Case Studies
IBM Case Study
The University of Auckland revamps
storage infrastructure with IBM System
Storage and IBM SVC technology
Overview
■ Challenge
To address The University of
Auckland’s server sprawl and
underutilization of storage
space in a federated
environment
■ Solution
Deploying a fully virtualized IT
infrastructure based on VMware
ESX Server and IBM System
Storage™ SAN Volume
Controller (SVC)
■ Key Benefits
Improves storage utilization,
enables centralized storage
administration, and reduces the
total cost of ownership
New Zealand’s leading university and
research facility, the University of
Auckland supports approximately
40,000 students and staff members.
The university is a federated environ-
ment, meaning that each academic
department has the autonomy to
choose its own IT solutions. In this envi-
ronment, the overarching IT infrastruc-
ture must accommodate a wide variety
of technologies.
The university’s evolving IT infrastructure
was strained by two increasingly critical
issues—expanding data storage
requirements and inadequate data
availability. Information Technology
Services (ITS), the internal service
provider of IT support for the university,
was tasked to respond to these issues.
ITS addressed these issues with a vari-
ety of IBM System Storage solutions as
part of a larger project to build out a
new primary data center.
Challenges of growth in a federated
environment
In the past, ITS administrators installed
servers on a one-to-one basis with
applications, which led to server sprawl
and underutilization of storage space.
With over 350 servers in use, the uni-
versity’s primary data center was run-
ning low on space, power and cooling
capabilities. John Askew, system archi-
tect for ITS, says, “As we moved to the
new data center, we needed to improve
administrative effectiveness, reduce the
outages required to work on the
systems and reduce the total cost of
storage.”
Based on these requirements, ITS
decided to consolidate and virtualize all
layers of the university’s infrastructure,
including storage and servers, eliminat-
ing the one-to-one relationship between
applications and physical servers, and
enabling centralized administration of
the storage area network (SAN). ITS
used VMware ESX Server to virtualize
the application servers, reducing
the footprint from 350 servers to just
26, and IBM SVC to virtualize the
storage network.
Powerful solutions for data storage
ITS established IBM SVC nodes at its
primary and backup sites, then con-
nected the SVC to each storage array
to mirror data between sites. The
organization then consolidated storage
on IBM System Storage DS4100 and
IBM System Storage DS4800 disk
storage systems, leveraging the SVC
for centralized storage administration.
“IBM’s vision of storage and storage vir-
tualization matched our view of how it
should be done,” Askew explains.
“The best place to virtualize anything is
the abstracted layer between the host
operating system and the storage. The
IBM SVC was one of the few products
in the marketplace that actually did vir-
tualization that way.”
“ IBM’s vision of storage
and storage
virtualization matched
our view of how it
should be done.”
— John Askew, system architect,
The University of Auckland
“The solution we needed”
Askew says the SVC technology helped
ITS ensure a smooth migration to the
new data center. “IBM had the solution
we needed to work with all our storage
arrays and host systems,” he notes, “so
it was an easy fit into the environment.”
“ IBM had the solution
we needed to work
with all our storage
arrays and host
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008
systems, so it was an
easy fit into the
environment.”
— John Askew, system architect,
The University of Auckland
By implementing System Storage tech-
nology, ITS was able to consolidate and
virtualize the SAN, increasing data avail-
ability, improving storage utilization, and
providing the ability to perform central-
ized maintenance. The new infrastruc-
ture also offers significant room for
future growth and further consolidation
of secondary systems. All of these
benefits helped the University of
Auckland realize a major reduction in
the total cost of ownership of the IT
infrastructure.
“Virtualization has enabled us to remove
a lot of the physical infrastructure,”
Askew says, “which means we’re not
using as much power, we’re not using
as much cooling. It has reduced our
carbon footprint and lowered our oper-
ating costs while giving us room to
grow.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:
ibm.com/systems/storage
For more information about the
University of Auckland, visit:
www.auckland.ac.nz
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
January 2008
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo and System Storage are
trademarks or registered trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries or both.
Other company, product and service names
may be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.
TSC03041-USEN-00
IBM Case Study

Palomar Pomerado Health prepares

for new strides in digital healthcare
with storage virtualization

will increase the need for IT to deliver

secure, reliable access to information.
Further into the future are plans to
move toward computerized physician
order entry (CPOE)—a digital physician
bedside care system that will again
raise the bar on system availability.

