Paycor

Customer at
a glance
Name:
Paycor, Inc.
Headquarters:
Cincinnati, Ohio
Telephone:
800-381-0053
Number of employees:
550
URL:
www.paycor.com
“We liked the opportunity to move back to ProLiant,”
continues Armour. “All our other infrastructure is
ProLiant, so it was a natural fit.” The expected
availability of the DL980 also fit Paycor’s schedule.
Armour told Agilysys, “If we have it by mid-November,
it will work.”
According to Armour, the HP ProLiant DL980 server
delivers a combination that would meet Paycor’s
needs: high availability for critical applications plus
exceptional x86 performance. “We were drawn to the
increased core count in the eight-socket architecture,
the high-availability architecture with Intel
®
Xeon
®
processors, and the Proactive Services available. In
terms of serviceability and uptime, with the DL980 we
thought that ProLiant was now close to Integrity.
“Our ProLiant experience gave us a comfort level as
we made the move,” continues Armour. “We had
grown up through generations of ProLiant. We always
moved up to the biggest ProLiant as it came along,
and now we were doing the same thing.”
Beating the clock
When the scheduled roll-out of the DL980 was pushed
back a week, Agilysys and their HP rep red-flagged
Paycor’s tight delivery requirement to HP management,
who helped make sure Paycor got their systems in the
first batch of DL980s.
“The manufacturing slippage gave me a little
concern,” says Armour, “but we have a lot of very
competent people. We figured if we get the systems
on a Monday, our crew can have them up and
running by the next weekend.”
Setting up the new system actually took two weeks.
“The first week HP Services came in and racked the
servers and got the hardware running and burned in.
We got the cluster up ourselves,” Armour explains,
“and the second week we got SQL set up.”
Mission-critical solution
Paycor’s in-house-developed payroll processing
software is the key to one-to-one service. Clients are
able to get a secure log-in through the firewall into
Paycor’s Citrix environment to directly access the
application and their service associates. This gives
clients a level of control and flexibility that is a major
selling point for Paycor.
The two new DL980 servers are the database servers
for the payroll processing application. Configured
in a cluster of one active and one failover server,
they provide both business continuity and the high
performance required. Payroll processing is an
exceptionally complex application that puts an extra
burden on the database servers. The DL980 servers
log and verify millions of transactions daily, and
also perform numerous calculations needed to
generate paychecks.
Each of the DL980 servers has 512 gigabytes of
memory, compared to 192 gigabytes in the previous
servers. “Memory is usually the bottleneck in database
applications,” explains Armour, “and the bigger
DL980 memory gives us an I/O boost, with more of
the database in resident memory.” And, with memory
expansion up to 2 terabytes, the DL980 servers offer a
reliable growth path.
“A lot faster”
The new infrastructure began to prove itself right
away. “On our first full day of production use,
the performance was fantastic! Prior to the new
server implementation, we maintained 75% to 80%
CPU utilization during the 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. peak
processing time, but with the new DL980 servers, the
CPU maintained below 20% utilization.”
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