Turkey Ministry of Finance – Revenue Administration
"Mirror Activator leverages the best attributes of disk mirroring and transactional replication. It provides us with a complete and efficient business continuity solution that meets our very demanding requirements – rapid return to operations, zero data loss and complete data integrity."
Selcuk Gurcuoglu
IT Systems Manager
Revenue Administration
The Republic of Turkey's Ministry of Finance – Revenue Administration has led the way in the transformation process to e-government. One example of this is its implementation of a system to allow businesses to file their tax returns, check balances and access regulations via the Internet. Powered by multiple Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) databases and supported by a Sybase IQ-powered tax compliance data warehouse, the system has been very successful. To ensure its continuous availability as well as the safety and integrity of the terabytes of data it maintains, the Ministry of Finance developed and deployed business continuity and disaster recovery systems powered by Sybase Mirror Activator and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise. Business Advantage Key Benefits Sybase Technology Industry
Ensuring Business Continuity for The Republic of Turkey's Internet Tax System
The Republic of Turkey is in the process of streamlining government processes and making government more accessible and user-friendly to its citizens through the use of information technology. Turkey's Ministry of Finance has led the way in this e-government transformation process with the implementation of the country's biggest e-government initiative. This initiative allows businesses to file their tax returns, check balances and access regulations via the Internet. The system encompasses tax offices in 81 cities charged with the collection and auditing of as many as 30 tax returns and declarations a year for the typical business. The tax office collects approximately 150 billion Turkish Lira annually, which translates into approximately USD$140 billion.
This Internet tax office system is part of the Ministry's overall Revenue Administration system called VEDOP. This large-scale effort is the perfect alignment of partners: As the primary contractor, Siemens manages the overall project, including the efforts of the sub-contractors, Cybersoft, who develops and maintains the software systems, and Sybase, who provides the database, analytics and DR technology. The system is powered by multiple Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) databases and Sybase IQ analytics servers running on Fujitsu Siemens systems. The Internet tax office system processes an average of 144,000 returns and declarations per hour, with each return requiring an average of 50 inserts into the databases.
The overall VEDOP system processes 500,000 transactions per hour on peak days with each transaction consisting of 40 queries and six to ten inserts.
The system's consolidated database contains 3.5 terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 500 gigabytes per year.
Increasing Convenience and Compliance
"The tax office system employs both transactional and analytic database management systems," explains Kemal Guven, VEDOP Project Manager at Siemens. "The transactional systems use Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, while the analytic systems use Sybase IQ to power the Ministry's tax compliance data warehouse. This data warehouse contains four terabytes of raw data, which Sybase IQ compresses to just 1.4 terabytes. The Sybase IQ warehouse is fed by a dedicated staging database, which is another ASE database."
Together, the system not only enables businesses to file their returns and make their declarations without having to physically visit tax offices multiple times a month, but allows tax office staff to audit returns by cross checking filings with other information sources to ensure tax compliance. Prior to the implementation of this system, business taxpayers had no choice but to physically visit local tax offices as often as three times a month and endure long waiting times. This system won the Computerworld Honors awards, largely considered to be IT's highest honor.
Sybase Selected to Ensure Business Continuity
Suffice it to say that the Finance Ministry's tax office system and the data residing in it constitute a mission-critical system of the highest order. To ensure the continuous availability of the system as well as the safety and integrity of the terabytes of data it maintains, Siemens, as the main contractor, brought in Cybersoft and Sybase to develop and implement a business continuity and disaster recovery system at remote locations. The ministry's business continuity center, located 20 kilometers from its centralized datacenter, features a virtually identical hardware and software copy of the ministry's primary system to ensure continuous operations during planned and unplanned downtimes. The disaster recovery system is located 250 kilometers from the centralized data center. Sybase Mirror Activator is the key enabling technology to connect the primary and secondary sites.
"Mirror Activator works in conjunction with storage replication systems to replicate database transactions from a mirrored log to an available Sybase ASE or other database" says Selçuk Gurcuoglu, IT Systems Manager at the Revenue Administration "Mirror Activator leverages the best attributes of disk mirroring and transactional replication. It provides us with a complete and efficient business continuity solution that meets our very demanding requirements – rapid return to operations, zero data loss and complete data integrity."
Specifically, the ministry's business continuity system employs Mirror Activator to replicate disks synchronously via SRDF over a gigabyte Ethernet fiber optic line to EMC DMX3 and DMX2000 storage systems. By combining the power of disk mirroring with transaction replication, Mirror Activator ensures no committed transactions are lost and the secondary servers are online at all times. This minimizes failover time.
Cybersoft, as the sub-contractor responsible for code development and ongoing maintenance, summarizes the system and its benefits, "The combination of solutions provides the utmost in processing performance, as well as guarantees data integrity and zero data loss. This is a system that is built for performance, scalability and long-term stability," says Yenal Gogebakan, co-founder of Cybersoft.
Mirror Activator Selected Over Traditional Disk Mirroring and Transactional Replication Methods
Using Mirror Activator, as opposed to traditional either/or disk mirroring or transactional replication methods, the mirrored database log is used as the source for replication purposes, so only the log devices—not the data devices—need to be mirrored. As the transaction log is mirrored, Sybase Mirror Activator monitors it and feeds the database transactions to the ASE business continuity database.
Mirror Activator provides the ministry with an additional benefit – an increased ROI. This is because hardware that is normally dormant in a traditional redundant architecture can be used for other applications such as reporting and decision support.
"We chose Mirror Activator for our business continuity system because it makes it possible to combine the best attributes of disk mirroring and transaction replication solutions," states Arif Yildirim, IT Director, Revenue Administration. "And, of course it met all of our mandatory requirements, like the ability to use the mirrored site for queries and reports, and the protection from corrupt data files being mirrored via disk mirroring systems. Sybase also provided and continues to provide exceptional support through its professional services organization. Sybase technology and services have been key to the successful implementation of this tax office project."
Mehmet Atug, Vice President, Revenue Administration, provides his perspective on the project, "The Siemens team, together with Cybersoft and Sybase, has put together a project that represents the best in software design, data management solutions and business continuity. We are very proud of the value this effort provides to our organization."
The Revenue Administration organization is already planning to implement additional systems, such as e-invoicing, that will employ Mirror Activator as well as Sybase database technology. Additionally, in keeping with its commitment to use the most leading edge technology, the Ministry of Finance – Revenue Administration organization has begun migrating to the latest version of ASE (ASE 15), which provides unique security options and a host of other new features that boost performance while reducing operational costs and risk.
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