Infrastructure upgrades position PPH for

continued growth
In response to a growing number of
users and the need for greater system
Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH), availability, the PPH IT staff imple-
Overview the largest public health district in mented a wide-ranging upgrade of the
California, is expanding services signifi- computing infrastructure. Previously,
■ Challenge
cantly. Funded by an US$496 million three IBM System p™ 650 servers and
Build a flexible, highly available,
bond measure, PPH is adding another a large IBM Enterprise Storage System
virtualized storage infrastructure
hospital and planning to adopt more (ESS) supported Cerner production and
for all healthcare data—images,
digital technologies in the near future. test functions, including picture archiv-
operations and financials
■ ing and communication system (PACS)
Solution
In fact, the widespread use of technol- image storage.
A virtualized storage environ-
ogy is one of the ways that hospital
ment based on IBM® System
management helps the staff provide the In an effort to establish the best direc-
Storage™ SAN Volume
best of care for patients. For example, tion for the upgrade, the IT staff dis-
Controller and IBM System
many manual processes have been cussed the hospital’s needs with the
Storage DS4300 and DS6800
streamlined by the Cerner Millennium® Cerner team. According to Engberg,
disk storage systems
suite of clinical software, which includes “Cerner recommended that we move to
■ Key Benefits
financials, laboratory systems, surgery two IBM System p5™ 590 servers con-
— A tiered storage architecture
scheduling, clinical and pharmacy sys- figured in a high-availability cluster,
helps to reduce the overall
tems and other processes. which would support more users than
cost of storage
the three existing p650 servers and
— Non-disruptive equipment
Every day, more patient information is dramatically improve server availability.
upgrades, data migrations
being stored in digital form, making IT Cerner also recommended that we
and maintenance help
system reliability and availability more adopt a virtualized storage environment
improve application
critical than ever. According to Paul based on IBM System Storage SAN
availability
Engberg, director of technical services Volume Controller (SVC).”
— The virtual storage environ-
at PPH, the hospital is moving toward
ment positions IT to respond
fully automated medical records, which
quickly to new requirements
Virtualized storage forms a flexible
infrastructure
A virtualized storage environment can
dramatically improve the ability of
PPH IT staff to quickly provision the
best storage solution for each applica-
tion. With many new storage uses on
the horizon, IT needs the flexibility to
assign the most cost-effective storage
systems based on user requirements. A
virtualized environment can help simplify
this task because servers and applica-
tions see virtual devices, not physical
devices. Therefore, IT can assign the
most appropriate subsystems within the
physical infrastructure—even change
the assignments on the fly without
affecting applications.
To increase the capacity and perform-
ance of the storage environment,
PPH IT staff augmented the existing
ESS with new IBM DS6800 and
DS4300 storage arrays configured in a
storage area network. The existing
Tivoli® Storage Manager software con-
tinues to handle tape backups.
Tiered storage helps improve cost
effectiveness
As part of the infrastructure upgrade,
PPH moved to a tiered storage archi-
tecture. Each of the storage systems
was assigned to a tier, based on its
performance and cost:
Tier 1: IBM DS6800 (4 TB) provides
the highest performance and is used for
Cerner and Lawson production data.
Tier 2: IBM DS4300 (14 TB) stores all
imaging files.
Tier 3: IBM ESS (15 TB) supports non-
production data.
“ When making storage
assignments, it is easy
to find the best match
between our storage
subsystems and the
users’ needs and
budget.”
– Paul Engberg
Director of Technical Services
Palomar Pomerado Health
By helping to eliminate the need to
over-provision storage, Engberg
expects that the tiered approach can
significantly lower the overall cost of
storage for PPH.
With tiers now defined, IT staff can
match storage subsystems to applica-
tions. Says Engberg, “When making
storage assignments, it is easy to find
the best match between our storage
subsystems and the users’ needs and
budget. As new storage devices are
added over time, we can change those
assignments without disrupting
applications.”
Future storage requirements are driven
by the kinds of applications adopted by
the hospitals departments over time.
Says Engberg, “We don’t really know
what all of those requirements might
be; many of those decisions are driven
by our clinical staff. So having a flexible
storage environment is a big asset for
IT—we can now respond quickly to
new requirements without having
to rent a forklift or throw out existing
equipment.”
But one storage requirement is a cer-
tainty: storage needs will continue to
grow exponentially, especially due
to digital imaging. “Not only are we
storing more images every day, but new
higher resolution imaging technology
will drive up file sizes,” says Engberg.
“SVC gives us much greater flexibility in
the way we manage that growth. For
example, we have requirements to save
images for 21 years. That is driving the
need for image archiving capability in
the next year. SVC will play a role in
helping us accomplish that in the most
effective way.”
IBM SVC reduces disruption to users
during the upgrade
Because of the all-encompassing
nature of the infrastructure upgrade, the
rollout was accomplished in phases.
First, the new servers were installed
and the Cerner Millennium® system
software updated. An upgrade to the
SAN fabric followed, including the addi-
tion of IBM SVC and new IBM DS4300
and DS6800 storage subsystems.
Finally, storage tiers were defined and
data was migrated from the legacy ESS
to the appropriate storage tier.
Up-front planning is always the key to a
smooth upgrade process, states
Engberg. “Having SVC in place prior to
the data migration helped minimize the
disruption to users,” he says. “Once all
the legacy storage was behind SVC,
the data could be migrated to the
appropriate tier of storage without any
disruption to applications.”
Dennis Dechant, PPH system adminis-
trator, notes the streamlined migration
process as well. “I did the entire migra-
tion of our Lawson financial applications
to the DS6800 while users were online.
No one noticed any degradation during
the process,” he adds.
Dechant also appreciates the help pro-
vided by the vendors. “Even though
Cerner provided the storage systems,
IBM technical people came onsite to
help us set up SVC. In the process,
they also taught us how to manage
SVC on an ongoing basis.”
IBM SVC helps boost storage availability
SVC helps improve storage availability
by enabling storage system mainte-
nance to take place without disrupting
users. According to Dechant, some
storage maintenance activities—such
as microcode upgrades—previously
required taking the storage device
offline. Now, with all storage behind
SVC, “We can non-disruptively move
the files off the storage device before
taking it offline,” he says. “In that way,
applications continue to operate and
users are unaffected. When we are
done with the maintenance, we simply
move the data back to the upgraded
storage device.”
The higher performance and higher
availability of the new infrastructure has
direct benefits to staff, says Engberg.
“Because the hospital is moving toward
electronic medical records, we need to
have an IT infrastructure that is highly
available and resilient to failures. And IT
needs the flexibility to respond quickly
to new requirements from our users,”
he explains. “In the storage arena, SVC
combined with IBM storage systems
provides that infrastructure.”
“ Beyond the advanced
functions that it
provides, the simple
fact that the SVC
insulates applications
from changes to the
physical storage
infrastructure means
that downtime is
reduced or eliminated
for storage migration
activities. This is a key
technology for keeping
our customers online,
and it is being proven
again at PPH.”
– Dan Cowan
Senior Practice Manager
Cerner
Storage administrators become more
productive
With storage management centralized
on IBM SVC, storage administration is
much faster according to Mitesh
Manek, systems administrator. “We no
longer need to get inside the storage
subsystems or remember how to use
the various storage subsystem configu-
ration utilities. Almost all storage man-
agement functions are accomplished
using the SVC console. Having one uni-
form console gives me a system-wide
view across all devices so I can see the
big picture. It also has streamlined our
administrative work.”
SVC also gives the IT staff more time to
work on higher-level aspects of the
infrastructure. For example, “I no longer
have to worry about spreading disk
activity across physical devices to avoid
hotspots that slow performance,” says
Manek. “At any time, we can migrate
data among the storage subsystems to
balance the workload and maximize
performance. With SVC, I’m sure we
can improve performance compared to
our non-virtualized environment.”
Logical unit number (LUN) sizing has
also become very efficient, in part
because SVC enables capacity to be
allocated in small increments. Says
Manek, “I don’t have to allocate a
64 GB LUN if 32 GB will do. This fine
granularity has enabled us to improve
the utilization of our storage investment.
And all of these types of changes can
be accomplished without disrupting
users.”
Storage virtualization brings disaster
recovery closer to reality
To help maintain operations if some-
thing should happen to the primary
data center, the PPH IT staff plans to
add a second SAN at another location.
Says Engberg, “An SVC node at the
secondary site will maintain mirrored
data on a second DS6800 storage sys-
tem. By using SVC to manage storage
at the two sites, we eliminate any
impact on host software so all the
power of the p5-590 servers is dedi-
cated to production work. Having mir-
rored data will save us many days
rebuilding systems if we are hit by a
disaster. We expect to be able to
restore operations in a few hours, which
will enable our staff to continue provid-
ing quality patient services with very
little disruption.”
All-encompassing approach to
virtualization pays off
The decision to virtualize all storage
with SVC was a no-brainer, says
Dechant. “There are really no negatives
to moving to a virtualized storage envi-
ronment,” he explains.
Engberg agrees, adding that SVC does
not lock PPH into a single vendor for
storage systems. “When you are invest-
ing for the long-term, it is all about flexi-
bility. Today, all our storage is from
IBM. But we want the ability to add
some new device from another vendor
so we can be opportunistic. That’s one
of the big reasons why we saw no neg-
atives in the move to SVC.”
The PPH IT staff put all Cerner data
behind SVC—images, the production
clinical system and test systems. Says
Engberg, “This proved to be the right
decision because we are now receiving
the benefits of virtualization in every
area of the business. Flexibility and
ease of administration are benefits to IT.
And users quickly get exactly the right
storage for their needs—whether it is a
new application or just a request for
more space. And as we implement our
business continuity initiatives, having
virtualized all storage enables us to pro-
vide greater resiliency to all our users.
Therefore, why would we not put all our
storage behind SVC?”
“Storage virtualization, managed by
IBM SVC, is key to our plan to maintain
a highly reliable yet flexible IT infrastruc-
ture,” adds Engberg. “Our infrastructure
is now well positioned to support the
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008
move to paperless medical records and
automated systems that help our staff
when they are at the patient’s bedside
or even outside our facilities at their
offices or homes.”
“ Storage virtualization,
managed by the
IBM SVC, is key to
our plan to maintain a
highly reliable yet
flexible IT
infrastructure.”
– Paul Engberg
Director of Technical Services
Palomar Pomerado Health
For more information
For more information, contact your
IBM sales representative, IBM Business
Partner or visit us on the Web at:
ibm.com/servers/storage
For more information on Palomar
Pomerado Health visit www.pph.org
For more information on Cerner
Corporation visit www.Cerner.com
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States
April 2008
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage, System p,
System p5 and Tivoli are trademarks or
registered trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
Cerner and Millennium are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Cerner Corporation in
the United States, other countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
IBM and Cerner Corporation are separate
companies and each is responsible for its own
products. Neither IBM nor Cerner Corporation
makes any warranties, express or implied,
concerning the other’s products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.
TSC03038-USEN-00
IBM Case Study
Able Body Labor gets the storage job
done with IBM SVC technology
William Stillwell and Paul Zimorski of Able Body Labor
Overview
■ Challenge
To develop a storage infrastruc­
ture strategy that meets short-
term and long-term needs
■ Solution
Deploying a storage virtualiza­
tion solution that includes
IBM System Storage™ DS4700
and IBM SAN Volume Controller
(SVC)
■ Key Benefits
Provides increased storage
capacity, delivers improved disk
performance, streamlines man­
agement and maintenance, and
enables new levels of storage
flexibility and scalability
The Able Body family of companies is
one of the fastest growing staffing
organizations in the U.S. With store­
fronts that include Able Body Labor,
Preferable Staffing, Infinity Staffing and
others, the company has grown to
include 170 locations across 24 states
and almost 900 full-time employees.
Based in Clearwater, FL, Able Body
uses a “daily pay” business model to
provide skilled and unskilled labor for a
wide variety of industries.
The company’s IT organization has
worked hard to leverage new technolo­
gies that help the IT infrastructure keep
pace with rapid growth. The organiza­
tion implemented server virtualization
with VMware ESX Server on
IBM System x™ hardware a few years
ago, followed by a consolidation of
storage on IBM System Storage
DS4300 disk system with an
IBM System Storage EXP810 storage
expansion unit.
Growing pains
As the company continued to grow,
however, its storage needs began to
exceed capacity. “We reached a point
where we couldn’t back up everything
that we wanted,” explains William
Stillwell, Able Body systems architect.
“We also had some new storage proj­
ects that were going to require a lot
more disk space than we had on
hand.”
Company CIO Paul Zimorski said his
first instinct was to add more disk at
the primary data center as well as
at the company’s backup site in Tampa.
But when plans to build out a third data
center in Nevada began to take shape,
Zimorski decided it was time to evalu­
ate the company’s long-term storage
strategy. He called in IBM Premier
Business Partner Champion Solutions
Group to help identify and evaluate
potential options—with an eye to lever­
aging the company’s existing storage
investments.
Storage virtualization
Based on Champion’s recommenda­
tions, Able Body deployed IBM System
Storage DS4700 to expand the
capacity of the storage area network
(SAN), then virtualized the storage infra­
structure with IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
“We could have gotten by with just
adding disk,” says Zimorski, “But from
an infrastructure standpoint, that wasn’t
the direction we wanted to go. We
didn’t want to be doing this again in six
months.”
A milestone implementation
Zimorski gives credit to Champion
Solutions Group for a smooth imple­
mentation of the storage virtualization
solution. “They’ve been great to work
with,” he says. “They took the time to
understand our business, and they
were with us every step of the way.”
In the process, Able Body helped
IBM achieve a milestone by taking
delivery of IBM’s 10,000th SVC
engine—as one of over 3,400 SVC
installations worldwide.
Dramatic improvements
In addition to expanding storage capac­
ity, Able Body has realized numerous
benefits from the IBM solution. “We’ve
seen a dramatic improvement in disk
performance,” Zimorski reports. “We’re
also leveraging IBM TotalStorage®
Productivity Center, which has made
management easier. With TPC, I just go
to one console and I’m able to see disk
utilization and take corrective action
right then.”
“One of the biggest benefits is to be
able to perform maintenance in real
time without any downtime from the
end-user perspective,” adds Stillwell.
“With the SVC, we can do all the main­
tenance we need to do during normal
business hours. It has allowed us to vir­
tualize the disk array the way VMware
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008
allowed us to virtualize our servers.”
Zimorski says that the IBM storage
solution gives Able Body the flexibility
and scalability to accommodate future
growth—and helps position the com­
pany for continued success. “We
needed to get organized on the back-
end so we could enable competitive
advantages for the business,” he con­
cludes. “The IBM storage solution has
allowed us to do that.”
“ We needed to get
organized on the
backend so we could
enable competitive
advantages for the
business. The
IBM storage solution
has allowed us to do
that.”
— Paul Zimorski, CIO, Able Body
Labor
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:
ibm.com/systems/storage
For more information about Able Body
Labor, visit: www.ablebody.com
For more information about
Champion Solutions Group, visit:
www.championsg.com
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
January 2008
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage, System x
and TotalStorage are trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the United
States, other countries or both.
Other company, product and service names
may be trademarks or service marks of others.
IBM and Champion Solutions Group are
separate companies and each is responsible for
its own products. Neither IBM nor Champion
Solutions Group makes any warranties, express
or implied, concerning the others’ products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.
TSC03039-USEN-00
IBM Case Study
Storage virtualization heralds the end
of planned downtime at Gwinnett
County
Overview
■ Challenge
Reduce application outages due
to changes within the storage
infrastructure while improving
the ability of IT to respond to
changing user storage needs
■ Solution
A virtualized storage environ­
ment based on IBM® System
Storage™ SAN Volume
Controller, IBM TotalStorage®
Productivity Center software
and IBM System Storage
DS4800 and System
Storage DS4700 Express disk
storage systems
■ Key Benefits
— Application availability is no
longer affected by changes
to the storage system, even
during data migrations and
maintenance
— Storage utilization is
increased due to enhanced
flexibility to allocate storage
to applications when and
where it is needed
— Advanced replication
capability of the
IBM FlashCopy® feature
improves data protection
and the accuracy of testing
The environment being served by the
Gwinnett County IT department has
changed. Like almost every enterprise
in the world, offering more online
access to their systems has created the
need to operate around the clock.
“With our citizen self-service initiatives
well under way, the ability for IT to get
approval for planned downtime has vir­
tually disappeared,” says Barry Puckett,
information technology services man­
ager at Gwinnett County. “Our Web site
is used extensively at all times of the
day, and our employees use our internal
systems over a much wider range of
hours than ever before. As a result, we
have had to rethink how we architect
our systems, especially storage.”
Growth and always-available computing
drive the need for a new storage
architecture
Both Intel® architecture-based servers
and IBM System p™ 570 and System
p 690 servers, which host the county’s
SAP applications, were attached to
storage area networks (SANs).
The Intel-based servers accessed an
IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage
Server® (ESS) Model F20, and the
System p servers accessed an ESS
Model 800 storage system.
Both storage systems worked well, but
the county’s storage needs were grow­
ing rapidly. New applications drove the
need to store more data. And the
move from server-attached storage to
centralized SAN-based storage also
contributed to rising SAN storage
requirements.
IBM storage system reliability makes for
an easy choice
When the ESS Model F20 reached its
end of life, the Gwinnet County IT group
decided to move up to the IBM System
Storage DS4000™ family, ultimately
choosing System Storage DS4800 and
System Storage DS4700 Express sys­
tems as the basis of its new storage
infrastructure. The staff’s long experi­
ence with the reliability of IBM storage
systems made the decision easy. Says
Puckett, “We have HP StorageWorks
Modular Smart Arrays, but we are
moving away from them because of the
additional redundancy that the System
Storage DS4000 family provides.”
IBM SAN Volume Controller hides storage
changes from application users
The Gwinnett County IT team needed
to move to the new systems without
disrupting ongoing operations. Changes
to storage systems are notoriously dis­
ruptive, requiring the IT team to negoti­
ate outage windows with internal users
who must then plan for downtime.
When storage is used 24 hours a day,
as with Gwinnett County enterprise
resource planning (ERP) and tax
systems, these negotiations can be
painful. Worse, with no visibility into
scheduled downtime, users outside the
organization—such as the citizens
using the county’s tax system—face
even more frustration.
IBM had the answer. “We had received
briefings by IBM about storage virtual­
ization and the IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller,” says Gwinnett
County Contract IT Architect Philip
Wilson. “Incorporating virtualization into
our storage infrastructure was exactly
what we needed.”
SAN Volume Controller is a modular
appliance based on IBM System x™
servers that can be configured in high-
availability pairs. By virtualizing the stor­
age environment, physical storage
changes are hidden from applications.
Multiple storage devices, even
non-IBM devices, are supported by
SAN Volume Controller. By pooling
capacity from multiple disk arrays, SAN
Volume Controller helps increase stor­
age utilization.
Compared to traditional storage man­
agement techniques, SAN Volume
Controller boosts administrator produc­
tivity by providing a single point of con­
trol over all the storage it manages.
Provisioning new storage devices and
migrating data from one device to
another are simple tasks enabled by a
Web interface. Reconfigurations do not
result in downtime.
Gwinnett County upgrades storage
overnight with no disruption to
applications
The IT group had two major data
migrations to accomplish. Initially, the
ESS Model F20 was being decommis­
sioned along with several other storage
systems from various vendors. But
within a year, the ESS Model 800 would
come off lease. First, during a planned
maintenance outage, Wilson put SAN
Volume Controller in front of the storage
devices that were supporting the Intel-
based servers and the System p
servers. “We reconfigured the servers
to point to SAN Volume Controller. We
also attached the new System Storage
DS4800 and System Storage DS4700
Express storage arrays behind SAN
Volume Controller,” explains Wilson.
“We used 4 Gbps Fibre Channel con­
nections between SAN Volume
Controller and the System Storage
DS4800 array in order to provide the
greatest possible performance.”
Once the servers came back up,
according to Wilson, “the servers con­
tinued to access their storage devices
as if nothing had changed.” Next, he
tested the data migration capability dur­
ing the day. “I moved the data on one
of our test servers from the ESS Model
F20 to the System Storage DS4800
without even being noticed by the end
users. That was impressive.”
After that test, Wilson proceeded to
migrate all the data from the ESS
Model F20 and other storage systems
onto the new System Storage DS4800
and System Storage DS4700. “On a
Friday afternoon, I entered the migra­
tion commands and went home for the
night. The next morning, I logged in to
see that the migration had taken place
with no errors whatsoever. We had
accomplished a hot migration without
incurring any application downtime,”
he says.
Wilson notes that one of the database
administrators dropped by his office the
next Monday to ask what happened.
As Wilson explains, “It used to take him
a little over three hours to run his Oracle
database exports and he wanted to
know why it just took 45 minutes.
Our whole team was grinning from ear
to ear.”
SAN Volume Controller offers flexibility to
keep up with changing user needs
With SAN Volume Controller enabling
non-disruptive storage additions, the
Gwinnett County IT group can now
respond quickly to changing user
needs. Both the Intel-based servers
and the System p servers access the
same physical storage devices, so
reserve capacity can easily be assigned
to either group of servers.
“If someone needs more storage,
I simply open the SAN Volume
Controller console and increase their
storage allocation,” says Wilson.
“Storage management with the
IBM SAN Volume Controller is a storage
administrator’s dream come true.”
In the future, Wilson plans to use
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center
software to analyze and optimize stor­
age resource allocations. “Reorganizing
storage allocations across the arrays
can help us improve response times
and postpone additional storage pur­
chases,” he says.
“ Storage management
with the IBM SAN
Volume Controller is a
storage administrator’s
dream come true.”
– Philip Wilson, Contract IT
Architect, Gwinnett County
Non-disruptive maintenance helps
increase storage availability
Routine storage system maintenance
can now be conducted without applica­
tion downtime: The IT team simply
moves the affected data to another
storage device before taking the stor­
age server offline. “We can quickly
move all the data from one array to
another so we can perform mainte­
nance, including shutting the entire
array down,” says Wilson. “Having the
ability to perform non-disruptive mainte­
nance enables us to proactively fix
problems before they might affect
users. That just helps to increase overall
storage availability.”
Tiered storage helps lower overall costs
The Gwinnett County IT team selected
the two models of IBM storage arrays
in anticipation of implementing tiered
storage architecture. The System
Storage DS4700 has low-cost Serial
ATA (SATA) drives and the System
Storage DB4800 has faster, more
expensive Fibre Channel-attached
drives. “We assign only the applications
that need high performance to the
System Storage DS4800 array. All other
applications use the System Storage
DS4700. That has helped us lower the
overall cost of storage for the county,”
explains Wilson.
SAN Volume Controller also reduces
the minimum amount of storage that
can be assigned, which has helped
improve storage utilization. Better uti­
lization of the storage hand can obvi­
ously postpone the time when
additional capacity must be purchased.
FlashCopy improves testing and data
protection
The ESS Model 800 houses all the data
used by the SAP systems running on
several large IBM System p servers.
With SAN Volume Controller in front of
the ESS Model 800, the county’s SAP
team can use the FlashCopy feature to
make quick backup copies of SAP data
for data protection and testing pur­
poses. “We wrote a script for SAN
Volume Controller that our SAP
administrator can use to create a
point-in-time backup copy,” adds
Wilson. “Because everything is auto­
mated, the outage window is very small
and we in IT do not need to be
involved. That makes everyone happy.”
Virtualized storage sets the stage for
smooth operations
SAN Volume Controller figures into the
county’s business continuity require­
ments as well. Once a second data
center is established, Wilson plans to
use the Metro Mirror feature to maintain
a mirror image of production data at the
remote data center. That way, if any­
thing should happen to the primary
data center, the data will be quickly
accessible to resume operations.
Next year, when the ESS Model
800 goes off lease, the IT department
envisions another smooth data migra­
tion to the new device—probably on
another Friday night. “When the time
comes, we can simply add another
IBM storage array to SAN Volume
Controller and migrate the data without
any application downtime,” says
Puckett. “If all goes according to plan,
it might all happen again while we are
home sleeping.”
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007
“ We wrote a script
for SAN Volume
Controller that our
SAP administrator can
use to create a point-
in-time backup copy.
Because everything is
automated, the outage
window is very small
and we in IT do not
need to be involved.
That makes everyone
happy.”
– Philip Wilson, Contract IT
Architect, Gwinnett County
For more information
For more information, contact your
IBM sales representative, IBM Business
Partner or visit us on the Web at
ibm.com/servers/storage/
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States
December 2007
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, DS4000, Enterprise Storage
Server, FlashCopy, System p, System Storage,
System x and TotalStorage are trademarks or
registered trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
Intel is a trademark or registered trademark
of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.
TSC03036-USEN-00
IBM System Storage Case Study
IBM storage graduates with honors for
performance and reliability at the
University of Calgary
Overview
■ Challenge
Build a responsive, reliable and
scalable data storage infrastruc­
ture that can support high-
performance student applica­
tions and administration
processes while improving
administrator productivity in a
rapidly growing university
environment
■ Solution
A virtualized storage environ­
ment based on IBM System
Storage™ SAN Volume
Controller (SVC), IBM System
Storage DS4800 disk storage
systems and IBM SAN Switches
connected to virtualized
IBM System p5™ 570 applica­
tion servers
■ Key Benefits
— Storage virtualization simpli­
fies data and disk manage­
ment, increasing system
flexibility and freeing up valu­
able time for IT data adminis­
tration staff
— Storage virtualization with
SVC provides boot­
from-SAN capabilities that
also free up management
time for IT data and server
administration staff
— Storage utilization is
increased due to ability to
allocate storage to applica­
tions when and where it is
needed
— Performance speeds have
risen from 2 Gbps to 4 Gbps,
resulting in an increase from
4,000 input/output opera­
tions per second (IOPS) to
13,000 IOPS
— Built-in reliability helps keep
mission-critical systems run­
ning for thousands of users,
with no noticeable latency
— Backup times are cut in half
compared with previous
third-party SAN
The University of Calgary is one of
Canada’s top public universities, gradu­
ating more than 120,000 alumni since
1966, including the current Canadian
prime minister. Today, the university
offers more than 80 programs to
around 40,000 full- and part-time stu­
dents, including an extension program
in Qatar. And the goal is to keep on
growing.
Fuelled by Alberta’s nation-leading eco­
nomic growth, the university’s five-year
plan includes adding capacity for
7,000 more students and a host of new
teaching and research activities, includ­
ing a new digital library and an experi­
ential learning center. Several initiatives
to transform important on-campus
administrative processes, especially
student registration services, are part of
the plan.
“Our students and staff here in Alberta
and in southwest Asia expect state-of­
the-art services 24x7,” explains
Don Zarsky, technical architect for
PeopleSoft support in the administrative
systems IT group at the university. “At
any given time, we might have thou­
sands of students logging into our
systems looking for and updating infor­
mation related to their learning experi­
ence. These services are critical to the
university’s success.”
IBM supports explosive data growth
Initially, the university had developed
most of its student and business
operations applications on an
IBM mainframe. But these homegrown
systems were proving too slow, expen­
sive to support and difficult to scale.
Faced with another huge wave of stu­
dent registrations, the university
decided to upgrade its finance, supply
chain, human resources, payroll and
student services software and build out
a new, reliable infrastructure that would
meet the high performance demands of
a large university.
After an extensive request-for-proposal
process, the university chose a suite of
PeopleSoft software deployed on
four IBM System p5 servers
running IBM AIX 5L™ and three
IBM System x™ 365 servers with dual-
core Intel® processors. “This configura­
tion not only offers us performance
speeds we need but also enables us to
move further with our virtualization
efforts to prioritize system resources,”
Zarsky says.
During the testing phase, Zarsky and
his team ran the PeopleSoft software
powered by Oracle database platforms
connected to an older model
IBM SAN—with the goal of migrating
over to a new third-party SAN that
another IT group had just purchased.
However, Zarsky soon discovered that
the new SAN couldn’t scale quickly
enough for the rapid growth in data
from the human resources, finance and
student registration services.
Performance was disappointing, too.
“The performance simply wasn’t there,”
Zarsky says. “Since we had been using
an older IBM SAN during testing, we
knew that the new IBM DS4800 with an
IBM SAN Volume Controller would pro­
vide the reliability we needed and work
well with our existing systems. A key
advantage of the DS4800 is speed—
we could move up to 4 Gbps
performance.”
“ Since we had been
using an older
IBM SAN during
testing, we knew that
the new IBM DS4800
with an IBM SAN
Volume Controller
would provide the
performance and
reliability we needed
and work well with
existing systems. A key
advantage of the
DS4800 is speed—we
could move up to
4 Gbps performance.”
— Don Zarsky, Technical Architect,
PeopleSoft Support, IT Group,
University of Calgary
Attractive lease option reduces TCO
After presenting the university’s senior
staff with empirical results and convinc­
ing administrators that the new
SAN Volume Controller and IBM SAN
would deliver the performance and reli­
ability the PeopleSoft production
systems required, Zarsky received the
green light to place the order.
Since budget is a major concern for this
publicly funded institution, the university
arranged a lease program through
IBM Global Financing Services. In addi­
tion to helping reduce the total cost of
ownership, leasing helps the university
keep technologies current and make
flexible equipment decisions to support
student growth and changing adminis­
trative needs.
IBM SAN management optimizes resources
Deployment was quick and easy. Two
members of Zarsky’s team worked with
IBM Global Technology Services to set
up the entire SAN system supporting
the PeopleSoft applications quickly and
smoothly, and in plenty of time for the
next wave of student registrations. In
addition, IBM training in SVC manage­
ment helped ensure that the system
would run optimally from the start.
Using IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controllers, IBM Tivoli®
Storage Manager software and a pair of
Fibre Channel IBM SAN Switch devices,
the PeopleSoft support database and
server administrators can back up vital
production data from IBM AIX 5L,
Microsoft® Windows® and Oracle
Standard Edition (SE) operating
environments.
The IBM DS4800 offers 4.7 TB of raw
storage capacity with 32 drives, each
turning at 15,000 rpm and each with
147 GB of capacity. “In less than three
years, the University of Calgary moved
from mainframe-based applications for
finance, supply chain, human resources
and student services to a completely
new PeopleSoft environment,” says
Harold Esche, university CIO. “With
such an aggressive timeline, it was
essential to ensure that technology
issues didn’t derail the project. As
expected, the IBM systems and storage
performed flawlessly.”
“ In less than three
years, the University of
Calgary moved from
mainframe-based
applications for
finance, supply chain,
human resources and
student services to a
completely new
PeopleSoft
environment. With
such an aggressive
timeline, it was
essential to ensure that
technology issues
didn’t derail the
project. As expected,
the IBM systems and
storage performed
flawlessly.”
— Harold Esche, CIO, University of
Calgary
High performance improves efficiency
Performance has also improved signifi­
cantly with the IBM SAN environment.
Data network speed increased from
2 Gbps to 4 Gbps—a significant boost
that the university IT department attrib­
utes to both the cache on the System
Storage DS4800 device and the cache
of the SVC.
Furthermore, the evening batches that
used to max out at only 4,000 IOPS
now reach speeds up to 13,000 IOPS.
This performance improvement trans­
lates to a more than 50 percent reduc­
tion in the time that it takes to back up
production servers and databases.
Says Esche, “Not only have we seen a
tremendous improvement in perform­
ance, but software upgrades have been
completely non-disruptive—a level of
efficiency we were never able to
achieve on our previous SAN.”
“A key measure of the success of a
technology is a lack of awareness by
the customers,” Esche adds. “From a
user perspective, the best technologies
are the ones that are transparent. They
just work. The IBM SAN has been just
that—always available with no perform­
ance problems. That’s exactly what we
needed for this high-profile and critical
project.”
Virtualization increases flexibility
By virtualizing the storage environment,
Zarsky has also increased system flexi­
bility and improved ease of manage­
ment. “Virtualization simplifies data and
disk management,” he explains. “We’ve
been extremely impressed with the
management capabilities of the
IBM virtualized storage network
because it provides the flexibility that
our other SANs lacked. For instance,
we no longer have to deal with the
compatibility issues of using third-party
device drivers, and this means no more
scary moments when upgrading
system software on production
application servers.”
Since the PeopleSoft applications are
critical to university operations, building
a reliable and secure infrastructure was
key to the success of the PeopleSoft
upgrade project. “We don’t have to
worry about the reliability of the
IBM devices; they’ve been rock solid,”
Zarsky says. “Our users are able to
access everything they need, when
they need it, which saves us a lot of
time by reducing the number of help
calls we must field.”
Strong IBM infrastructure supports
campus life
In the meantime, Zarsky and his
team are focusing on consolidating test
and development data onto the
IBM DS4800 environment and building
out a redundant storage area network
for disaster recovery purposes. He’s
also sharing his knowledge and experi­
ence with the IBM SVC and DS4800
with other groups at the university.
“The new IBM SAN has attracted a lot
of attention from other IT groups within
the university,” he explains. “While some
are interested in implementing a similar
system, others are already asking if
they can put their data on the
IBM SVC.”
For more information
For more information, contact your
IBM sales representative or
IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:
ibm.com/servers/storage/
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008
IBM Systems and Technology Group

For more information visit: Route 100

Somers, NY 10589

www.ucalgary.ca
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States

January 2008

All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, AIX 5L, System Storage,

System p5, System x and Tivoli are trademarks
or registered trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the
United States, other countries or both.
Intel is a trademark or registered trademark of
Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries.
Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.

