers the governmental organization’s scalability needs while also promoting accessibility to IBM zSystems at a large scale.

Our partnership with this agency has evolved into a long-standing relationship, with agency staff often relying on Rocketeers to provide guidance in strategic decision-making for USgovernment networks, storage management, and security. Key Rocket personnel are even placed locally to provide continued support and domain expertise around Rocket systems. We continue to enhance performance through this special partnership with the agency, and already API traffic has increased from 60 million to 250 million calls a day.

During the pandemic, we mobilized our entire Model 204 team to analyze the available hardware and current load characteristics. In a little over a week, the team was able to stabilize performance and expand headroom through a combination of enhancements to Model 204 and targeted changes to the application code that better utilized IBM specialty (zIIP) engines.