The Belgian Ministry of Finance, the finance department of Belgium’s federal government, is responsible for managing the country’s customs, finances and taxation. Its tax-on-web service is a critical system that supports tax cycles and handles sensitive financial data. Its customs applications are critical for supporting the import, export and transit of goods in the European economic zone.

The Ministry was experiencing frequent unplanned outages and unavailability of the databases that support the tax-on-web platform, resulting in additional costs and impacting the ability of citizens and businesses to submit their tax returns on time. The Ministry required a highly available, reliable and high-performance system to enable the timely processing of tax submissions and management of the associated data.

The Ministry partnered with IBM to address the challenges of unplanned outages and improve the overall availability of its tax-on-web service. Through a two-stage transformation, the Ministry initially modernized its system using IBM® LinuxONE Rockhopper II, enabling high availability and increased reliability.

“Building on the experience acquired on the Rockhopper II, we completely redesigned our approach to the implementation of the new platform,” says Gamal Khaldi, Service Manager for Db2 and LinuxONE at the Belgian Ministry of Finance.

Six years later, when the Ministry looked to refresh and expand the systems, it collaborated with IBM again to implement a solution using IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 servers, IBM Db2® databases and IBM FlashSystem® storage.

Khaldi describes the performance improvement that IBM Storage FlashSystem 9500 brings, saying “The new FlashSystem 9500 delivers incredible performance. We were used to having great performance on the IBM FlashSystem A9000R, where we saw during daytime OLTP average of 160,000 IOPS. With the new system, we are consistently running over 400,000 IOPS and are still far from the system limits.”

The IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 server was selected for its ability to provide high levels of availability and scalability as well as cybersecurity capabilities, making it an ideal choice to meet the Ministry's needs. The solution also included a migration to Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® platform.

With the ability to scale capacity and performance incrementally, the Ministry can now efficiently manage its growing workload and expand its use of the platform. “As a result, we have pushed capability to handle the I/O-intensive workloads to heights we could only dream of. And best of all, the new architecture is so flexible that once implemented, it’s almost a ‘set and forget’ solution. The system is so flexible that the time needed to do systems performance management is reduced to almost nil,” explains Khaldi.

The benefits are apparent according to Khaldi. “Thanks to the new architecture put in place, the Ministry can see the first major improvements. On the 28 major applications we are running, we see database response time improvements between 250% and 800%. On average, our batch processing times for LOADs and ETL have been reduced by a factor of 3.”

The Ministry is also exploring the consolidation of other workloads, such as MariaDB, onto LinuxONE, further enhancing its data management capabilities.

Looking ahead, the Ministry plans to continue working with IBM to further optimize its IT infrastructure and explore new opportunities for growth and development, such as with Red Hat OpenShift®.

The Belgian Ministry of Finance (link resides outside of ibm.com) (known locally as FOD Financiën/SPF Finances) is the finance department of the federal government of Belgium. The department is responsible for taxation, tax collection and recovery, and ensuring balance between the state treasury and outstanding public debt within the framework of legal transactions involving goods. It also ensures legal certainty by supplying patrimonial data, supervises flow of goods upon importation, transit and exportation, and contributes to preventing and fighting fraud and crime within their areas of competence.