TSC03037-USEN-00

Techem builds scalable, tough business
solution based on Linux on POWER with
SAP and IBM
Overview
 The Challenge
Growing fast organically and by
acquisition, energy specialist
Techem wished to integrate
business systems rapidly and
effectively. Existing servers
supporting SAP software had
reached capacity and needed
replacing, and plans for new SAP
applications were restricted.
Techem wanted a scalable, flexible
server and operating system
landscape to support its expansion
plans, secure data and protect
against disaster.
 The Solution
Implemented new SAP software on
IBM System p servers running
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,
using IBM virtualization to share
workload efficiently and reduce
software license fees. Deployed
EMC High End Storage
Technologies and a range of IBM
Tivoli software for a complete, high-
resilience business solution.
we know
they know
 The Benefits
Virtualization contributes to lower
database license fees. Simplified
operating system environment
helps reduce administration costs.
Advanced IBM storage software
and hardware has cut data volumes
and provides a highly resilient
infrastructure, that protects Techem
against disaster and is able to scale
up to meet the demands of growth.
 Key Solution Components
Industry: Energy
Applications: SAP® ERP 5.0, SAP
CRM, SAP NetWeaver® Business
Intelligence, SAP NetWeaver
Portal.
Hardware: IBM System p™ model
570 servers, EMC Symmetrix, IBM
System Storage™ 3592 Tape
Drives
Software: SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 9, Oracle 10g, IBM AIX® 5L™
5.3, IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controller, IBM Tivoli®
System Automation for
Multiplatforms, IBM Tivoli Storage
Manager
Services: IT-Services and Solutions
GmbH, an IBM Global Technology
Services affiliate
Techem specializes in recording and
allocating billing data on energy, water
and cooling consumption. With
subsidiaries and trading partners in
more than 25 countries and over 2,500
employees worldwide, some 7.5
million households and almost
700,000 client companies use Techem
systems. Total annual sales are €523
million, and the company is a world
leader in radio metering devices.
Rapid business growth has produced
an equally rapid increase in business
transactions and data volumes, and
existing systems were reaching their
capacity limits. The Techem team
wanted to extend the power and
functionality of its SAP software by
selecting a flexible, highly scalable IT
infrastructure that would offer a very
resilient landscape with full disaster
protection.
Ralf Schumacher, Group Leader,
Commercial and Distributive Systems,
explains, “Techem is expanding very
fast and absorbing other companies. It
is essential to be able to integrate and
run their business operations and
“The IBM servers offer
familiar architecture
with a very good price-
performance ratio. The
combination of
reliability, availability,
ease of maintenance
and the all-important
virtualization made
Linux on POWER the
right choice for
Techem.”
Rüdiger Schenk
Unix System Administrator
Techem
transactions on an easily scalable
system, which helps us reduce costs
and build a unified view of the
company.”
Linux on POWER offers freedom
Techem chose to review its SAP
software landscape, selecting a
comprehensive suite of SAP
applications including SAP ERP, SAP
CRM, SAP NetWeaver Business
Intelligence and SAP NetWeaver
Portal. The ERP applications include
sales and distribution, financial
accounting, controlling, materials
management, warehouse
management and asset accounting.
Knowing that current systems would
be unable to support the new software
and transaction loads, the team
embarked on a complete infrastructure
refresh. The aim was to provide a
foundation for business growth, and
help reduce operational and software
license expenses by creating a unified
server platform strategy to support
both existing AIX-based applications
and as an intermediate step towards
migrating to SAP software on Linux.
Once the migration was complete,
Techem would be able to take
advantage of the IBM Advanced
POWER Virtualization (APV)
technologies to consolidate its server
and processor footprint, which would
help reduce operational costs.
“We chose an ambitious migration
path, covering three version upgrades
in SAP software and simultaneously
moving to the Linux operating system,
which would give us the freedom to
choose the best hardware platform,”
says Ralf Schumacher.
After reviewing two possible hardware
vendors, Techem chose to replace its
IBM RS/6000 SP with a new IBM
System p model 570 and to upgrade
an existing p5-570 from four to eight
processors. The company has
subsequently expanded the new
servers to a 16-way configuration. With
the increased processing capacity
shared across all the logical partitions
using the advanced virtualization
capabilities of the POWER5+
technologies, Techem has created a
highly flexible, resilient IT
infrastructure.
“The IBM servers provide a well-
known architecture and very
competitive price points. The
combination of reliability, availability,
ease of maintenance and the all-
important virtualization made Linux on
POWER the right choice for Techem,”
says Rüdiger Schenk, Unix System
Administrator.
Flexible, secure virtualized platform
During the migration project, each
p570 server was configured with
multiple logical partitions running
several instances of the IBM AIX 5L
operating system and SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server 9 operating system
concurrently. This setup enabled the
existing SAP applications to be
systematically migrated from the
original AIX environment onto the latest
AIX 5L level, upgrade the database
and SAP software to the target levels
and then migrate to the Linux
partitions. The ability of IBM
POWER5+ processor-based systems
to run more than one operating system
and multiple LPARs within a single
physical server offered Techem key
advantages over other hardware and
operating system solutions, enabling
simplified consolidation of multiple
applications to the new Linux on
POWER platform.
The System p5 servers utilize Dynamic
Logical Partitions (DLPARs), Micro-
Partitioning and Virtual I/O features.
The SAP software components are
running on SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 9 operating system entirely.
By selecting Linux on POWER,
Techem is able to take advantage of
IBM virtualization technologies,
enabling compute resources to be
allocated to partitions in increments of
as little as one hundredth of a
processor (one-tenth of a processor
being the minimum size). This flexibility
allows Techem to exploit its systems as
fully as possible, reducing the need for
additional hardware expenditure by
maximizing existing capabilities. This
is the key success factor for projects
with changing demands on hardware
resources.
Comprehensive data storage solution
The Techem solution is one of the
largest SAP software installations on
Linux on POWER to date, and uses a “The IBM System p5
comprehensive set of IBM and EMC
servers running SUSE
products to complement and manage
the system landscape. This includes
Linux Enterprise Server
IBM System Storage SAN Volume and SAP software allow
Controller, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager us to reduce operational
for ERP and IBM Tivoli System expenses, integrate new
Automation for Multiplatforms.
companies into the
The storage environment for the new
group rapidly and
SAP system is based on a SAN built efficiently, and manage
with ten IBM System Storage SAN a dynamically growing
switches and two EMC Symmetrix environment easily and
High End Storage Systems, offering a
cost-effectively.”
total capacity of 60  TB. Techem uses
IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Frank Bartnitzki
software to provide virtualized storage Linux System Administrator
Techem
management.
For company-wide data backups,
Techem installed IBM Tivoli Storage
Manager V5 software. The Tivoli
Storage Manager software manages
daily incremental backups of data from
the SAP software environment to two
IBM 3494 Tape Library devices
equipped with ten IBM 3592 Tape
Drives.
Superb service and support
IT-Services and Solutions GmbH, an
IBM Global Technology Services
affiliate, worked closely with Techem to
help design, implement and
commission the software and
hardware, from original vendor
comparison tests through to system
go-live. Developers from several
product teams within IBM co-operated
very closely to solve challenges arising
in the complex customer environment
during migration and test phases at
Techem. The system supports a total
of some 1,800 named users accessing
large data volumes: 1.1TB in the
production system, 380GB in the
customer relationship management
application, and another 140GB in the
portal.
Leander Dahlmann, DB Administrator,
comments, “Techem wanted to have a
homogeneous platform for its SAP
applications, including the underlying
database. IT-Services and Solutions
has successfully delivered the first
Oracle 10g on Linux on POWER
implementation, and they have
delivered a first-class solution for
Techem. The implementation
demonstrates the excellent
performance and high scalability of
Oracle 10g and SAP NetWeaver on
Linux on POWER platform.
“By migrating to this release we were
also able to achieve savings in storage
use by archiving older data. Taking
advantage of IBM virtualization
technologies, Techem has also been
able to reduce the number of Oracle
database instances, which has helped
reduce the total license fees – a
significant cost saving.
“The IBM, EMC and SAP solution fully
met Techem’s requirements,
especially concerning a guaranteed
future to support our highly acquisitive
expansion strategy”
Handling rapid business growth
Despite the radical nature of the
change – new operating system, new
SAP software, new servers – there was
no need for user training, as the
application interfaces remained the
same.
Frank Bartnitzki, Linux System
Administrator, concludes, “The Linux
on POWER solution gives Techem the
ability to handle rapid growth in
business with a flexible, scalable
architecture. The IBM System p5
servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server and SAP software allow us to
reduce operational expenses,
integrate new companies into the
“IT services and solutions
and IBM Global
Technology Services
have successfully
delivered the first
Oracle 10g on Linux on
POWER
implementation, and
they have delivered a
first-class solution for
Techem”
Leander Dahlmann
DB Administrator
Techem
IBM Deutschland GmbH
D-70548 Stuttgart
ibm.com/solutions/sap
group rapidly and efficiently, and
IBM, the IBM logo, IBM System Storage, IBM System z, IBM
manage a dynamically growing System p, IBM System i, IBM System x, z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX,
environment easily and cost- DB2, Domino, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational and WebSphere are
trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business
effectively.” Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or
both.
Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Xeon and the Intel Xeon logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its
subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a
registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States
and other countries. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in
the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft, Windows,
Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may be trademarks,
or service marks of others.
This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM
and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many
factors have contributed to the results and benefits described.
IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information
contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/
or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy.
All customer examples cited represent how some customers
have used IBM products and the results they may have
achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual customer
configurations and conditions.
This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may
show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2008 All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2008 SAP AG
SAP AG
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16
D-69190 Walldorf
SAP, the SAP logo, SAP and all other SAP
products and services mentioned herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG
in Germany and several other countries.
GK12-4331-00 (01/08)
IBM Business Partner Case Study
Tectrade helps Dumfries and Galloway Council
migrate its storage hardware with IBM SAN
Volume Controller
Overview
 The Challenge
As part of a server consolidation
exercise, Dumfries and Galloway
Council needed greater storage
capacity for its SAN. The Council
wanted to find a simple, safe way to
deploy a new infrastructure with
minimal disruption, and to manage
its storage systems more
effectively.
 The Solution
Working with Tectrade
(www.tectrade.co.uk), an IBM
Premier Business Partner, the
Council deployed a new SAN based
on IBM System Storage DS4800
hardware. IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller was used to
migrate data from existing SAN
hardware, and manages the new
virtualized infrastructure.
 The Benefits
Centralised storage has simplified
physical server management and
backup processes, and will enable
the development of a full disaster
recovery solution. Storage
virtualization has increased
flexibility and scalability, supporting
server consolidation and
minimising the risk and disruption
of migrating data.
Dumfries and Galloway Council is
responsible for providing a wide
range of services to 148,000 people
in southern Scotland. The council
employs 6,500 people at 150 sites
across the region.
As communications infrastructure in
the region has improved significantly
in recent years, the Council decided
to embark on a programme of server
consolidation and centralisation,
moving 150 servers from local sites
onto just 70 machines in a central data
centre.
“As a consequence of the server
consolidation, we now have a lot
more data stored centrally,” explains
Graeme McIlorum, Technology
Services Manager at Dumfries and
Galloway Council. “We were already
using a SAN based on IBM FAStT500
hardware, so we decided to update
this infrastructure in order to increase
our storage capacity.”
Migrating to new SAN hardware
The Council decided to refresh its
storage hardware by introducing IBM
System Storage DS4800 hardware
to the SAN, and gradually phasing
out the existing hardware platform.
For guidance on how to perform this
migration safely and manage the new
infrastructure, the Council consulted
Tectrade, an IBM Premier Business
Partner specialising in centralised
storage solutions.
Tectrade helped the Council deploy
IBM System Storage SAN Volume
Controller (SVC) to virtualize the
existing storage environment, and
installed the new DS4800 hardware.
SVC enables IT administrators to
treat an entire SAN as a single pool
of storage, enabling storage devices
to be added or removed with minimal
need for manual configuration. In
consequence, it was a simple task to
integrate the new hardware into the
Council’s SAN, move 8TB of critical
data onto it, and gradually remove the
older FAStT systems from the network.
“The DS4800 is an impressive
platform, providing a very scalable
architecture without compromising
on reliability,” says Graeme McIlorum.
“IBM SAN Volume Controller enabled
us to migrate to the new hardware
quickly, safely, and without disruption
to our systems. The combination of
these two products is excellent, giving
us the flexibility to make optimal use of
an enterprise-class infrastructure.”
The Council was so impressed by the
solution that it decided to move its 4TB
Microsoft Exchange environment –
which provides email and calendaring
for around 3,800 users – onto the SAN
as well.
“Now that we have a more reliable,
easily manageable storage
infrastructure, it makes sense to
move more of our core systems
onto the SAN,” explains Graeme
McIlorum. “Having a single, centrally
managed storage environment means
considerable savings in administrative
workload, as well as simplifying
backup processes. SAN Volume
Controller gives us the flexibility to
allocate storage capacity wherever it is
most needed, so it is easy to add new
systems to the network.”
Building a resilient infrastructure
Dumfries and Galloway is also
planning to set up another SAN at
a second data centre, as part of a
comprehensive disaster recovery
solution.
“The Tectrade team has really helped
with the design of the second SAN,”
says Graeme McIlorum. “On topics
like mirroring, for example, there are
“With IBM DS4800
hardware and SAN
Volume Controller,
Tectrade has helped
us deploy an
enterprise-class storage
infrastructure. The
centralisation of our
storage infrastructure
is a vital part of our
consolidation strategy,
helping to simplify
management and
reduce operational
costs.”
Graeme McIlorum
Technology Services Manager
Dumfries and Galloway Council
a lot of different technologies on the
market and making the wrong choice
could be an expensive mistake – so
Tectrade’s expert opinion is very
valuable to us.”
He concludes: “With IBM DS4800
hardware and SAN Volume
Controller, Tectrade has helped us
deploy an enterprise-class storage
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007 All Rights Reserved.
infrastructure. The centralisation of
our storage infrastructure is a vital part
of our consolidation strategy, helping
to simplify management and reduce
operational costs.”
IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU
The IBM home page can be found at ibm.com
IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage, System Storage
DS and DS4000 are trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the United States,
other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may be
trademarks, or service marks of others.
IBM and Tectrade are separate companies and each
is responsible for its own products. Neither IBM nor
Tectrade makes any warranties, express or implied,
concerning the other’s products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM intends
to make these available in all countries in which IBM
operates. Any reference to an IBM product, program
or service is not intended to imply that only IBM’s
product, program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or service
may be used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how some
customers have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs
and performance characteristics will vary depending
on individual customer configurations and conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured from new
parts,or new and used parts. In some cases, the
hardware product may not be new and may have
been previously installed. Regardless, IBM warranty
terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
SDC03001-GBEN-00

Agrium finds the formula for growth with IBM
System p and DB2
Overview
 The Challenge
Anticipating rapid growth, Agrium
realized that its existing hardware
infrastructure was reaching end-of-
life and lacked the capacity to store
and process increasing data
volumes.
 The Solution
Working with IBM Global
Technology Services and
REALTECH, an IBM Business
Partner, Agrium migrated its SAP
software environment from a
number of ageing Alpha servers to
just five IBM System p5 570s. The
company also migrated from Oracle
to IBM DB2, and extended its SAN
infrastructure, adding an IBM
System Storage DS4800 and using
IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
to virtualize the entire storage
environment.
 The Benefits
New virtualized server and storage
infrastructure increases flexibility,
boosts performance and provides
scalability for future growth;
migration to DB2 reduced database
maintenance costs by 50 per cent;
we know
they know
SVC protects existing storage
investment and provides simpler
storage management; IBM’s
'development advocate' program
provides highly responsive
technical support for DB2
environment.
 Key Solution Components
Industry: Manufacturing, Wholesale
Distribution
Applications: SAP® ®
R/3 with
financial accounting, human capital
management and production
planning, SAP Customer
Relationship Management,
SAP Supplier Relationship
Management, SAP Solution
Manager, SAP Supply Chain
Management, SAP NetWeaver®
Exchange Infrastructure, SAP
NetWeaver Business Intelligence
Hardware: IBM System p5™ 570,
IBM System Storage™ DS4800,
IBM System Storage SAN Volume
Controller 3.1
Software: IBM AIX® 5L™,
IBM DB2®, IBM HACMP™
Services: IBM Global Technology
Services, IBM Business Partner
REALTECH
Agrium, based in Calgary, Alberta,
Canada, is a leading global
manufacturer and wholesaler of
agricultural nutrients, industrial
products and specialty fertilizers, with
major agricultural retail interests in
North and South America. The
company achieved total sales of more
than US$4 billion in 2006, and
employs over 6,500 people.
Agrium is planning to grow
significantly over the next three years
through expansion into new markets
and the acquisition of new businesses
– for example, the company is
currently building a new production
facility in Egypt. Agrium's IT team
realized its existing infrastructure
would not be capable of scaling to
support the resulting increase.
"We were running our SAP software
environment on 21 Alpha and Intel-
based Windows servers, which were
reaching end-of-life," explains Luke
Lau, Director of IT Technology
Planning at Agrium. "We needed a new
hardware platform, so we asked
several of the major vendors to
propose a new architecture."
 Choosing a technology partner
After analyzing each of the proposals,
“The IBM System p5 Agrium decided to work with IBM, and
invest in the System p5 platform.
platform offers us
reliability, high "IBM had a much better roadmap than
performance and the any of the other vendors – both in
ability to take terms of the POWER processor
advantage of leading- architecture and the strong
relationship with SAP," says Luke Lau.
edge IBM virtualization
"In addition, we were keen to move to a
technologies – making virtualized infrastructure, and the IBM
a significant virtualization technologies are much
contribution to the more mature than offerings from other
power and price- vendors."
performance of our IT
Agrium worked with IBM Global
environment.” Technology Services to implement five
Luke Lau
IBM System p5 570 servers to run its
Director of IT Planning SAP application landscape. Three of
Agrium
these servers handle the production
environment, and have been clustered
using IBM High Availability Cluster
Multi-Processing (HACMP) to ensure
high availability. The remaining two
p5-570s are currently used for testing,
training and special projects.
Luke Lau comments: "The IBM System
p5 platform offers us reliability, high
performance and the ability to take
advantage of leading-edge IBM
virtualization technologies – making a
significant contribution to the power
and price-performance of our IT
environment."
Virtualized storage environment
With the servers in place, Agrium's
next task was to update its storage
area network (SAN) to increase its
capacity and improve scalability for
the future. IBM Global Technology
Services added a new IBM System
Storage DS4800 disk system to
complement the existing storage
hardware, and deployed IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
to manage the entire infrastructure.
The IBM DS4800 provides superb
data throughput with 2Gbps Fiber
Channel connectivity and the ability to
mix Fiber Channel and SATA disk
drives for cost-effective performance.
The configured storage system has
seven shelves, for a total of 18TB
storage. Agrium's production and
business intelligence databases
currently total around 2TB, so the SAP
software environment will be able to
grow without significant additional
investment in storage hardware.
"SVC has made a big difference to the
scalability and cost-effectiveness of
our storage environment," says Luke
Lau. "By treating all our storage
devices as a single pool, it has
become much easier to manage the
infrastructure. If we need more space,
we simply plug in more hardware and
SVC treats it as part of the SAN – with
minimal need to change settings or
reconfigure."
He adds: "IBM Global Technology
Services did an excellent job with the
hardware implementation. The quality
of documentation they created was
outstanding as well, and really helps
our in-house team handle the
hardware by themselves. "
Moving to DB2
As part of the migration, Agrium
decided to move from its existing
Oracle database platform to IBM DB2.
"Both IBM and SAP are committed to
DB2 as a database platform for SAP
applications, so we can be confident in
its future as part of our environment,"
says Luke Lau. "DB2 is very well-
integrated with the SAP software
environment, so it is easy for
administrators to manage their
databases. In particular, the SAP DBA
cockpit for DB2 enables most
database administration to be handled
from within the SAP software
environment.
"One of the main reasons for migrating
to DB2 was the excellent and cost-
effective support provided by IBM. As
part of our support contract, IBM
assigned us a 'development
advocate', who is always available to
help us resolve any issues as quickly
as possible. In addition, we are saving
about 50 percent on maintenance
costs with DB2, compared with our
previous platform."
Rapid SAP software migration
Once the new infrastructure was ready,
Agrium began the migration of its SAP
landscape, working with IBM Business
Partner REALTECH. Agrium uses a
wide range of SAP applications,
including SAP ERP, SAP Customer
Relationship Management, SAP
Supplier Relationship Management,
SAP Solution Manager, SAP Supply
Chain Management, SAP NetWeaver
Exchange Infrastructure and SAP
NetWeaver Business Intelligence.
“The SAP DBA cockpit
"I really can't praise REALTECH
for DB2 enables most
enough," says Luke Lau. "They were
extremely professional and
database administration
knowledgeable, and helped us deal to be handled from
effectively with all the challenges of the within the ERP
migration. Their project management environment. In
was excellent – ensuring we could go
addition, we are saving
live with the new systems on time and
on budget."
about 50 percent on
maintenance costs with
Advantages of virtualization DB2, compared with
Agrium's SAP software environment, our previous platform.”
which supports 2,700 users, now runs
in ten logical partitions (LPARs) spread Luke Lau
Director of IT Planning
across the three production p5-570s. Agrium
The three servers have 29 active
processors between them, and
Agrium uses IBM System p Advanced
POWER Virtualization (APV)
technologies to share these
processors between the different
LPARs.
"Virtualization enables us to treat each
of the System p5 servers as a single
pool of processing resources, so we
can allocate as much or as little power
to each LPAR as it requires to handle
its current workload," says Luke Lau.
"And if we want to introduce a new
application or development
environment, we don't have to buy a
new physical machine, as we can set
up a new LPAR within a matter of
minutes.
"As the SAP software environment
grows, we are also planning to use IBM
On/Off Capacity on Demand, which
will allow us to temporarily switch on
inactive processors within the p5-570s
in order to deal with periods of peak
workload – for example, month-end
financial reporting. This will give us a
performance boost without the
expense, effort and disruption of “IBM Global Technology
buying new hardware."
Services and
In addition to virtualising their server
REALTECH have
environment, Agrium is using IBM SVC helped us create an
to virtualize the entire storage architecture that will
environment as well – including both support our SAP ERP
the state-of-the-art IBM DS4800 and
environment as data
older storage servers from HP –
enabling Agrium to maximise the
volumes increase, and
utilization of its SAN hardware and will help us meet our
keep costs low while promoting strategic growth
scalability. targets.”

IBM Deutschland GmbH
Supporting future growth Luke Lau D-70548 Stuttgart
Director of IT Planning ibm.com/solutions/sap
In the near future, Agrium also plans to Agrium
IBM, the IBM logo, IBM System z, IBM System p, IBM System i,
upgrade to DB2 9, which will offer a IBM System x, z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX, DB2, DB2 Universal
number of features – such as deep Database, Domino, Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere and Enterprise
Storage Server are trademarks of International Business
compression and improved integration Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or
– that will help the company as its SAP both.

software environment grows. Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, Intel
Centrino logo, Celeron, Intel Xeon, Intel SpeedStep, Itanium, and
Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel
"IBM Global Technology Services and Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other
countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in
REALTECH have helped us create an the United States and other countries. Linux is a trademark of
architecture that will support our SAP Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are
software environment as usage and trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other
data volumes increase, and will help countries, or both.

us meet our strategic growth targets," Other company, product or service names may be trademarks,
or service marks of others.
concludes Luke Lau. "With System p5
This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM
and DB2, we have been able to and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many
improve SAP application availability factors have contributed to the results and benefits described.
IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information
and transaction response times for contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/
end-users, giving us an infrastructure or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy.
All customer examples cited represent how some customers
that is more than equal to today's have used IBM products and the results they may have
business challenges." achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual customer
configurations and conditions.

This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may

show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007 All Rights Reserved.

© Copyright 2007 SAP AG

SAP AG
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16
D-69190 Walldorf

SAP, the SAP logo, mySAP and all other SAP

products and services mentioned herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG
in Germany and several other countries.

