Engineer Runs Core Apps on a Single Server

High-technology engineering group Sandvik has consolidated 11 iSeries servers across the Asia-Pacific region into a single data center based in Sydney.

The project is part of a global plan that has seen 130 servers worldwide reduced to three data centers in Sweden, the United States and Australia.

The goal was to provide high availability infrastructure to Sandvik’s businesses around the world.

Locally, the company has 1,500 employees and revenues of US$752 million.

Sandvik began the project with the purchase of an IBM iSeries server and started consolidation applications from servers across the region including Japan, Australia, India, Singapore, China and Korea.

As a result, the company’s Asia-Pacific IT general manager, John van Dijk, said the IT services arm can undertake 24-hour monitoring and management of vital applications.

“Previously, we would have to wait for customers to tell us there was a problem with their systems,” he said.

“Now we can intervene very quickly if something goes wrong; often we notice and fix a problem before the customer finds out about it.

“A lot of regional offices used to need overnight downtime for end-of-day processing or backups, but we will deliver near 24-hour availability.”

While the project was completed in May this year, the company purchased its first server in 2004.

A year later Sandvik upgraded the server, adding processors and memory to cope with demand as the number of applications increased. Van Dijk said running core business applications on a single server has simplified the IT environment.

“We have had some financial benefits, but the most compelling arguments for the upgrade were improvements in availability and security,” he said.

IBM’s iSeries business unit executive, Bob Morton, said organizations can start small and expand iSeries as business grows.

“Advanced virtualization, logical partitioning and workload balancing technologies allow the system to run multiple operating systems and application environments simultaneously, including IBM i5/OS, Linux, IBM AIX 5L and Microsoft Windows,” Morton said.

-Sandra Rossi, Computerworld Australia

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