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• 2007

S&T Bulgaria consolidates land ownership data for State Fund Agriculture

Three modern computer centers as a basis for a disaster recovery solution

State Fund Agriculture (SFA) is headquartered in Sofia and has a total of 28 regional subsidiaries in the country. The organization is an established EU appointed paying agency and is also registered as a SAPARD* agency. In the past two years it has grown from 400 to 1,200 employees. Its responsibilities in accordance with EU directives include the collection and management of the land ownership data of around 150,000 Bulgarian farmers. In addition, photographs of all the agriculturally productive land are brought together and are made available to the farmers. The SFA has very strong guidelines for the archiving and storage of this data, which required the implementation of a high performance and highly accessible system. S&T Bulgaria was appointed to plan and execute the data consolidation and storage and a comprehensive disaster recovery solution. "S&T Bulgaria has many years of experience in large, complex infrastructure projects and has already worked successfully with SFA in the past. In addition, disaster recovery and business continuity are main focal points for the S&T Group. To this end we also have our own competence center in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which looks after customers in all the countries where S&T has a presence" explains Christian Rosner, CEO of S&T.

Highly accessible data

The project was completed in two phases. In the framework of the first phase, two computer centers were set up in the SFA head office in Sofia, and the SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure was implemented. The entire SAN infrastructure was designed to be resilient with a no single point of failure architecture. With a storage capacity of several terabytes, SFA now has a reliable solution for long-term data archiving which complies with all the EU directives. During the second phase of the project, S&T Bulgaria implemented a centralised backup solution and provided additional storage capacity. In addition, a third computer center was set up in Plovdiv, 120 kilometres from Sofia.

Compliance with EU data protection requirements

The solution implemented by S&T Bulgaria complies with all the EU's data protection requirements and provides the State Fund Agriculture with an industry-approved environment for highly accessible data consolidation and long-term archiving. "The data storage system, completed with the support of S&T, was distributed to different server sites in Sofia and was copied in the Backup Information Center in Plovdiv. It set the foundation for the development of the technical infrastructure to prepare for the paying agency. All activities relating to the supply, installation and setup as well as technical support were executed to the highest quality standards and within a very short time, so that the software customized for the office could be installed on time. This was particularly important in view of the accreditation from State Fund Zemedelie as a paying agency which, together with the European structure funds will support Bulgarian agriculture. We would like to thank the S&T team for being so understanding and obliging, and for its technical support and consulting during system integration and system maintenance", says Evgeni Hinkov, IT Manager, State Fund Agriculture.

*SAPARD = Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development