GK12-4306-00 (10/07)
IBM case study
Circuit City boosts IT infrastructure
effectiveness with storage
virtualization
Overview
■ Challenge
Build a scalable storage infra­
structure that can keep pace
with business growth; improve
administrator productivity as
well as application and server
availability
■ Solution
A virtualized storage environ­
ment based on IBM System
Storage™ SAN Volume
Controller, IBM TotalStorage®
Productivity Center software
and IBM System Storage
DS4500 and DS8100 disk
storage systems
■ Key Benefits
— The use of tiered storage
architecture helps to reduce
the overall cost of storage
As a leading worldwide retailer of
brand-name consumer electronics, PCs
and entertainment software, almost
every aspect of Circuit City relies on IT.
In the U.S., the IT infrastructure sup­
porting the company’s 652 Superstores
and CircuitCity.com Web site is located
in two data centers on the corporate
campus in Richmond, Virginia.
Circuit City outgrows traditional storage
infrastructure
The storage architecture was typical of
many large enterprises. Most of the
storage was already SAN-attached;
however, no single management or vir­
— Non-disruptive data migra­
tualization tools were in place. This cre­
tions enabled by SVC reduce
ated multiple SAN islands. After years
maintenance windows from
of rapid growth, the IT team was strug­
hours to minutes, which
gling with storage management issues
helps improve application
such as poor storage utilization and the
availability
need to interrupt application availability
— IBM TotalStorage
just to make changes to the server and
Productivity Center
storage infrastructure. Almost all of the
software—a centralized stor­
storage administration work was per­
age management and report­
formed by the various IT teams using
ing tool—helps identify ways
manual procedures.
to improve application
performance
The amount of labor needed to simply
— The IBM FlashCopy®
keep everything running made it difficult
function helps reduce recov­
for the storage administrators to plan
ery times and improve data
ahead. Far too little of their time was
protection during configura­
spent on storage planning, optimization
tion changes
and strategy.
— The multi-tier storage
environment helps enable
excellent application per­
formance while deferring
Tier 1 storage purchases
In June 2005, business requirements
drove the doubling of storage in the
two data centers. It was clear to Nick
Otto, director of IT infrastructure serv­
ices, that the time to move to a more
flexible storage architecture had arrived.
Virtualized storage infrastructure helps
address the demands of growth
Otto’s team asked their incumbent
storage vendor as well as IBM to
recommend a comprehensive storage
management initiative that would
include storage virtualization, tiered
storage and new tools to manage,
monitor and deploy storage. After
reviewing a number of technologies and
architectural approaches, Circuit City
selected IBM as its solutions provider.
IBM delivers virtualization management
in an appliance-like device, called the
IBM System Storage SAN Volume
Controller (SVC). SVC is designed to
combine storage capacity from multiple
vendors into a single reservoir of capac­
ity that can be managed from a central
point of control. From the server’s view,
storage looks like a common LUN
served by SVC—the actual storage
characteristics are irrelevant to the
servers. In fact, any type of physical
storage can be deployed in the
IBM virtual environment.
Compared to the other vendor, the
IBM storage virtualization architecture
provides greater flexibility and more
control. For example, says Otto,
“SVC is standards-based, so I can
incorporate any servers and disk
systems into the IBM environment.”
In fact, Otto viewed the manageability
benefits of virtualization as essential to
the team’s ability to serve users. “If I
could not afford everything I wanted,
I would have given up spare capacity
before giving up virtualization.
Fortunately, with IBM, I accomplished
all my objectives within the budget.”
Circuit City migrates nearly 400 TB to a
virtualized environment with little
downtime
The order was placed with IBM in
June 2005. All system changes had to
be completed before the company’s
peak season began, which gave the IT
team less than four months to migrate
most of their 400 TB of data to the new
IBM virtualized storage infrastructure.
The flexibility of virtualized storage
made it possible to complete the migra­
tion in the timeframe allowed. The
Circuit City team first moved all the
servers and the legacy storage devices
behind the SVC and then loaded the
drivers onto the servers. Then the new
disk arrays were added to the environ­
ment. Because the storage was now
virtualized, the data was easily migrated
from the legacy disk arrays to the new
IBM disk arrays without any interruption
to service.
Adoption of tiered storage helps to reduce
storage costs
The Circuit City IT team implemented
three storage tiers. Today, the majority
of storage growth at Circuit City is in
Tier 2 and Tier 3:
Tier 1—Highly available, mission-
critical enterprise-class applications
such as large financial systems and
e-commerce tools (IBM System
Storage DS8100 series)
Tier 2—Important internal applications
that serve corporate needs, such as
procurement systems (IBM System
Storage DS4500 arrays)
Tier 3—Less critical applications, such
as workstation home directories and
e-mail archives (IBM System Storage
DS4100 arrays)
The tiered approach enables the IT
team to match the price/performance
of the disk drives to the needs of the
applications, lowering the overall cost of
storage without impacting application
performance. Otto’s team reduced its
forecast for storage capital equipment
spending by US$1 million over
18 months by moving applications from
Tier 1 to Tier 2 storage. And growth
has continued in Tiers 2 and 3 instead
of expensive Tier-1 devices. Otto says,
“Since 2005, our Tier 1 storage has
stayed relatively flat while Tier 2 and
Tier 3 have experienced significant
growth.”
Virtualization helps reduce the disruption
of a SAN fabric upgrade
After the storage infrastructure was vir­
tualized, the IT team upgraded the
entire SAN fabric. In a traditional
storage environment, such an extensive
refresh would require large maintenance
windows for deployment and provision­
ing. At Circuit City, says Otto, “With vir­
tualization, the upgrade was simple and
smooth. The disruptions were minimal.”
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center helps
optimize storage planning
The Circuit City IT team deployed
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center
software to help tune the storage envi­
ronment. IBM TotalStorage Productivity
Center software simplifies and auto­
mates the management of storage
infrastructure through a centralized,
common suite of tools for the manage­
ment of storage devices, storage net­
works and data. The software is
designed to help optimize resource uti­
lization, improve application availability
and enhance the productivity of storage
administrators.
Says Otto, “TotalStorage Productivity
Center uncovered bottlenecks in places
that we had not expected. We took that
information back to the application
teams and suggested changes that
made a big difference.”
Another capacity upgrade was sched­
uled for Spring 2006. Says Otto,
“TotalStorage Productivity Center forms
the basis for our planning, giving us a
clear view into storage needs and
trends. Because of its monitoring
and management capabilities, we
invested more in Tier 2 and Tier 3 and
bought less Tier 1 storage in 2006 than
we had forecasted in 2005. That repre­
sented significant cost savings for the
company.”
FlashCopy helps boost productivity
According to Otto, IBM tools like
FlashCopy helped the IT team get
through the busy season without having
to add staff. FlashCopy helps the IT
team protect critical data when they
change disk array configurations. The
administrator can create a quick copy
of volumes, make whatever system
changes are needed and then restore
the system from the copy. By com­
pletely eliminating the need to resort to
backup tapes, administrators can work
more quickly.
Virtualized servers and storage helps
speed maintenance and provisioning
Today, the combination of server and
storage virtualization enables the IT
department to respond quickly to user
needs. Two-thirds of the Microsoft®
Windows® environment is virtualized
using VMware ESX Server. As Otto
explains, “Server virtualization tools like
VMware VMotion help us easily move
virtual machines. But without virtualized
storage, maintenance on a physical
server can still involve downtime. If the
storage is virtualized, in a window of
only a minute or two, the entire physical
host server can be moved.”
Virtualization is a storage administrator’s
dream come true
Most storage infrastructure upgrades
no longer require outage windows. For
example, since virtualization was
installed, Circuit City has replaced
90 percent of the disks in the data
center—all with minimal to zero disrup­
tion to users.
Looking back, Otto says, “IBM storage
virtualization has transformed our IT
storage infrastructure so we can
respond quickly to user needs. And the
IT team has the tools to work produc­
tively. Today, our team spends much
more of their time thinking strategically,
which helps us stay on the right course.
IBM has helped us create a great envi­
ronment for storage administration.”
For more information
For more information, contact your

IBM sales representative, IBM Business

Partner or visit us on the Web at:

ibm.com/servers/storage/

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007

IBM Systems and Technology Group

Route 100

Somers, NY 10589

U.S.A.
Produced in the United States

September 2007

All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, FlashCopy, System Storage

and TotalStorage are trademarks or registered
trademarks of International Business Machines
Corporation in the United States, other
countries or both.
Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that
IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
IBM and non-IBM products and services
contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.

TSC03032-USEN-00
IBM Case Study
Trowers & Hamlins selects Tectrade
for its innovative IBM SAN solution
■ The Challenge
Accelerate backup of business-
critical data; enable near-real-time
replication of data to disaster
recovery site; enable a single point
of control for backup and recovery
of data; significantly increase
scalability of data storage
infrastructure.
Overview
■ The Solution
Trowers & Hamlins worked with
Tectrade to implement two SANs
based on IBM hardware and
software, one for production
systems and the other at the
company’s disaster recovery site.
IBM SAN Volume Controller
provides asynchronous data
replication between the two sites.
■ The Benefit
Customer audits of product
Virtualized storage capacity can be
moved and expanded on the fly,
with no interruption to the business;
more efficient use of existing and
new capacity will reduce long-term
costs; new SANs offer significant
increase in data read/write
performance; backups can be
completed outside office hours;
data replication ensures faster
recovery in the event of disaster.
Trowers & Hamlins is a major law
firm based in the City of London,
with further UK offices in Exeter and
Manchester, and offices in Abu Dhabi,
Bahrain, Cairo, Dubai and Oman. With
a client base that spans the private
and public sectors, Trowers & Hamlins
offers services covering virtually every
aspect of commercial law.
Aiming to accelerate data backups,
improve data recoverability, and
enhance the availability of core
business systems, Trowers &
Hamlins worked with Tectrade to
deploy a mirrored SAN infrastructure.
The solution uses asynchronous
replication with IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller storage
virtualisation software, enabling the
Trowers & Hamlins backup site to track
the production site almost in real time
through a relatively low bandwidth
connection.
Bob Greenwood, IT Manager at
Trowers & Hamlins, comments: “The
Tectrade and IBM solution has given
Trowers & Hamlins a more scalable
storage infrastructure that offers
better performance and more reliable
backup.”
“Tectrade’s proposal
showed an excellent
appreciation of the
need to mitigate risk
during the crucial data
migration stages.”
Bob Greenwood
IT Manager
Trowers & Hamlins
Growing pains
Data volumes at Trowers & Hamlins
were already increasing rapidly when
the organisation took the decision
to migrate its email from Novell
GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange.
The aim was to take advantage of
better integration between the MS
Outlook mail client and the company’s
content management system, but the
side-effect was a sudden increase in
the volume of mail and attachments.
“We had outgrown our direct-
attached storage model, which
lacked the capacity, performance
and reliability to support the growing
business requirements,” recalls Bob
Greenwood. “Our overnight backups
were already running well into the
following working day, and there was
no easy or accurate way to plan our
future storage capacity.”
Trowers & Hamlins was fighting the
rising tide of data by adding more
and more disks to individual servers
in its data centre, and as a result the
processes for backup and restore
were becoming more unwieldy, time-
consuming and unreliable.
Says Bob Greenwood, “We wanted
to replicate our business-critical data
from the London headquarters to our
disaster recovery site, and it was clear
that a storage area network [SAN]
solution was the best option.”
Selecting the new solution
Trowers & Hamlins approached
IBM for advice and was directed to
Tectrade, an IBM Premier Business
Partner and storage expert. Following
a competitive tendering process
with two other providers, Trowers
& Hamlins selected the proposed
Tectrade solution as offering the
highest quality and the closest fit to the
business requirements.
“Tectrade’s proposal showed an
excellent appreciation of the need
to mitigate risk during the crucial
data migration stages,” says Bob
Greenwood. “Another factor in our
choice was Tectrade’s specialist focus
on backup and recovery – the other
vendors had a broader, and potentially
shallower, range of skills.”
Working with Tectrade, Trowers &
Hamlins implemented two SANs. The
IBM System x servers in the production
SAN are connected to an IBM System
Storage DS4700 with Fibre Channel
disks via dual IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller (SVC) nodes.
The SAN includes an IBM System
Storage TS3310 Tape Library, and
a multi-protocol router that converts
the Fibre Channel traffic to IP for
transmission to the remote backup
site. At the backup site, Trowers &
Hamlins runs virtualized servers under
VMware, dual SVC nodes, an IBM
DS4200 Express with SATA disks, and
an IBM 3582 Tape Library.
Says Bob Greenwood, “Tectrade
helped us to migrate all the data
without the end users even noticing.
The planning was excellent, so we
knew exactly what to expect, and the
migration was surprisingly quick and
easy.”
Asynchronous replication with SVC
Tectrade set up asynchronous
replication between the two sites via
SVC, the first time this approach has
been taken in the UK.
“The ease and reliability of the SVC
replication is astonishing,” says
Bob Greenwood. “The replication
technology is built into SVC, and it
gives us a single point of control for
management, regardless of how many
servers are actually being replicated.
The second SAN tracks about five
minutes behind the production
environment, and since we were
expecting a delay of more like 30 or 40
minutes, there is plenty of headroom
for the data volumes to grow without
requiring us to upgrade the existing
100Mbit/s line.”
SVC will also offer significant
advantages in the future, providing
a shared pool of storage that can
be expanded at low cost and non-
disruptively. Furthermore, the large
SVC disk cache increases the speed
of access to data, enabling better
service to end users and faster
backups.
Faster backup and recovery with Tivoli
With the introduction of the IBM SAN
technologies, Trowers & Hamlins has
taken steps to establish a future-proof
infrastructure and enable the remote
replication of business-critical data.
The organisation has also dramatically
increased the speed and reliability of
its backup procedures.
The overnight backup that previously
ran until 2pm the following day can
now be completed by 9:30am. The
use of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
has reduced the total backup set from
eight to three tapes, saving time and
reducing media costs. The speed has
also improved on the recovery side: in
many cases, small recovery jobs can
be handled from the disk storage on
the TSM server, without the need to go
back to the tapes.
In addition to designing and
configuring the Tivoli solution,
Tectrade ran training courses for
Trowers & Hamlins staff, and now
provides ongoing support for both
hardware and software in the SAN
environments.
“The ease and reliability
of the SVC replication
is astonishing.”
Bob Greenwood
IT Manager
Trowers & Hamlins
Virtualised benefits
With direct-attached storage, Trowers
& Hamlins could not easily predict
where growth would occur on the
network, and could not accurately
plan the storage capacity on any
given server. “One server could
easily run out of capacity at a critical
moment, while another might have
spare capacity going to waste,”
says Bob Greenwood. “With storage
virtualisation, any storage capacity
added to the pool can be shared
across all systems, and re-shared
whenever the business requirements
change.”
He concludes, “The likely cost savings
in the future are significant, but the
main benefits of the IBM and Tectrade
solution are the scalability and
reliability. We now have a firm basis on
which the business can grow.”
 IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU

The IBM home page can be found at ibm.com

IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage DS and

Tivoli are trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.

Other company, product or service names may

be trademarks, or service marks of others.

IBM and Tectrade are separate companies and

each is responsible for its own products. Neither
IBM nor Tectrade makes any warranties, express
or implied, concerning the other’s products.

References in this publication to IBM products,

programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an
IBM product, program or service is not intended
to imply that only IBM’s product, program
or service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.

All customer examples cited represent how

some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual
customer configurations and conditions.

IBM hardware products are manufactured

from new parts,or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.

This publication is for general guidance only.

Photographs may show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007 All Rights Reserved.

TSC03035-GBEN-00
IBM Case Study
Pearson reduces storage costs with
Tectrade and IBM
Overview
■ The Challenge
Pearson Shared Services found that
managing storage demands was
expensive and slow, with spare
capacity locked away in individual
servers. Over-allocating storage as
a tactic to avoid the costs of
changing storage capacities was
inefficient, and did not solve the
basic problem of inflexibility.
■ The Solution
Working with IBM Premier Business
Partner Tectrade, Pearson Shared
Services implemented an IBM
System Storage DS8100, IBM
System Storage SAN Volume
Controller, and an IBM TotalStorage
3584 tape library.
■ The Benefit
Using SAN Volume Controller,
Pearson Shared Services can
allocate, move and change storage
capacities on the fly with no
interruption to the business. With
more granular control of storage,
more efficient use of existing and
new capacity contributes to
reduced costs – lower than the
maintenance costs of the previous
system.
Pearson is a world leader in
education, business information and
consumer books, with international
brands such as The Financial
Times, Penguin Books and Pearson
Education. With around 29,000
people and annual sales of more than
£4.4 billion, Pearson is a fast-growing
education and information services
provider.
Within the group, Pearson Shared
Services provides a complete range
of IT systems and support for around
1,500 people in the Penguin and
Education divisions in Harlow, UK.
From email to advanced database
applications and interactive Web
sites, Pearson Shared Services is
responsible for the cost-effective
delivery of the enabling technology
behind their business success.
Mike Howard, Server Team Leader,
explains the challenges that growth
has brought: “Managing storage
capacity was becoming gradually
more time-consuming and expensive.
As well as general file serving and
email allocations, business units
would often find that their demands
for storage would rise unexpectedly
with new Web site successes or as
new database-driven applications
came on stream.
“With IBM SVC, Pearson “The existing system was a mixture of
SAN and direct attached storage, with
Shared Services is able
spare capacity isolated on individual
to reduce its storage servers. Because it was difficult to
costs by making more add storage to an existing application,
efficient use of existing we tended to over-allocate capacity to
capacity and managing try to reduce the number of changes
required.
storage demands at
lower costs.” “When we did need to add capacity,
Mike Howard we had no means of growing the
Server Team Leader assigned volumes, which meant that
Pearson Shared Services
applications might end up with data
spread over a handful of locations.
To respond more effectively to the
business needs, we started the
search for a more cost-effective way
to handle storage demands.”
Searching for storage capacity
Working with an IBM Premier
Business Partner, Tectrade, a
specialist integrator of data and
storage management solutions,
Pearson Shared Services elected
to deploy IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controller (SVC) virtualisation
software, together with an IBM
System Storage DS8100 with 9TB of
high-performance disk capacity.
Mike Howard comments, “The IBM
SAN Volume Controller technology
gives Pearson Shared Services
the ability to manage storage in
a completely new way. With SVC
virtualising our storage capacity, we
can move data on the fly to the most
suitable device on the SAN, allocate
and re-allocate storage volumes,
expand allocations and much more.
SVC enables us to assign storage
capacities more accurately, knowing
that we can make changes easily and
cost-effectively if required.
“With IBM SVC, Pearson Shared
Services is able to reduce its storage
costs by making more efficient use of
existing capacity and by
managing storage demands
at lower costs.”
New system, greater functionality,
lower costs
When preparing the business case for
the changeover, Tectrade was able
to show that the collective operating
costs of the new SVC and DS8000
combination would be lower than
the maintenance costs of the former
system.
Additionally, with limits on the
available floorspace, expanding
the former system was out of the
question, which meant finding a
high-capacity, high-density solution.
With a small physical footprint and an
architecture that can scale to 192TB,
the DS8100 proved to be the best
choice.
“The first time we moved data
from one SAN device to another
live, during production, was highly
impressive,” remarks Mike Howard.
“SVC has always performed
faultlessly, and very quickly you get
used to the idea that you can rely on
the IBM technology to do exactly what
it says it can do.”
Approximately 6TB on the DS8100
is virtualised and controlled by SVC,
with the remaining 3TB dedicated
to applications that do not normally
require storage capacity changes.
As the business needs grow, the
remaining data may also be brought
within the scope of the SVC to offer
additional flexibility.
Taking advantage of integrated
operations
Pearson Shared Services provides
storage for data from diverse
applications, financial systems, static
and interactive Web sites, as well as
graphics documents and images
generated by Mac-based designers.
The company had been using IBM
Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
for some time, and, working with
Tectrade, chose to implement an IBM
TotalStorage 3584 tape library with
LTO2 media for backup and archiving
requirements.
“Tectrade has provided invaluable
advice on TSM, helping us exploit the
automation and functionality of this
extremely powerful product,” says
Mike Howard.
Enabling technology to help Pearson
succeed
Now that the SVC, DS8000 and TSM
solutions are in place, Mike Howard
reports that Pearson Shared Services
is in a better position to serve the “The IBM System
business.
Storage solution offers
“With IBM SVC, we are able
us the flexibility to
to respond more quickly to meet new business
unpredictable demands for storage demands faster, at
increases, and able to bring assets lower cost and with
online and into production more
better data protection.
rapidly. The IBM technologies
have made a positive difference
Combine this with
to our ability to manage projects, excellent service and
and helped us to reduce costs – for skills from Tectrade,
example by utilising existing storage and Pearson Shared
capacity more effectively,” says Mike
Services is ready for
Howard.
the next phase in
“The IBM System Storage solution storage growth.”
offers us the flexibility to meet new
Mike Howard
business demands faster, at lower Server Team Leader
cost and with better data protection. Pearson Shared Services
Combine this with excellent service
and skills from Tectrade, and Pearson
Shared Services is ready for the next
phase in storage growth.”
 IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU

The IBM home page can be found at

ibm.com

IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage DS,

Tivoli and TotalStorage are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product or service names may

be trademarks, or service marks of others.

IBM and Tectrade are separate companies

and each is responsible for its own products.
Neither IBM nor Tectrade makes any
warranties, express or implied, concerning the
other’s products.

References in this publication to IBM products,

programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to
an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead.

All customer examples cited represent how

some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.

IBM hardware products are manufactured

from new parts,or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.

This publication is for general guidance only.

Photographs may show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007 All Rights Reserved.

TSC03030-USEN-00

Pick ’n Pay buys into a dynamic future
with IBM and SAP
Overview
■ The Challenge
Pick ’n Pay is a hugely successful,
multi-brand retail business, based
in South Africa and growing
globally. Ambitious growth plans
were being hampered by high
software development costs and an
infrastructure that was difficult to
expand in line with the business
needs.
■ The Solution
Working with IBM Business Partner
UCS Solutions, Pick ’n Pay chose
integrated SAP ERP and SAP for
Retail solutions running on IBM
System p5 servers. Using
advanced IBM virtualization
technologies and IBM On/Off
Capacity on Demand, Pick ’n Pay
has built a flexible, scalable and
easy-to-manage IT foundation.
we know
they know
■ The Benefits
Pick ’n Pay now has the ability to
respond more quickly to business
requirements without the delay or
expense associated with the
purchase, configuration and
deployment of new physical
servers. System administration
costs are reduced, development
costs cut, and the business is able
to grow rapidly by enabling
additional compute power precisely
as it is needed.
■ Key Solution Components
Industry: Retail
Applications: SAP® ERP, SAP for
Retail, SAP NetWeaver® Business
Intelligence, SAP NetWeaver
Portal, SAP NetWeaver Exchange
Infrastructure, SAP NetWeaver
Mobile
Hardware: IBM System p5™
models 590 and 550, IBM System
Storage™ DS8100 storage server
Software: IBM AIX®, IBM DB2®,
IBM SAN Volume Controller, IBM
®
Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM DB2
CommonStore for SAP software
Services: IBM Global Finance, IBM
Global Business Services, IBM
Business Partner UCS Solutions
Pick ’n Pay is a South African - and
increasingly, global - retail success
story. The company’s more than
40,000 staff operate over 500
hypermarkets, supermarkets and
minimarkets under multiple brands
such as Boxer, Franklins, Pick ’n Pay
and Score, generating annual
revenues of almost ZAR 32 billion
(around US$5 billion).
Pick ’n Pay operated a self-developed
retail system to track distribution,
sales, stock and finances. Running on
numerous vendor systems, the
solution was becoming increasingly
expensive to extend, often requiring
new hardware to cope with increased
workload. As Pick ’n Pay expanded
both within South Africa and in
Australia, this approach to providing
information services was hampering
growth.
Francois van der Merwe, Technical
Operations Manager, reports, “Adding
new physical systems was a relatively
slow and cumbersome way to respond
to business growth. Adding new
hardware was often an inaccurate way
to meet workload requirements, and
each new installation carried risks.

“With the p5 systems and
DB2, we have created an
SAP application
environment that can
scale up, respond fast,
and deliver low license
and operational costs.”
Francois van der Merwe
Technical Operations Manager
Pick 'n Pay
We also felt obliged to redeploy the
redundant servers, and that in itself
occupied valuable personnel
resources.
“On the applications side, we no longer
wanted to develop our own software, as
we were convinced that an integrated
third-party solution would offer greater
functionality without the development
expense. The issue was to find an IT
implementation that would offer the
flexibility and low costs of operation to
meet our business goals.”
Sean Summers, former Chief Executive
Officer, adds, “SAP for Retail embodies
best practice in retail management, and
no individual business can continue to
evolve and develop its own systems as
effectively. Having investigated in-depth
all possible options, we came to the
conclusion that SAP was at the forefront
of all relevant technology evolutions.”
Introducing virtualization
Working with IBM Business Partner UCS
Solutions, which specializes in the retail
sector, Pick ’n Pay chose SAP for Retail,
SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business
Intelligence as its core solutions. In a
shift away from another vendor
hardware platform, Pick ’n Pay selected
an all-IBM IT infrastructure, based on
two IBM System p5 590 servers and a
single p5-550 server, running IBM AIX
5L v5.3, with IBM System Storage
DS8100 storage systems.
Francois van der Merwe notes, “The
flexibility offered by the advanced
virtualization capabilities of the p5
servers and AIX 5.3 will allow Pick ’n
Pay to eliminate the cost and delay of
implementing physical servers. With
our SAP software solutions on p5
systems, we can allocate the resources
to each application in increments of as
little as one-tenth of a processor, and
double the total processor capacity
should we need to. With the p5 systems
and DB2, we have created an SAP
application environment that can scale
up, respond fast, and deliver low
license and operational costs.”
Ready for a dynamic future
As a new SAP software user, the initial
forecasting of workload and server
capacity was one of the biggest
challenges for Pick ’n Pay. The data
warehouse, SAP NetWeaver Business
Intelligence (BI), was new to the
company, and there was no easy way to
estimate data storage requirements
and processing workload. The system
had to be designed to cope with these
entirely unknown factors.
“Growing by adding servers is a costly
and disruptive way to expand,”
comments Francois van der Merwe. “In
the past, as application workload grew
it would be shifted to a new server,
which carries an unknown risk and time
delay.
“The p5 solutions give Pick ’n Pay the
ability to scale on demand by adding
virtual servers and processor power
without delay. When production
workload is high, we allocate more
power from the test and development
environment to the production
environment to ensure jobs are
completed on time, without the need to
add new servers to deal with
temporary or seasonal demand.”
Pick ’n Pay’s two p5-590 servers
operating SAP for Retail and SAP ERP
software each have 32 processors
installed, all of which are active. The
p5-550 server runs SAP NetWeaver
BI, with four active processors of a
possible eight. Pick ’n Pay uses the
On/Off Capacity on Demand feature to
enable additional processors as
required, paying only for the capacity it
needs.
The IBM System Storage DS8100
manages data for all SAP applications.
Pick ’n Pay will use IBM SAN Volume
Controller to virtualize its storage
volumes. By doing so, the company
will be able to add to, subtract from,
and upgrade its storage pools
independently of the physical devices
themselves – another step towards
matching the IT infrastructure with the
changing business needs.
Aligning costs with operations
UCS Solutions were key in terms of
functional help, technical assistance
and design work around the new
architecture. Working with SAP, UCS
recommended the IBM p5 and DB2
Information Management solutions,
and assisted in planning and
implementing the logical partitions
(LPARs) on the p590 servers. The
hardware implementation team was
lead by IBM. The solution is being
implemented by UCS Solutions
working with IBM Global Business “The p5 solutions give
Services.
Pick ’n Pay the ability to
“UCS Solutions demonstrated the
scale on demand by
experience to guide us through the adding virtual servers
process, and provided a great deal of and processor power
excellent guidance on processes to without delay.”
follow and pitfalls to avoid,” says
Francois van der Merwe. Francois van der Merwe
Technical Operations Manager
Pick 'n Pay
Infrastructure transformation
Pick ’n Pay is transforming its IT
infrastructure, focusing on creating a
dynamic infrastructure for the SAP
software. System resources can be
allocated according to pre-set policies
defined by service level agreements. IT
personnel will focus on responding to
the business needs, while the system
itself adapts to the changing workload.
Pick 'n Pay is taking advantage of the
virtualization capabilities of POWER5-
based systems, the IBM AIX 5L
operating system, and sophisticated
software such as SAN Volume
Controller and SAN File System.
Pick ’n Pay has also implemented IBM
DB2 CommonStore for SAP software,
which is used to perform archiving from
within SAP applications.
Francois van der Merwe concludes,
“We feel that IBM virtualization
technologies are a leader in providing
the kind of flexibility and scalability
Pick ’n Pay wants.
“The IBM team offered understanding
and professionalism, listening closely
to Pick ’n Pay’s needs. The right
specialists were always available, with
impressive levels of skill and
experience.”
 IBM Deutschland GmbH
D-70548 Stuttgart
ibm.com/solutions/sap

IBM, the IBM logo, IBM System z, IBM System p, IBM System i,
IBM System x, z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX, DB2, DB2 Universal
Database, Domino, Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere and Enterprise
Storage Server are trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or
both.

Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, Intel
Centrino logo, Celeron, Intel Xeon, Intel SpeedStep, Itanium, and
Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel
Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other
countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in
the United States and other countries. Linux is a trademark of
Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.

Other company, product or service names may be trademarks,

or service marks of others.

This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM
and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many
factors have contributed to the results and benefits described.
IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information
contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/
or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy.
All customer examples cited represent how some customers
have used IBM products and the results they may have
achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual customer
configurations and conditions.

This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may

show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007 All Rights Reserved.

© Copyright 2007 SAP AG

SAP AG
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16
D-69190 Walldorf

SAP, the SAP logo, mySAP and all other SAP

products and services mentioned herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG
in Germany and several other countries.

GK12-4248-02 (06/07)
IBM Case Study
IBM offers FranklinCovey a highly
reliable solution for critical business
processes
Overview For FranklinCovey, IT is central both to
■ Challenge
Improve business efficiency and
IT flexibility while continuing to
deliver outstanding reliability for
essential business systems
■ Solution
Deploy an IBM System p5™
server, IBM System Storage™
SAN Volume Controller and two
IBM 32-port switches
Dedicated to improving the effective­
ness of individuals and organizations,
FranklinCovey relies heavily on IT to
streamline business operations.
FranklinCovey was formed when
Stephen R. Covey, author of The
7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
combined forces with the producers of
the highly successful Franklin Day
Planner. Since then, the company
has evolved into a leading source of
effectiveness training, productivity tools
and assessment services for Fortune
100 companies, government organiza­
tions, educational institutions and
individuals.
customer interactions and back-office
■ Key Benefits
operations. “We have a variety of
— The IBM System p5 server
Web-based tools that run our
offers highly reliable perform­
Web sites and enable e-commerce,”
ance plus simple scalability
says Dan See, director of infrastructure
and exceptional flexibility
at FranklinCovey. “We also depend on
through logical partitioning
IT to run the essential business systems
(LPAR) capabilities
that keep our company going, such as
— The SAN Volume Controller
the Oracle financial and customer data­
can help FranklinCovey
bases. The primary goal of my group is
retain its current storage
to make sure those critical systems
investment while helping to
keep working and continue to serve the
simplify management of het­
business.”
erogeneous storage systems
 “ The dynamic LPAR
capabilities of the
p5-570 server let us
move around resources
in much less time than
before. Now we can
move processes from
test to production
without having to
reconfigure anything.”
– Dan See
Director of Infrastructure
FranklinCovey
As its platform for back-office systems
neared end-of-life, See’s IT group
began to investigate new products that
might deliver the reliability the company
required. “These systems must be avail­
able when we need them,” says See.
“Downtime could mean a problem
when running payroll, conducting our
financial reporting or maintaining supply
lines for our catalog, e-commerce and
retail sales.”
See wanted to make sure that a new
system could offer even stronger sup­
port for Oracle along with robust hard­
ware reliability. “We previously used a
clustered environment that could help
ensure a certain amount of uptime and
recoverability,” says See. “We were
looking for a product that could deliver
the same or better level of availability.”
Improving the server’s flexibility was
another key goal. “Our previous envi­
ronment was hard-partitioned,” says
See. “We had eight separate nodes in
two physical servers. In that configura­
tion, we could not change processor
utilization or memory dynamically. To
make a change, we had to physically
turn everything off, repartition it and
turn it back on. We wanted to find a
server that would let us respond more
dynamically to changing conditions.”
At the same time, See wanted to main­
tain the investment FranklinCovey had
already made in its storage area net­
work (SAN) environment. “We have a
large disk storage array from another
company, and we needed to be sure
that whatever server we chose would
work flawlessly with the storage,” says
See. “We also wanted the flexibility to
add storage devices later on and know
that we could use those new devices in
the same environment.”
IBM System p5 570 offers robust reliability
and flexibility for changing workloads
After considering products from several
vendors, FranklinCovey contacted
IBM Business Partner Sirius Computer
Solutions to explore IBM products that
might fit the company’s needs. “We had
worked with Sirius before and had a
good relationship with that group,” says
See. “We knew that they could bring
together the right people from IBM. It
was a team effort: Both Sirius and
IBM worked with us to find the right
solution.”
See’s team selected the
IBM System p5 570 server in part
because of its reputation for reliability.
“We collected a lot of great recommen­
dations from other users—companies
that had experienced no problems
meeting their service-level agreements
with the p5-570,” said See. “They said
the hardware just runs. That was the
vote of confidence we needed.”
The System p5 570 server features
mainframe-inspired reliability, availability
and serviceability (RAS) features that
help keep businesses running around
the clock. An optional redundant
service processor; hot-plug, hot­
swappable and redundant components;
IBM Chipkill™ ECC and bitstring
memory; and dynamic deallocation of
system components enable technicians
to modify and service system elements
without bringing business processes to
a halt. “The hot-swap capabilities of the
p5-570 work much more reliably than
those on our last platform,” says See.
“And given our past experience with
IBM servers, we anticipate that the hot-
plug capabilities can provide us with the
peace of mind we need.”
Logical partitioning helps increase
utilization and reduce administrative
burdens
The LPAR capabilities of the System p5
570 server also gave See’s group the
flexibility it needed to dynamically adjust
workloads and maximize server
utilization. Implemented via
IBM Virtualization Engine™ technolo­
gies and the IBM AIX 5L™ operating
system, LPAR capabilities allow the
processors to run separate workloads
in different partitions of the same physi­
cal server. Dynamic LPAR capabilities,
implemented on supported operating
systems, allow administrators to
dynamically allocate system resources
to application partitions without reboot­
ing. “We have test, development and
production environments running simul­
taneously, but their processor utilization
is rarely equal,” says See. “With the
p5-570, we can redistribute processor
power and memory without having to
purchase additional hardware or even
turn off the server.”
“ The SAN Volume
Controller gives us
a simple way to
retain our storage
investment.”
– Dan See
Director of Infrastructure
FranklinCovey
One result of the newfound flexibility is
the reduction of administrative burdens.
“The dynamic LPAR capabilities of the
p5-570 server let us move around
resources in much less time than
before,” says See. “Now we can move
processes from test to production with­
out having to reconfigure anything.”
Scalability was another important factor
in choosing the System p5 570 server.
The server is packaged as building
block modules, with each module able
to support up to four 1.9 or 2.2 GHz
IBM POWER5+™ processor cores
along with cache, memory, media,
disks, I/O adapters, power and
cooling. Up to four modules (a total of
16 processors) can be integrated into a
19-inch rack as a single symmetric mul­
tiprocessing (SMP) server. Capacity on
Demand (CoD) options, which allow
companies to activate additional pro­
cessing power or memory, provide flexi­
bility for growth. “The ability to add
processors and PCI cards is very
important for us,” says See. “We know
that as we grow as a company, the
p5-570 can grow with us.”
IBM SAN Volume Controller simplifies
storage management
FranklinCovey selected the IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller to help
ensure smooth integration of the
p5-570 server with the company’s cur­
rent storage system while also helping
to simplify storage management. The
SAN Volume Controller enables organi­
zations to pool storage capacity from
IBM and non-IBM devices into a single,
virtualized reservoir that is shared by
applications.
The SAN Volume Controller also
features a centralized interface for man­
aging heterogeneous storage that oper­
ates consistently regardless of the type
of storage being managed.
Administrators can map pooled disk
storage volumes to virtual volumes,
track the effects of provisioning and
easily change the configuration to help
meet service goals. Currently,
FranklinCovey uses the SAN Volume
Controller to manage the 12 TB in the
SAN used by the p5-570 server appli­
cations. In the future, See plans to
expand the use of the SAN Volume
Controller to manage storage for appli­
cations running on Microsoft®
Windows®–based IBM System x™
servers. “The SAN Volume Controller
gives us a simple way to retain our stor­
age investment,” says See. “In the near
term, we plan to place storage for other
applications under the control of the
SAN Volume Controller. We also know
that in the long term, if we need to add
storage capacity to our current SAN or
if we choose to add a new storage sys­
tem, it will be easy to do so without
having to change how we manage
storage.”
FranklinCovey also selected two
IBM 32-port switches for the SAN
Volume Controller. “We previously used
two 16-port switches with eight dual-
path nodes,” says See. “We chose the
32-port switches to enable us to dual-
path all of the systems that required it
while giving us plenty of room to grow.
Now we can easily add more hosts as
we need more capacity.”
Cost savings enable FranklinCovey to grow
without changing the bottom line
Sirius helped FranklinCovey deploy the
System p5 570 server and SAN Volume
Controller over a two-week period.
Since then, See’s team and the Sirius
team have worked together to help
ensure smooth management. “The
Sirius team has continually demon­
strated its willingness to answer
questions and provide training post-
deployment,” says See. “Sirius has
been tremendous in working with us to
manage the environment.”
According to See, FranklinCovey is
already benefiting from the flexibility and
reliability of the p5-570. “We have been
able to try a number of new configura­
tions with the LPARs,” says See. “The
server has performed admirably.”
The speed and power of the p5-570
POWER5+ processors have also
enabled FranklinCovey to reduce the
number of partitions it runs. “We used
to have three servers to run produc­
tion,” says See. “But with the increased
performance of the p5-570, we can
now run production on a single
partition.”
Reducing the number of partitions from
a total of eight to only five is helping
FranklinCovey minimize operating
expenses. “We have definitely reduced
administrative overhead. Once we have
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007
everything live, we estimate that we
could save approximately US$6,000
per month in administrative costs,” says
See. “By purchasing a new server, we
also expect to save up to US$12,000
per month in hardware maintenance.
Our maintenance contracts had been
increasing every year due to the age of
the hardware, but with the three-
year warranty we purchased for the
IBM server, we stand to save a signifi­
cant amount of money.”
FranklinCovey can use those savings to
help the organization to grow without
having to alter its bottom line. “We plan
to take those savings and put them
straight into the bank,” says See. “Our
company is dedicated to effectiveness,
and IBM is helping us maximize effec­
tiveness and efficiency within our own
organization.”
For more information
For more information, contact your
IBM sales representative or
IBM Business Partner, or visit us on the
Web at:
● ibm.com/storage
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Printed in the United States of America
March 2007
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, AIX 5L, Chipkill, POWER5+,
System p5, System Storage, System x and
Virtualization Engine are trademarks or
registered trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
Microsoft and Windows are registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
United States, other countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
IBM and Sirius Computer Solutions are separate
companies and each is responsible for its own
products. Neither IBM nor Sirius Computer
Solutions makes any warranties, express or
implied, concerning the other’s products.
All statements regarding IBM future direction or
intent are subject to change or withdrawal
without notice and represent goals and
objectives only. ALL INFORMATION IS
PROVIDED ON AN “AS-IS” BASIS, WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
IBM shall not be responsible for any damages
arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to,
this documentation or any other documentation.
Nothing contained in this documentation is
intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating
any warranties or representations from IBM (or
its suppliers or licensors), or altering the terms
and conditions of the applicable license
agreement governing the use of IBM software.
References in this publication to IBM products
or services do not imply that IBM intends to
make them available in all countries in which
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All customer examples described are presented
as illustrations of how those customers have
used IBM products and the results they may
have achieved. Actual environmental costs and
performance characteristics may vary by
customer.
TSC03015-USEN-01
IBM Case Study
Softbank virtualizes its storage
environment to achieve low
operating cost.
Overview
■ Challenge
Softbank Telecom wishes to
lower the cost of its installed
storage area network (SAN) that
consists of multivendor servers
and storage facilities.
■ Solution
Softbank installed an IBM
System Storage™ SAN Volume
Controller (SVC). The SVC’s disk
virtualization capabilities help
Softbank integrate and manage
multivendor storage devices in a
complex SAN environment.
“ With the storage
■ Key Benefits
— SVC can be used by a range
of operating systems, includ-
ing Microsoft® Windows®,
Linux®, IBM AIX® and
HP-UX; connection to a vari-
ety of disk drives is possible;
and all can be managed in a
single virtualization.
— A variety of disks of different
price range can be deployed
according to the importance
of the data, helping to
achieve a cost benefit.
— Although transferring data
from used to new disks
incurs initial hardware and
labor costs, the process can
be conducted smoothly
using SVC.
control device
approach to
virtualization, once the
device was in place we
were dependent on the
particular storage
vendor thereafter. So
we opted out of this
method. The switch
method was still at the
conceptual level, so
there were hardly any
actual results
available. In the end,
we opted for the
network approach and
selected IBM’s SVC to
do the job. At the time,
there were few cases of
its adoption in Japan,
but there were many
results to look at in
other countries, so that
helped us to decide.”
– Mr Kamio, Manager of the
Corporate Systems Infrastructure
Department of the Information
Systems Division of Softbank
Telecom Corp.
 On October 1, 2006, Japan Telecom Co., Ltd., changed its company name to
Key Components
Softbank Telecom Corp. (hereafter, Softbank Telecom) and embarked on a new
Hardware start. As a service infrastructure-building department involved primarily in the tele-
● IBM System Storage SAN Volume phone business for corporate customers, the Corporate Systems Infrastructure
Controller Department of the company’s Information System Division works to realize IT
strategies of lower cost, more flexibility, more speed and higher quality, while also
being involved in business management infrastructure development. In addition, the
department is extending its reach into other business areas, including the Internet,
data communications, digital office solutions, disaster recovery and more.

As it deals with these various interests, the company’s Information Systems Division
has taken notice of the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC).

Storage virtualization in the SAN environment employing a mix of storage products from a
range of vendors
In 2002, when the company then known as Japan Telecom introduced a storage
area network (SAN), it became clear that the SAN environment, due to its range of
servers and storage devices from various vendors, was exacting a high operating
cost. The company took up the challenge of overcoming this problem, and at this
point learned about the IBM SVC. Mr. Kamio, manager of the Corporate Systems
Infrastructure Department, says:

“Based on the principle of market competition, the company was selecting high,
cost-performance equipment at the time and introducing products from many ven-
dors as a result. But even though a product may have been cost-effective when
installed, from the long-term view of overall optimization, it became expensive.
When we were considering how to solve this problem, IBM introduced us to the
SVC, which was designed to provide virtualized disk storage in a SAN environment.
On conducting a simulation, we found that initial cost was reduced as well as long-
term operating cost, without incurring the physical restrictions of storage devices.
So we set about introducing the SVC in the spring of 2005.”
This was the first time the company had used this product, says Kamio, “but from
the standpoint of the company’s telecommunications business, we are aware of
challenges, and we have taken on the demands for more speed, flexibility and
innovation. That’s why we maintain a positive attitude towards installing the most
advanced IT technology.”

Favorable introduction results, IBM’s SVC replete with functions

On adopting the SVC, Softbank Telecom conducted a comparison of IBM product
with the disk storage virtualization products of other companies. The company had
three selection options—the first of which was to achieve its goal by means of a
storage control device. The second was to use switches, and the final option was
an approach from the network side.

Says Kamio, “With the storage control device approach to virtualization, once the
device was in place, we were dependent on the particular storage vendor there-
after. So we opted out of this method. The switch method was still at the concep-
tual level, so there were hardly any actual results. In the end, we opted for the
network approach and selected IBM’s SVC to do the job. At the time, there were
few cases of its adoption in Japan, but there were many results to look at in other
countries, so that helped us to decide.”

However, the SVC was an unknown device at the company, and staff had no expe-
rience in configuring settings and fine tuning. Careful redundancy tests were con-
ducted, and the time from system design through introduction and testing to
operation was about three months. Says Kamio, “The actual work time was about
one month, but we spent more time on testing to confirm the many functions. We
went through with this knowing that spending time here would eventually be bene-
ficial. We kept existing systems as they were but began housing new systems
sequentially in the SVC. This, I think, made for a smooth introduction with no
wasted effort.”
Utilization in various operating system environments, as well employment of disk storage
systems in various price ranges
Systems for SVC use at Softbank Telecom included customer control systems,
sales support systems and other core corporate systems. Operating systems are
also diverse, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, AIX and HP-UX.

Now, one year after introduction (November 2006), the SVC operates without
performance problems, and extra units can be connected without difficulty.
Mr Minakawa, assistant manager of the Corporate Systems Infrastructure
Department, says:

“We can connect up various disk drives and then have the benefit of controlling
them as one through virtualization. An important capability for us is that we can mix
and use drives in different price ranges. For example, even if we use the expensive
main database controlled by the customer as the storage device, the backup
space need not be expensive. At Softbank Telecom, we are currently allocating
disk drives of various prices in accordance with the importance of the data, and I
think use of the SVC here is beneficial.”

Softbank introduced the new system into the main Information Systems depart-
ment using formal procedures for everything from setting to mounting, and atten-
tion was paid to increasing know-how. Says Minakawa, “It can be tough getting to
know a system and familiarizing yourself with it, but after it begins operating, when
changing the configuration, or when a fault occurs, we can smoothly handle the
problem without incurring extra costs. When we adopted the SVC, we also had
IBM on hand to give us invaluable support.”
Minakawa cited the SVC’s disk migration function as an unexpected benefit. “When
migrating from used disks to new ones in the past, costs were incurred in time and
labor. But with the SVC, this process can now be conducted smoothly. I thought
from the start that this was a useful function.”

Building an infrastructure that elicits synergies of the three telecommunications

companies in the group
Softbank Telecom is forging ahead in association with other companies in its group
that are developing mobile phone, broadband and other businesses. Says Kamio,
“We are not building this kind of system for Softbank Telecom alone but increasing
the capacity with the aim of harnessing corporate group synergies. I think that vir-
tualization, including the SVC system, will expand in the future. This too will be a
cooperative effort between the three group member companies.” Minakawa com-
mented, “With regard to this IT challenge, it would be a boon to us if IBM lent us
more of its capabilities to find even better solutions.”

From an established telecommunications company to an ICT solutions company.

Softbank Telecom, which continues to change by capitalizing on corporate group
synergies, will draw on system expertise cultivated so far in the work ahead.
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at
ibm.com/storage
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007
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programs, or services does not imply that
IBM intends to make such products, programs
or services available in all countries in which
IBM operates or does business. Any reference
to an IBM program or product in this document
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functionally equivalent program or product, that
does not infringe IBM’s intellectually property
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is a customer testimonial based only on that
customer’s experience. It is not a representation
of the results or performance you can
expect to achieve from an implementation of
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obtained by any customer implementing
IBM products or services will depend on a large
number of factors specific to that customer’s
operating environment and will vary significantly.
IBM makes no representation that these
results can be expected or obtained in any
implementation of any such IBM products or
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IBM Systems and Technology Group
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Produced in the United States
January 2007
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, AIX and System Storage are
trademarks or registered trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries or both.
Microsoft and Windows are registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
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TSC03021-USEN-00

Voith cuts complexity and costs, steering
a new course with IBM and SAP
Overview
■ The Challenge
The Voith group of companies in
Heidenheim, Germany, is
continuously growing by acquiring
other companies and by building its
business organically. To maintain the
pace of growth, the company needed
to ensure speed and accuracy in
internal reporting and to achieve very
high business efficiency. Existing
systems were not capable of meeting
these needs, which prompted a
complete overhaul of the SAP server
hardware environment at Voith.
■ The Solution
IBM Global Technology Services
worked with IBM Premier Business
Partner SVA to design and
implement a new SAP hardware
infrastructure, with databases
running on the IBM System p5
platform and a SAN based on an IBM
System Storage SAN Volume
Controller with a mixed storage
environment. SAP NetWeaver
Exchange Infrastructure is used to
integrate core mySAP ERP 2005
applications with other SAP software
and with third party applications.
we know
they know
■ The Benefits
Query times reduced by up to 50 per
cent, improving response to business
needs; virtual servers in micro-
partitions and load-balancing
features help reduce licensing and
hardware costs by between 20 and
30 per cent; having fewer physical
servers saves space and cuts
electricity and cooling costs by 70 to
80 per cent; this more flexible,
standardised infrastructure is now
capable of growing with Voith to meet
the issues of business scalability.
■ Key Solution Components
Industry: Engineering
Applications: mySAP™ ERP 2005,
mySAP Product Lifecycle
Management, SAP NetWeaver ® the company’s highly successful path:
(SAP NetWeaver Exchange
Infrastructure)
Hardware: IBM System p5™ 570,
®
IBM System Storage DS8000™,
®
IBM TotalStorage Enterprise
Storage Server®
®
Software: IBM AIX 5L 5.3, IBM
HACMP™, IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller, Oracle ®
Services: IBM Global Technology
Services, IBM Premier Business
Partner SVA
Voith AG is a large German
engineering and manufacturing group
with four main divisions – Voith Paper,
Voith Turbo, Voith Siemens Hydro
Power Generation and Voith Industrial
Services. Headquartered in
Heidenheim, Germany, the group
employs more than 30,000 people and
generated revenues of around �3.5
billion in the financial year 2004/5.
Voith Paper and Voith Turbo, the two
largest divisions, were already using a
number of SAP software for ERP and
HR. The SAP applications were
supported by Oracle and SQL
databases totalling 6.35TB, running
on 30 different servers supporting up
to 5,000 named users on a mixture of
HP UX and Intel-based machines.
Voith management wanted to continue
acquiring other companies and
building business organically. To
maintain the pace of growth, the
company needed to ensure speed
and accuracy in internal reporting and
to achieve very high business
“The ability to simply turn efficiency. Existing systems, built
over time, were not capable of
on more processors as
meeting these needs, which
and when we need them prompted a complete overhaul of the
was a key factor in our Voith SAP hardware environment.
decision for the IBM
System p5 platform – it is “Our hardware environment was
becoming highly complex and
a versatile architecture
difficult to manage,” explains
which is perfect for a Gerhard Müller, Systems Engineer at
growing business like Voith. “With so many servers,
Voith.” maintenance and administration was
very labour-intensive. We also had
Steffen Burmeister
little space left for expansion in the
Systems Engineer
Voith data-centre, and our mixture of
hardware platforms could not grow
with the business in a cost-effective
manner.
Choosing IBM for greater flexibility
Voith needed to create a new
infrastructure capable of delivering
greater flexibility and improved
performance.
“We considered solutions from a
number of vendors,” says Gerhard
Müller. “SAP benchmark tests showed
that the IBM POWER5 processors
would run Voith’s environment much
faster than the equivalent Intel Itanium
system, and we were convinced by
IBM’s roadmap for the future of the
POWER architecture.”
Voith worked with IBM Global
Technology Services and IBM Premier
Business Partner SVA to migrate the
company’s existing SAP systems and
databases from 30 physical servers to
logical partitions (LPARs) on just four
p5-570 servers.
“We initially bought eight CPUs for
each machine, with a total of 32
LPARs,” explains Steffen Burmeister,
Systems Engineer at Voith. “This gave
us the extra capacity to implement
new applications like SAP NetWeaver
Portal and Global Trade Management,
both of which we are still testing. Later,
we upgraded each machine to 12
CPUs, giving us more capacity as the
business grows.
“The ability to simply turn on more
processors as and when we need
them was a key factor in our decision
for the IBM System p5 platform – it is a
versatile architecture which is perfect
for a growing business like Voith.
“The IBM storage server provides
cost-effective high-performance
storage for Voith, and IBM SAN
Volume Controller in particular helps
us maximise the utilisation of our
available capacity for the best
possible return on investment.”
IBM Global Technology Services was
responsible for project management,
handling all 35 SAP software
migrations from the HP and Intel
systems to the IBM System p platform.
SVA implemented and configured the
IBM System p servers, and Voith
deployed the complete storage and
networking topology. The project was
completed more rapidly than
scheduled.
Maximising benefits with IBM technology
IBM System p Advanced POWER
Virtualization (APV) features enable
processing resources to be allocated
to a given virtual server as required,
ensuring that the hardware is
maximally utilized. Voith has
implemented advanced virtualization
features available exclusively on IBM
POWER5 processor-based systems –
including Micro-partitioning, virtual I/O
capabilities and virtual networking.
These features allow Voith to run a
smaller physical server footprint,
making more efficient use of system
resources by sharing them
dynamically between applications,
which contributes to lower costs and
improved system efficiency.
“With some of our previous vendors,
the solution to performance issues
was to throw more processors at the
problem,” says Roland Gessler,
Systems Engineer at Voith. “IBM’s
approach is different – its virtualization
solutions help us get the most out of
our existing IT resources – which
makes an important contribution to
reducing the total cost of operations.”
All of the production systems are
clustered with IBM High Availability
Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP),
helping critical systems remain
available to SAP software end-users
24/7. “Our infrastructure is now flexible
enough to offer what amounts to high “IBM’s approach is
availability on demand,” says Roland
different – its
Gessler.
virtualization solutions
Voith has also implemented a storage help us get the most out
area network (SAN) based around an of our existing IT
IBM SAN Volume Controller with a resources.”
mixed-vendor storage environment,
including one IBM System Storage Roland Gessler
Systems Engineer
DS8000 series storage system and a Voith
pair of IBM TotalStorage Enterprise
Storage Server storage systems. The
storage solution uses IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller to fully
virtualize the environment, providing a
single pool of storage capacity which
is both simple to manage and easily
expandable.
Optimising the software environment
Some time before the migration to the
new IBM hardware, Voith deployed
SAP NetWeaver Exchange
Infrastructure (XI) to improve
communication between its different
SAP software systems and to bring
both SAP and external applications
into a single interface. The company
has also introduced a single sign-on
solution which should substantially
reduce the incidence of forgotten
passwords and save time for users
and IT staff alike.
Just like the server consolidation,
SAP NetWeaver XI has helped Voith
optimise its IT environment by
increasing ease of management. As
the company’s infrastructure
continues to grow, its complexity is
increasingly being managed by the
systems themselves, cutting
administration and manual processing
for users.
In a further project intended to support
its project document management
solution, Voith has implemented
SAP Collaboration Folders (cFolders)
on a single IBM System p5 510 server
in its DMZ. The solution helps external
users, customers and suppliers,
access vital project documents
remotely, without decreasing the
security of Voith’s systems.
High performance, business benefits
The high performance of the new
hardware solution has seen query
times reduced by up to 50 per cent,
increasing productivity for users and
helping them respond more quickly to
changing business needs. In addition,
the replacement of physical with virtual
servers has helped reduce Voith’s
licensing and hardware costs by
between 20 and 30 per cent.
Having fewer physical servers frees up
space in the data centre and has cut
energy costs substantially: “The
System p5 solution costs around 70 to
80 per cent less in terms of electricity
and cooling than our old systems,”
explains Gerhard Müller. “We also
estimate that its energy consumption
is 20 to 30 per cent less than an
equivalent Intel Itanium solution.”
Looking to consolidate worldwide SAP
software systems in future, Voith is
considering implementing Unicode to
help its subsidiaries in China and
elsewhere integrate more closely with
the central business. There are also
plans to introduce an SAP solution for
the Voith Siemens Hydro Power
Generation division.
“It is a fact of life: as the business
grows, data volumes and system
complexity will grow too. The
combination of IBM and SAP is a
winning team, helping us to map our IT
“The combination of IBM
and SAP is a winning
team, helping us to map
our IT infrastructure
more effectively to
business growth, while
constantly striving to
decrease the ongoing
costs of licensing,
maintenance and IBM Deutschland GmbH
administration.” D-70548 Stuttgart
ibm.com/solutions/sap
IBM, the IBM logo, IBM System z, IBM System p, IBM System i,
Gerhard Müller
IBM System x, z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX, DB2, DB2 Universal
Systems Engineer
Voith Database, Domino, Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere and Enterprise
Storage Server are trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or
both.
infrastructure more effectively to Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, Intel
Centrino logo, Celeron, Intel Xeon, Intel SpeedStep, Itanium, and
business growth, while constantly Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel
striving to decrease the ongoing costs Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other
countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in
of licensing, maintenance and the United States and other countries. Linux is a trademark of
administration,” concludes Gerhard Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are
Müller. trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may be trademarks,
or service marks of others.
This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM
and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many
factors have contributed to the results and benefits described.
IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information
contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/
or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy.
All customer examples cited represent how some customers
have used IBM products and the results they may have
achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual customer
configurations and conditions.
This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may
show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2006 SAP AG
SAP AG
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16
D-69190 Walldorf
SAP, the SAP logo, mySAP and all other SAP
products and services mentioned herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG
in Germany and several other countries.
GK12-4202-00 (01/07)
IBM Case Study
University of East Anglia boosts storage
flexibility with IBM and Tectrade
Overview
■ The Challenge
Match storage capacity to
organisational growth; support all
operations with reliable,
high-performance data storage;
centralise storage resources
and implement standardised
management procedures
■ The Solution
Worked with Tectrade to implement
a storage area network (SAN)
based around IBM TotalStorage
DS4500 and DS4100 storage
systems, with IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller
virtualisation technology
■ The Benefit
Robust, centralised storage
environment offering excellent
performance, non-disruptive
scalability and significant
reductions in administrative cost
and effort
The University of East Anglia
(UEA, www.uea.ac.uk) has around
9,900 undergraduate and 3,300
postgraduate students enrolled in
a total of more than 300 courses.
Located in 320 acres of parkland two
miles outside Norwich city centre, UEA
was named one of the UK’s top three
universities for student satisfaction in
2005.
As demand for data storage at the
University grew, the two central file
servers could not longer deliver the
required capacity or performance.
To get round the problem, individual
departments within the University had
begun to add their own file servers and
storage solutions, effectively creating
islands of storage dotted around the
University.
Iain Reeman, IT Systems Director at
UEA, comments, “The locally owned
and managed storage devices
generally lacked resilience and an
enterprise-level backup solution.
Moreover, their performance was
moderate at best, due to their location
at the edge of the University’s
network infrastructure. Our aim was
to implement a flexible and scalable
storage area network, thus creating
a robust, centralised platform for the
whole University.”
Improved performance
Following a public procurement
exercise, The University of East Anglia
chose to work with IBM Business
Partner Tectrade (www.tectrade.
co.uk) to design and implement
a storage area network based on
IBM System Storage disk, tape and
software technologies. Iain Reeman
comments, “It was clear that Tectrade
had a genuine understanding of the
IBM technologies, and excellent
ideas on how UEA could use it to drive
maximum value from our investment.”
The new solution, implemented
by a joint Tectrade-UEA team, is
built around an IBM TotalStorage
DS4500 storage system with six
EXP700 enclosures, providing
10TB of fibre-channel disk capacity
suitable for database serving and
other I/O-intensive functions. For
less demanding applications, UEA
implemented four IBM TotalStorage
DS4100 storage systems with 12
EXP100 enclosures, offering 45TB of
cost-effective SATA disk storage.
The majority of the disk space is
managed by IBM TotalStorage SAN
Volume Controller (SVC) software,
which virtualises the capacity and
presents it as more than 100 virtual
disks to the central and departmental
servers. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
backs up the entire SAN to an IBM
TotalStorage 3584 Tape Library with
five LTO2 drives and three LTO3
drives.
“The headline benefits of the
Tectrade and IBM solution are better
performance, increased capacity,
easier management and greater
scalability,” says Iain Reeman. “We
can now provide all the data storage
resources that the University needs
from a centralised point of control, and
we can increase capacity flexibly and
cost-effectively. From the compliance
point of view, centralisation provides
better assurance that we are
managing and protecting data in line
with regulations and guidelines.”
An end to growing pains
With IBM SVC virtualisation
technology, UEA now has a far
more flexible and resilient storage
infrastructure. The complexity of the
underlying physical disk environment
is hidden by the SVC, which makes it
easy for administrators to move data
from one storage pool to another, with
no disruption to users.
Scalability has also significantly
improved, as Matt Livermore, Storage
and HPC Systems Specialist at UEA,
explains: “If we need more storage
capacity, we can plug in another
DS4100, point it at the SVC, and have it
up and running without any additional
configuration and without taking down
the SAN. This flexibility is a real benefit
when you consider that we have
already added 30TB of SATA disk to
the SAN in the last 18 months.”
“The headline benefits
of the Tectrade and
IBM solution are better
performance, increased
capacity, easier
management and
greater scalability.”
Iain Reeman, IT Systems Director, UEA
Simple value
The IBM and Tectrade solution has
simplified the storage infrastructure
at UEA, creating a flexible central
resource that can be used to support
the University’s growing requirements.
One option under consideration is
the introduction of tiered storage for
users’ mail files, where old mail could
be archived to tape and moved offline,
enabling the University to offer virtually
unlimited personal storage to users.
“The SAN has given UEA a
more robust and flexible storage
infrastructure that also requires less
management,” says Iain Reeman.
“As a result, our operators spend
less time on routine backup/restore
administration, representing a
significant increase in efficiency. The
IBM and Tectrade solution therefore
delivers excellent value both in IT and
business terms.”
IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU
The IBM home page can be found at ibm.com
IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage,
TotalStorage and Tivoli are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks, or service marks of others.
IBM and Tectrade are separate companies
and each is responsible for its own products.
Neither IBM nor Tectrade makes any
warranties, express or implied, concerning the
other’s products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM
product, program or service is not intended
to imply that only IBM’s product, program
or service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how
some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured
from new parts, or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights
Reserved.
TSC03008-GBEN-00
IBM Case Study
St. Paul Travelers UK chooses IBM
for storage virtualization
Overview
■ The Challenge
Managing around 220 physical
servers with direct-attached
storage was complex, costly and
time-consuming; only 50 per cent
of total disk capacity was actually
used; disaster recovery was no
longer sufficiently rapid
■ The Solution
Implemented two IBM System
Storage DS4800s; virtualized disk
capacity into a single storage
resource managed by IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller;
introduced IBM System Storage
Productivity Center for Fabric
■ The Benefit
Simplified storage management
and provisioning; improved disk
utilisation for better cost-efficiency;
enhanced scalability and capacity
planning; faster time-to-recovery
for key business systems
St. Paul Travelers UK is part of The
St. Paul Travelers Companies, Inc.,
a leading property and liability
insurance organisation based in
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. St. Paul
Travelers UK (www.stpaultravelers.
co.uk) provides property-casualty
insurance for selected industrial,
institutional and professional sectors.
As its business grows, St. Paul
Travelers UK needs to manage
an increasing number of physical
servers, each with its own direct-
attached storage. Although barely
50 per cent of the total disk capacity
was actually utilised, the company
was continually adding new disks,
since it was not possible to share the
existing unused capacity between
servers. The logistics of managing
around 220 servers across three sites
strained technical resources to the
limit, tying up valuable staff in routine
administration.
In addition to improving the efficiency
and flexibility of its data storage
infrastructure, St. Paul Travelers
UK aimed to accelerate its disaster
recovery procedures, to enable key
business systems to be restored within
demanding timescales.
Introducing virtualization
Following a review of the offerings
from leading storage vendors, St. Paul
Travelers UK selected an IBM solution
based on two IBM System Storage
DS4800s in a dedicated storage
area network (SAN) with Cisco MDS
9509 switches. The company also
decided to virtualize the total available
capacity using IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software
– effectively pooling the combined
storage resources and sharing them
between the application servers.
Matt Barlow, Technical Development
Manager at St. Paul Travelers UK,
comments: “The IBM System Storage
solution has dramatically simplified the
management of storage and enabled
much faster provisioning. Previously,
if we needed more capacity on a
particular server, we would have
needed first to gain financial approval,
then procure the new disks and shut
down the server for the duration of
the upgrade. With SVC managing
a centralised storage resource, we
can quickly and simply allocate more
virtual disk capacity to a server without
impact on live users.”
Matching capacity to demand
Around 70 per cent of the available
disk capacity on the DS4800 systems
is now utilized, and St. Paul Travelers
UK will be able to achieve close to 100
per cent utilization in the future. This
represents a significant improvement
in cost-efficiency over the former
infrastructure, where only half of
the investment in disk capacity was
effectively utilized.
Previously, the company had to buy
new disk capacity in set increments,
often as much as 146GB at a time,
when a particular server might need
only an additional 20GB.
“With SVC, we can decide exactly
what each server needs and give
it that precise capacity,” says Matt
Barlow. “And because SVC allows us
to manage a heterogeneous storage
environment, we are not locked into a
single storage vendor. Equally, it gives
us a standard management interface,
shielding us from having to learn new
interfaces if we choose to implement
storage from other vendors.”
To manage the new storage
infrastructure, St. Paul Travelers UK is
using IBM TotalStorage Productivity
Center Standard Edition Version 3.1.
This provides a clear view of utilization
and performance across the entire
SAN, with configurable alerts to help
identify and resolve issues.
Faster recovery
St. Paul Travelers UK has also
introduced virtualization to
its Windows and Linux server
infrastructure. The company now has
160 servers – a mixture of physical and
virtual systems – that boot directly from
the SAN. With its previous disaster
recovery solution, recovering a server
would have required a full install of
the operating system, followed by the
recovery of the relevant data from tape
– a time-consuming process. Now
that each server boots from the SAN,
recovery is far quicker and easier, as
Matt Barlow explains: “We can simply
set up a new server or virtual server,
point it at the relevant storage volumes
on the SAN, and recover within
minutes of an outage.”
With the core SAN infrastructure in
place, St. Paul Travelers UK will now
turn its attention to tiered storage
– aiming to reserve high-performance
data storage for high-value data,
while moving lower-value data to
lower-cost storage. The company has
implemented IBM Tivoli Hierarchical
Storage Management software to
automatically manage the proposed
tiering.
“The SAN and storage virtualization
are just the first steps in a wider
overhaul of our storage management,
and we expect more benefits in the
years to come,” concludes Matt
Barlow. “The IBM solution is already
saving administrative time and effort,
freeing up the team and enabling us
to be more proactive, and has made
it much easier to perform capacity
planning for the future.”
IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU
The IBM home page can be found at
ibm.com
IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage, System
Storage DS and Tivoli are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries, or both.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the
Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.
Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo
and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Intel Corporation or its
subsidiaries in the United States and other
countries. Other names and brands may be
claimed as the property of others.
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the
United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks, or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM
product, program or service is not intended
to imply that only IBM’s product, program
or service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how
some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured
from new parts, or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007
All Rights Reserved.
TSC03017-GBEN-00
IBM Case Study
Natural History Museum virtualises data
storage with Tectrade and IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller
Image from Dino Jaws exhibition, Natural History Museum, London, which runs until 15 April 2007.
Copyright - Natural History Museum
Overview
■ The Challenge
Manage growing volumes of data
efficiently, and build a storage
architecture capable of scaling to
meet significant future growth in
data volumes; accelerate transfer
of data to and from near-line
storage, to enable better
responsiveness to researchers’
needs
■ The Solution
Worked with Tectrade, an IBM
Premier Business Partner, to
implement IBM SAN Volume
Controller (SVC) for storage
virtualisation; migrated data to one
IBM System Storage DS4300 and
two DS4100 storage systems,
increasing total capacity to 30TB;
Tivoli Storage Manager is used to
handle incremental backups
■ The Benefit
Flexible, scalable SVC architecture
enables modular growth of SAN to
meet storage needs on demand;
single point of control for storage
management helps reduce staff
workload; required backup window
reduced by 83 percent; faster
delivery of near-line data to
researchers
The National History Museum in
London first opened its doors to
the public in 1881, and has been
internationally renowned ever since
as the home of one of the largest
and most important collection of
natural history specimens in the
world.
It is also a major scientific research
centre, with more than 300 scientists
working on a diverse range of
research projects.
The Museum realised that the
various types of electronic data
used by its scientific researchers
– everything from digitized
microscope slides through to videos
of scientists researching in the field
– were as important a contribution to
its collection as the specimens in its
jars or the books in its library.
Scientific endeavour is founded
on the accumulation of data, so
even when a research paper is
completed, the data on which its
conclusions are based should be
retained and made available for
subsequent projects.
To ensure that this data could be
retained safely and to enable the
creation of a searchable catalogue
of research materials, the Museum
needed to implement a centralised
storage infrastructure. Its existing
Storage Area Network (SAN) was
running out of capacity.
 Without a new IT strategy, the
Museum’s infrastructure would
not have been able to handle a
“Tectrade’s service
centralisation of the large volume of
has been excellent high-definition images, documents
at every stage, from and video files already stored on
presales through researchers’ local machines, let
implementation to alone provide a platform for future
expansion.
support.”
Gavin Malarky
Senior Infrastructure Analyst Modular architecture, organic growth
Natural History Museum
The Museum considered its
requirements and initiated a public
sector procurement process. A key
requirement was that any solution
proposed would have to be capable of
scaling in a modular manner, as Paul
Richards, Head of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) at
the Natural History Museum, explains:
“As an organisation which depends to
a large extent on government funding,
we always need to demonstrate
responsible use of public money.
We didn’t want to implement a vast,
expensive solution all at once and be
left with a huge empty frame. Instead,
Image from Dino Jaws exhibition, Natural History Museum, London, which runs until 15 April 2007.
Copyright - Natural History Museum
we wanted to start small and grow
organically as the need arises.
A modular architecture was a must.”
The Museum chose a solution from
IBM and Tectrade, which would use
IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
to migrate data from the existing
FAStT500 and from researchers’
local machines onto one IBM System
Storage DS4300 and two DS4100
storage systems, increasing the
SAN’s capacity to 30 TB. Tectrade
also optimised backup performance
by recalibrating the Museum’s Tivoli
Storage Manager policies and
upgrading its IBM TotalStorage 3583
Tape Library to an IBM TS3500 using
LTO3 tape drives.
“Tectrade’s service has been excellent
at every stage, from presales through
implementation to support,” says
Gavin Malarky, Senior Infrastructure
Analyst at the Museum. “They really
listened to what we needed, and as
storage experts, they made sure that
the migration went smoothly.”
SVC virtualises the storage
environment, treating all attached
devices as a single pool of storage,
so the Museum can simply plug more
disk systems into the SAN as and
when they are required.
“SVC also enables the use of tiered
storage, so frequently-accessed data
can be stored on high-speed disks,
while cheaper storage holds files that
are less often used,” explains Gavin
Malarky. “It’s a useful feature that we’re
looking at using more in the future.”
“More importantly, SVC gives us
a single interface through which
we can manage the entire storage
environment, however large it
grows,” adds Paul Richards. “We
can expand easily and seamlessly
without increasing the administrative
workload, and even add other forms of
storage like optical media if needed.”
Fast near-line storage
Upgrading to faster IBM LTO3 tape
drives has considerably reduced the
Museum’s required backup window,
making it much easier to keep a
comprehensive near-line repository of
image data.
“We don’t talk about archiving data
– we just move it from online to
near-line,” explains Gavin Malarky.
“Implementing a high-performance
tape storage system was absolutely
vital because we need to be able to
backup and restore files quickly and
easily. With the LTO3 drives, average
backup times have reduced by around
“SVC gives us a single
83 per cent, and some transfers are interface through
quicker still. For example, sending which we can manage
80GB to tape with the old system took the entire storage
around four hours – now we can do it
environment, however
inside 30 minutes.”
large it grows.”
Paul Richards
SVC gives the Museum a fully- Head of Information and
Communication Technology
virtualised storage environment which Natural History Museum
can be extended as the need arises,
without increasing complexity of
management.
By freeing up skilled staff from
repetitive storage management
tasks, the solution enables the IT
department to concentrate on service
improvements and ensure that the
data is correctly catalogued.
“This IBM and Tectrade solution is
helping the Natural History Museum
treat research data as an important
part of its collection – an asset every
bit as valuable as our books and
specimens,” concludes Paul Richards.
“SVC gives us a storage platform
which can start small and grow
organically as data volumes increase,
making effective use of public
money and helping to ensure that
information is efficiently preserved for
future generations of scientists and
researchers.”
IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU

The IBM home page can be found at ibm.com

IBM, the IBM logo, Tivoli, System Storage, System

Storage DS and DS4000 are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in the
United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product or service names may be

trademarks, or service marks of others.

IBM and Tectrade are separate companies and each

is responsible for its own products. Neither IBM nor
Tectrade makes any warranties, express or implied,
concerning the other’s products.

Other company, product or service names may be

trademarks, or service marks of others.

References in this publication to IBM products,

programs or services do not imply that IBM intends
to make these available in all countries in which IBM
operates. Any reference to an IBM product, program
or service is not intended to imply that only IBM’s
product, program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or service
may be used instead.

All customer examples cited represent how some

customers have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs
and performance characteristics will vary depending
on individual customer configurations and conditions.

IBM hardware products are manufactured from new

parts, or new and used parts. In some cases, the
hardware product may not be new and may have
been previously installed. Regardless, IBM warranty
terms apply.

This publication is for general guidance only.

Photographs may show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved.

TSC03010-GBEN-00
IBM System Storage case study
Erstes Burgenländisches
Rechenzentrum goes virtual
with IBM servers and storage
Overview
■ Challenge
Improve customer service while
reducing administrative costs by
upgrading, rationalizing and con-
solidating IT infrastructure; gain
more headroom for business
growth
■ Solution
Worked with ILS Consult to
consolidate 23 servers to two
IBM System p5™ 570 servers
running IBM AIX 5L™ 5.3;
implemented two
IBM System Storage™ DS6800s,
with IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controller software
Erstes Burgenländisches
Rechenzentrum (EBRZ) provides out-
sourced IT services for government
agencies, healthcare providers, utility
companies and a variety of small and
mid-sized businesses. Based in the
Burgenland province of Austria, EBRZ
was founded in 1970 and employs
21 IT experts.
EBRZ needs its IT infrastructure to keep
pace with the demands of its cus-
tomers. When one of its customers
announced an intention to implement
SAP ERP 2005, EBRZ was faced with
a significant challenge. The company’s
existing IT infrastructure, based on a
mixture of Intel® processor-based and
Unix® servers was outdated, and
■ Key Benefits
would not be able to run the new
Lower total cost of ownership;
software effectively.
faster and more reliable data
backup; more efficient use of pro-
“We were using 23 separate servers to
cessing and storage resources;
run SAP and associated applications
more flexible and scalable infra-
for one of our customers,” explains
structure, offering high reliability
Hans Ludwig Karner, Director at EBRZ.
and availability
“The cost of physically managing that
infrastructure was considerable, and
our employees were spending much of
their time on routine maintenance
instead of dealing with higher-level
issues.”
Consolidated power for SAP
IBM Business Partner ILS Consult
came up with a winning solution
concept for EBRZ, suggesting a move
from the mixed server infrastructure to
an entirely Unix-based platform. Two
IBM System p5 570 servers were
deployed to handle the workload previ-
ously spread across 23 machines,
using logical partition (LPAR) technology
to keep the original 23 systems running
independently.
The two System p5 servers imple-
mented by EBRZ contain 12 and
13 IBM POWER5 processors respec-
tively, and can be upgraded to
16 processors each should business
requirements increase, giving ample
headroom for the planned implementa-
tion of SAP ERP 2005.
“The System p5 servers give us a
reserve of power that we can use on
demand,” says Hans Ludwig Karner.
“It won’t be necessary to change our
hardware if we require more perform-
ance, and we’ll be able to provide our
customers with additional resources
according to their business needs.”
The AIX 5L 5.3 operating system and
IBM POWER5™ architecture on
the System p5 platform offer
IBM Advanced POWER™ Virtualization,
with Dynamic Logical Partitioning,
enabling enormous flexibility for EBRZ.
Paul Ornik explains: “The servers’ phys-
ical resources, such as processors,
memory and I/O, can be automatically
allocated to production systems
according to demand, making it
possible to react quickly to changing
workload requirements.”
“We also use IBM Micro-Partitioning™,
which enables us to define virtual
servers down to a granularity of one
tenth of a POWER5 processor. We
estimate that these measures should
improve our average CPU utilization to
more than 50 percent, rising to 80 per-
cent at peak times, without loss of
performance.”
The Virtual I/O functionality of the
System p5 servers enables systems
running in logical partitions to share
valuable network adapters and fibre-
channel connections, reducing costs for
EBRZ. Similarly, the ability to increase
processor utilization means that EBRZ
can make more effective use of its
technology investments.
Optimized storage
Equally important to the future efficiency
of EBRZ’s IT infrastructure is its new
Storage Area Network (SAN), which is
based on two IBM System Storage
DS6800s. The storage capacity of the
two DS6800s is virtualized and man-
aged by IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controller (SVC). The two
storage systems, maintained at sepa-
rate geographical locations, provide a
highly reliable, security-rich and fully
redundant storage environment for
EBRZ, helping to ensure that business-
critical data can be recovered in the
event of a disaster.
The DS6800 storage systems use fibre-
channel technology to transfer data at
high speed and are, like the p5-570
servers, based on IBM POWER5
processors. EBRZ is using SVC to virtu-
alize the storage capacity on the
DS6800s, effectively creating a single
pool of storage. SVC was also used to
migrate data from the previous storage
systems without disruption to live
processes.
“The DS6800s are an excellent basis
for our new storage environment, offer-
ing excellent performance in a small
physical frame,” says Roland Piller,
Manager at EBRZ. “With IBM SAN
Volume Controller, we can reallocate vir-
tualized storage capacity from system
to system without downtime, and we
can add new physical capacity to the
DS6800s without taking them offline.”
Power on demand
The new storage environment at EBRZ
has already produced savings by help-
ing to lower the organization’s mainte-
nance costs, and enable faster and
more reliable backups than were
possible with the former tape-based
infrastructure. Combined with the
p5-570 servers, the virtualized
IBM storage solution provides a stable,
reliable and highly available platform for
EBRZ’s customers.
Most important, EBRZ now has the
capacity, both in processing and stor-
age terms, to deal flexibly with fluctuat-
ing customer demand.
“With IBM’s virtualized server and stor-
age landscape, our management costs
have decreased significantly, and there
are no more performance problems
with isolated systems,” says Roland
Piller. “The IBM solution will enable us
to provide better service for our cus-
tomers, and we can expand without
making physical hardware changes or
increasing our management
overheads.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:

● ibm.com/storage
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved.
● ibm.com/systems/p
IBM Systems Group
Route 100
Somers, New York 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
December 2006
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, System p, System p5,
AIX 5L, POWER, POWER5, Micro-Partitioning,
System Storage DS and TotalStorage are
trademarks of International Business Machines
Corporation in the United States, other
countries or both.
Intel and the Intel logo are registered trademarks
of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries. Other names
and brands may be claimed as the property of
others.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open
Group in the United States and other countries.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
IBM and ILS Consult are separate companies
and each is responsible for its own products.
Neither IBM nor ILS Consult makes any
warranties, express or implied, concerning the
other’s products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM
product, program or service is not intended to
imply that only IBM’s product, program or
service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how
some customers have used IBM products and
the results they may have achieved. Actual
environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on individual
customer configurations and conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured from
new parts, or new and used parts. In some
cases, the hardware product may not be new
and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.

TSC03004-USEN-00
IBM Case Study
IBM and Tectrade help Winterthur Life UK
meet storage demands
Photograph courtesy of Winterthur Life
Overview
■ The Challenge
Increase capacity and scalability of
mainframe storage; improve
performance and flexibility of
storage for Microsoft Windows-
based systems; simplify storage
management and enable faster
response to new business
requirements
■ The Solution
Worked with IBM Business Partner
Tectrade to implement an IBM
System Storage DS8100 storage
system, with IBM System Storage
SAN Volume Controller software;
Tectrade provided full project
management and training services
■ The Benefit
Ultra-fast, highly scalable storage
for both mainframe and Windows
environments; all storage capacity
is virtualized – including non-IBM
hardware – and can be shared
across all systems precisely as
required
One of the UK’s top 10 providers of
single premium personal pensions,
trustee investment plans and
corporate pensions, Winterthur Life UK
(www.winterthur-life.co.uk) is also a
leading provider of self-investment
retirement plans (Sipps). The company
employs around 800 people at two
sites in the UK, and distributes its
products via top-tier advisers and
Employee Benefit Consultants.
As part of a group-wide review of
IT service provision, Winterthur Life
UK looked at various options for
improving the cost-effectiveness of its
mainframe-based systems, including
hosting them elsewhere in the global
business, outsourcing them to a third-
party, and refreshing the existing UK
infrastructure. Working with IBM, the
company chose to implement a new
IBM System z platform with an IBM
System Storage DS8100 storage
system and IBM System Storage SAN
Volume Controller software.
Nigel Palmer, Service Delivery
Manager for Winterthur Life UK,
explains: “We determined that the
most cost-effective option was to
upgrade our existing infrastructure.
By selecting the DS8100 with SAN
Volume Controller software, we were
able to meet both our mainframe and
our Windows storage requirements
in a single solution. The benefits, in
terms of simplification, performance,
flexibility and ease of management,
are enormous.”
 Uniting systems
Winterthur Life UK’s mainframe
environment runs core insurance
systems, including its closed-book
operations – managing life and
pensions products that are no longer
“By selecting the sold to new customers. The company
also sells to high-net-worth individuals,
DS8100 with SAN
where the emphasis is on highly
Volume Controller tailored insurance products. These
software, we were are managed using in-house software
able to meet both running under Microsoft Windows.
our mainframe and
With a demanding customer-base
our Windows storage
that expects the highest standards
requirements in a in service, it is crucial for Winterthur
single solution.” Life UK to have robust, highly
available systems. The upgrade to the
Nigel Palmer, Service Delivery Manager, mainframe environment presented
Winterthur Life UK an excellent opportunity to boost the
resilience of the Windows-based
systems, as Nigel Palmer explains:
“We had rapidly growing storage
requirements for Windows, and we
wanted to provide all the storage in one
place. The combination of DS8100
and SAN Volume Controller gave us
that ability, and brought our Windows
storage to a new level of reliability.”
Plug-and-play deployment
IBM designed the overall architecture
of the solution, and took the project
management lead. The direct
implementation work was carried out
by IBM Business Partner Tectrade
(www. tectrade.co.uk), which also
provided training and support
services.
“Tectrade impressed us right from the
outset with their professionalism and
technical competence,” says Palmer.
“During our first meeting, they logged
in remotely to a demonstration SAN
Volume Controller site, showing us
how it was controlling a mixture of
mainframe and open systems storage.
That gave us great confidence that
they could actually deliver what we
needed.”
Sitting at the heart of Winterthur
Life UK’s SAN, the DS8100 storage
system offers high-performance, high-
availability storage.
Prior to its deployment, the
organisation had been approaching
the limits of the backup window for its
mainframe systems, and there was a
risk that the backup would begin to
extend into normal working hours.
The new solution – the DS8100
combined with the IBM FlashCopy
software on SAN Volume Controller
– immediately knocked two hours off
the backup run, giving Winterthur Life
UK plenty of room for manoeuvre.
The DS8100 server at Winterthur Life
UK is split into separate mainframe
and Windows partitions – and
SAN Volume Controller is used to
virtualize and manage the storage
volumes used by the Windows
systems.
Says Palmer, “The implementation
of the DS8100 ran exceptionally
smoothly – we practically just plugged
the new systems in, and they were
ready to use. The speed of deployment
was in part due to Tectrade’s expert
guidance.”
Drag-and-drop flexibility
SAN Volume Controller enables
Winterthur Life UK to manage its non-
IBM storage in exactly the same way
as it manages capacity on its DS8100
and DS4100 systems – and to treat all
the available capacity on disparate
systems as a single homogeneous
resource.
The value of storage virtualization was
immediately apparent. Winterthur Life
UK needed to upgrade the firmware on
several HP storage servers, and was
able to use SAN Volume Controller to
move the data they held in-flight to the
DS8100 server, without live users even
noticing.
“SAN Volume Controller is a brilliant
solution in terms of its flexibility and
ease of management,” says Palmer. “It
allows us to add or re-allocate storage
exactly as required, and it’s almost as
simple as dragging-and-dropping.”
He adds, “The large cache on the
SAN Volume Controller has provided
a dramatic increase in storage
performance for our Windows servers,
enabling much faster response times.
We have since added around 25
servers to the SAN, with no negative
impact on performance.”
Rapid response, cost-effective storage
The move from a per-server model for
storage to a centralised, virtualized
architecture has simplified storage
management and enables improved
utilisation of the available capacity.
Instead of running out of capacity
on individual machines while spare
capacity remains locked away
elsewhere on the network, Winterthur
Life UK can re-allocate storage as
required from the central pool – giving
each server exactly what it needs, with
no wastage.
Says Palmer, “SAN Volume Controller
enables us to provision new storage
very rapidly. In the type of market that
we (IT) support, with highly flexible
financial products coupled to the
demand for an increasingly shortened
time-to-market, we are accustomed “SAN Volume Controller
to getting last-minute requests from
is a brilliant solution
business users. Now, we’re actually
able to meet those requirements.”
in terms of its
flexibility and ease of
He adds, “The virtualized storage management.”
environment from IBM is substantially
more cost-effective than our previous Nigel Palmer, Service Delivery Manager,
environment, and it gives us many Winterthur Life UK
more capabilities into the bargain.”
The new IBM storage solution enables
the management of distinct tiers of
storage, ready for the demands of
information lifecycle management.
Winterthur Life UK will be able to
move archived or low-value data
to lower-cost disk, freeing up high-
performance drives for production
data.
Prepared for the life to come
Palmer concludes, “Our IBM storage
virtualization solution was the first
step towards a full service-oriented
architecture, a process which is now
continuing with the virtualization of
servers. Looking to the future, we
expect to be able to have a pool of
virtualized IT resources that can be
combined in whatever way best fits the
business requirements.”
 IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU

The IBM home page can be found at

ibm.com

IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage, System

Storage DS and FlashCopy are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product or service names may

be trademarks, or service marks of others.

IBM and Tectrade are separate companies

and each is responsible for its own products.
Neither IBM nor Tectrade makes any
warranties, express or implied, concerning the
other’s products.

References in this publication to IBM products,

programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to
an IBM product, program or service is not
intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
functionally equivalent product, program or
service may be used instead.

All customer examples cited represent how

some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.

IBM hardware products are manufactured

from new parts, or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.

This publication is for general guidance only.

Photographs may show design models.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved.

TSC03001-GBEN-00 (08/06)
IBM Case Study
V-ZUG AG boosts business continuity
with IBM
Overview
■ The Challenge
Achieve high availability and
scalability for data storage, while
keeping within strict budgetary
limits; develop business continuity
capabilities across Windows and
UNIX platforms
■ The Solution
Worked with IBM Premier Business
Partner becom to implement two
IBM TotalStorage DS4300 systems
with IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume
Controller and Metro Mirror
software
■ The Benefit
Greater storage capacity and fully
redundant SAN architecture with
smaller physical footprint; storage
virtualization allows greater
flexibility in allocation of capacity;
easier to add new disk capacity;
improved potential for business
continuity
V-ZUG AG (www.vzug.ch) is a leader
in the design, manufacture and
distribution of household appliances,
including cookers, washing machines,
dishwashers and microwave ovens.
Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland,
the company employs around 1,100
people and recorded turnover of
340 million CHF (€220 million) in
fiscal 2004.
To help ensure efficiency in its supply
chain and to guard against potential
loss of revenue, V-ZUG AG aims to
keep its IT systems available at all
times. With business continuity as a
key strategic goal, the company had
invested in clustered server solutions
from IBM, and wanted to achieve
similar resilience for its storage
environment.
Says Markus Fleischli, Head of
Systems at V-ZUG AG, “Our existing
storage server was outdated and
the maintenance costs were rising.
We needed more capacity, and we
aimed to invest in a solution that
would better support our business
continuity strategy. Our storage server
offered good availability and reliability,
but was potentially vulnerable to a
power outage or other unforeseeable
problem.”
Strengthening the architecture
V-ZUG AG previously used an IBM
TotalStorage Enterprise Storage
Server (ESS) at the heart of its SAN,
and while this system continued to
provide good support for the business,
the lack of a duplicate backup system
presented a risk.
“Effectively, we had our documents
and drawings data in a single place,”
says Markus Fleischli, “and the high
reliability of the ESS did not change
the fact the single-system architecture
was inherently less resilient than we
needed it to be.”
V-ZUG AG turned to IBM for a new,
fully redundant architecture, and
selected two IBM TotalStorage
DS4300 systems, housed in different
data centres and synchronised using
IBM TotalStorage Metro Mirro (peer-
to-peer remote copy) software. IBM
TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller
(SVC) software was used to create
two logically separate SANs, each
capable of supporting the entire
business should the other node fail.
“We considered the options, and
found that DS4300 with SVC offered
enterprise-class availability but at
a relatively low price,” says Markus
Fleischli. “In the event of any kind
of failure in one data centre, the
production environment automatically
and almost instantly switches to the
second data centre, where an exact
copy of the data is available. So
with the new IBM solution, our
business continuity capabilities
have improved greatly.”
Unlimited potential
V-ZUG AG worked with becom GmbH
(www.becom.com), an IBM Premier
Business Partner, to implement
the new DS4300 solution. The
total capacity was initially 800GB,
and this has already grown to 2TB
as the business requirements for
data storage have increased. Says
Markus Fleischli, “With the dual data
centre architecture and SVC, it is
very easy to add new disk capacity
to the SAN whenever the business
needs it. becom provided well-skilled
consultants for this solution, and their
excellent knowledge of the
IBM technologies helped to make it
a success.”
Although storage virtualization was
not a key driver for the new solution,
V-ZUG AG has taken advantage of the
SVC software to simplify the addition of
new servers and applications.
“We are no longer limited by the
physical storage architecture,” says
Markus Fleischli. “Rather, SVC lets
us see all the available capacity as
a single pool of storage, which we
can then divide between systems
in whatever way is needed. We can
allocate precisely the right amount of
storage to each system, so we make
more efficient use of our resources and
can avoid over-provisioning of disks.”
“We considered the
options, and found
that DS4300 with SVC
offered enterprise-
class availability but
with the best price/cost
ratio and integration
capacity.”
Markus Fleischli,
Head of Systems, V-ZUG AG
Protecting business
With the introduction of the mirrored
DS4300 systems, V-ZUG AG now has
a more resilient storage architecture,
capable of continuing to support
business operations even in the event
of a total data centre failure. Says
Markus Fleischli, “We take business
continuity very seriously, and we
are confident that the IBM solution
provides the right level of protection for
our enterprise.”
IBM United Kingdom Limited
PO Box 41
North Harbour
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 3AU
The IBM home page can be found at ibm.com
IBM, the IBM logo, TotalStorage and Metro
Mirror are trademarks of International Business
Machines Corporation in the United States,
other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks, or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM
product, program or service is not intended
to imply that only IBM’s product, program
or service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how
some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured
from new parts, or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights
Reserved.
TSC02030-CHEN-00
IBM Case Study

AES/PHEAA improves financial aid

administration as an On Demand Business

Overview

■ Challenge
AES/PHEAA sought to
improve the performance of its
business-critical financial aid
administration toolset in order
to provide partners and clients
with the best possible customer
experience.
■ Why Become an On Demand
Business?
By becoming an On Demand
Business, AES/PHEAA could
optimize its computing environ-
ment for enterprise-wide
improvements in core business
processes and reductions in
costs, while scaling to support
rapid growth and enhancing ■ Solution ■ Key Benefits
customer satisfaction. AES/PHEAA simplified its IT — Improved imaged document
infrastructure, leveraging the retrieval times by up to 1,500
virtualization capabilities of an percent, helping to enhance
IBM® _`® p5 595 sys- employee productivity and
tem and an IBM TotalStorage® user satisfaction
DS8300 system to consolidate — Reduced server footprint by
servers and improve resource more than 100 percent to
utilization. As a result, the com- generate maintenance sav-
pany created a resilient, high- ings, cut administrative over-
performance, cost-effective head and allow skilled IT

On Demand Business defined computing environment that professionals to focus on
An enterprise whose business
processes—integrated end-to-end
improves productivity and other business priorities
across the company and with key enhances partner and customer — More than doubled server
partners, suppliers and customers— interactions and satisfaction. and storage resource utiliza-
can respond with speed to any
customer demand, market opportunity tion rates to enhance effi-
or external threat. ciency, responsiveness and
cost savings

On Demand Business Benefits
● Improved imaged document retrieval
times by up to 1,500 percent,
helping to enhance employee
productivity and user satisfaction
● Reduced server footprint by more
than 100 percent to generate
maintenance savings, cut
administrative overhead and allow
skilled IT professionals to focus on
other business priorities
● More than doubled server and
storage resource utilization rates to
enhance efficiency, responsiveness
and cost savings
“ We have created a
system that allows our
organization to react
to changing business
conditions in a matter
of hours rather than
days or weeks. We are
confident that the
IBM technology
roadmap will provide
continuing support for
our efforts.”
– Mark Lowe, AES/PHEAA IT
Systems Manager
Since 1964, American Education Services/Pennsylvania Higher Education
Assistance Agency (AES/PHEAA) has grown from small student loan guarantor with
a guaranty volume of only 4,600 student loans to one of the largest full-service
financial aid organizations in the nation. AES/PHEAA devotes its energy, resources
and imagination to creating affordable access to higher education for students and
their families.
Today, AES/PHEAA manages more than US$67.2 billion in total assets and serves
millions of students and thousands of schools nationally through its state grant,
guaranty, servicing and financial aid processing systems. The agency strives to
implement innovative ways to ease the financial burdens of students and borrowers
while also streamlining delivery systems for schools and lenders.
AES/PHEAA’s management aims to leverage technology for business efficiencies,
higher quality of service and cost-effectiveness. The agency saves schools more
than US$25 million in administrative costs through its advanced financial aid deliv-
ery products and services. Today, AES/PHEAA’s new OneLINK loan guaranty sys-
tem promises to further business efficiency through technology by providing the
most complete financial aid servicing solution available in the nation.
Slow archive image retrievals and a complex IT environment hamper productivity
However, as AES/PHEAA developed the applications that allow it to deliver savings
to schools, its IT infrastructure grew more distributed and complex. “Our system
was hard-wired,” explains Mark Lowe, AES/PHEAA IT systems manager. “If you
needed another server, you had to get a physical machine, bolt it in and run cables
to it. It wasn’t possible to use just a small percentage of a server—we had to run
numerous servers at utilization rates of 30 percent or lower, which was not an effi-
cient or cost-effective use of our computing resources.”
Employee productivity also suffered because of slow system performance. The
AES/PHEAA loan processing application uses an image-based document workflow
and archived optical storage system so page display speeds are a critical factor in
delivering rapid results—and single pages were taking up to a minute to retrieve. To
Key Components
provide better service to users of its financial aid systems, AES/PHEAA sought to
enhance application performance, improve resource utilization and streamline IT Software

administration by consolidating server and storage footprints. ● IBM AIX 5L V5.3

● IBM DB2 Universal Database

AES/PHEAA selects IBM _` p5 595 for infrastructure simplification
● IBM SAN Volume Controller
After considering several alternatives for consolidating its distributed computing
● IBM Lotus Notes
infrastructure, the IT team at AES/PHEAA decided to migrate the organization’s key
business applications—including its archived document imaging system, data ● IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

warehouses and PeopleSoft Financial and Human Resources software—from multi- ● IBM Tivoli Productivity Center
ple physical servers to a single IBM _` p5 595 system running the ● IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
IBM AIX 5L™ operating system and IBM WebSphere® Application Server software
● IBM WebSphere Application Server
for the Linux® operating system. “Rather than having several machines deployed
for Linux
at just 30 percent capacity, we wanted to try to reduce our server footprint and
● PeopleSoft Financial software
better utilize the resources we had,” says Lowe. “Because the AIX 5L operating
system offered unique IBM Micro-Partitioning™ functionality and virtualization capa-
● PeopleSoft Human Resources
software
bilities, we anticipated that consolidating our applications onto the p5 595 system
could help boost application performance and dramatically streamline our IT Systems

administration requirements.” ● IBM _` p5 595 server

● IBM TotalStorage DS8300 storage

The IT team also realized that its storage infrastructure would play an important server
part in reducing archived image retrieval times and enhancing employee productiv- ● IBM TotalStorage 3494 tape library
ity. For this reason, AES/PHEAA implemented a storage area network (SAN) based
● IBM TotalStorage 3592 tape drives
on the IBM TotalStorage DS8300 storage server and IBM TotalStorage SAN
● SAN Volume Controller hardware
Volume Controller software. This high-performance system easily accommodates
the gigabytes of data AES/PHEAA processes daily and at the same time gives the
IT team the tools they need to easily allocate and optimize storage resources on
the network. “There is no rigid boundary between our p5 595 system and our
SAN,” says Lowe. “They work together as a single virtual system, which has helped
us reduce complexity and optimize image retrieval times.” Additionally,
IBM TotalStorage 3592 tape drives and a TotalStorage 3494 tape library provide a “ There is no rigid
low-cost alternative for backup and offline data archiving, and with IBM Tivoli® boundary between our
Storage Manager software for automated backup, the IT team is able to keep
p5 595 system and our
administration overhead low as well.
SAN. They work
together as a single
virtual system, which
has helped us reduce
complexity and
optimize image
retrieval times.”
– Mark Lowe, AES/PHEAA IT
Systems Manager
“ Single-page Virtualization facilitates better performance and faster application deployment
After installing the p5 595 system and configuring the SAN, AES/PHEAA users
documents, which
experienced dramatic improvements in image retrieval speeds—a change that has
previously took up to facilitated greater productivity and enhanced user satisfaction. “We have seen per-
a minute to retrieve, formance gains of up to 1,500 percent with the new system,” says Lowe.
now take about four “Single-page documents, which previously took up to a minute to retrieve, now

seconds. 100-page take about four seconds. 100-page documents take approximately 10 seconds.
Because our loan officers no longer have to wait a minute or more for their docu-
documents take
ments, these performance gains have translated directly into higher productivity. In
approximately addition, our list of trouble tickets has been reduced to virtually nothing—which
10 seconds. Because means users are able to do their work without issues.”
our loan officers no
longer have to wait a AES/PHEAA has also seen significant improvements in the time it takes to deploy
new servers and new applications. “Because Micro-Partitioning allows us to bypass
minute or more for
the old process of ordering, configuring and testing a new physical server each
their documents, time we roll out a new application, our development lifecycle is dramatically
these performance shorter,” explains Lowe. “IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager software and the cloning
gains have translated capabilities of the p5 595 system allow us to easily build and schedule server

directly into higher deployments. What previously could take up to a month now can be done
overnight—and the process is fully automated.”
productivity. In
addition, our list of IT simplification helps reduce administration overhead
trouble tickets has In addition to performance and productivity gains, AES/PHEAA has achieved new
been reduced to efficiencies by streamlining its IT administration requirements. Micro-Partitioning

virtually nothing.” capabilities, which allow the organization to create servers using as little as a hun-
dredth of a processor, played a critical role in allowing AES/PHEAA to consolidate
– Mark Lowe, AES/PHEAA IT
its computing infrastructure and simplify its administration.
Systems Manager

“Our developers maintain full test, development and production servers for each
application—more than 50 in all,” says Lowe. “But if we were to maintain more
than 50 physical servers, they would take up significant floor space and would
require a great deal of administrative attention. With the p5 595 system, we can
create the required partitions on the same physical server.” With server consolida-
tion and centralized system management, AES/PHEAA has been able to free
skilled IT administrators from routine maintenance so they can be redeployed to
other business-critical tasks.

Improved resource utilization helps deliver efficiency, responsiveness and cost savings
When AES/PHEAA integrated its server and storage resources to enhance respon-
siveness to user demands, achieving higher resource utilization through virtualiza-
tion and Micro-Partitioning technologies was a top priority. According to Lowe, the
organization has achieved this goal. “Unlike the physical servers we used in the
past, which rarely exceeded 30-40 percent resource utilization rates, the p5 595
system uses a shared-resource design,” he says. “We anticipate that the system
will run at 75-80 percent utilization most of the time because the partitions that
need processing, memory and I/O resources can dynamically ‘borrow’ resources
from partitions that are idle.”

Lowe cites the virtual I/O capabilities of the p5 595 system as an example of
another technology that has helped AES/PHEAA save on capital investment costs.
“With virtual I/O, we can put 50 test servers on one physical adapter instead of
buying 50 physical adapters,” he says. “In this manner, our resources are used
more efficiently—helping us save on both hardware investments and administration
costs.”

AES/PHEAA ready to deliver future innovations to students and schools

Today, AES/PHEAA is poised to build on its On Demand Business IT infrastructure
by adopting new technology innovations as they emerge, and then passing the
benefits of those technologies along to schools and students seeking financial aid.
“We have created a system that allows our organization to react to changing busi-
ness conditions in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks,” says Lowe. “We
are confident that the IBM technology roadmap will provide continuing support for
our efforts.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner. Or visit us on
the Web at:

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2006

ibm.com/eserver/pseries
Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Printed in the United States of America
January 2006
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, the _` logo, AIX 5L,
DB2 Universal Database, Lotus Notes, Micro-
Partitioning, Tivoli, TotalStorage and WebSphere
are trademarks or registered trademarks of
International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries or both.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
in the United States, other countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
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References in this publication to IBM products
or services do not imply that IBM intends to
make them available in all countries in which
IBM operates. Offerings are subject to change,
extension or withdrawal without notice.

PSC01721-USEN-01
IBM Case Study
DIS gains flexibility through storage
virtualization with IBM
Overview
■ The Challenge
Create a central data storage
resource, capable of serving
multiple users reliably; support
operating systems in a single
storage system; enable high-
availability storage for
business-critical systems
■ The Solution
Implemented two IBM
TotalStorage SAN Volume
®
Controllers in redundant
configuration, connected to a new
IBM TotalStorage DS4300, and to
two existing TotalStorage systems
■ The Benefit
Faster restoration of data in the
event of a server failure; greater
flexibility and support for multiple
system types; ability to add new
storage capacity to live systems
With 172 offices in 80 locations, DIS
Deutscher Industrie Service AG (www.
dis-ag.com) is one of the leading
temporary employment agencies in
Germany.
The company specialises in
the provision of highly-qualified
professionals in the areas of
management, information technology,
finance and engineering, and has
more than 35 years of experience in
the job market. In fiscal 2004, DIS
recorded revenues of €265 million,
representing year-on-year growth of
more than 20 per cent.
To meet its customers’ growing needs,
DIS aims to provide ever more rapid
and cost-effective employment
services. To do so, the company
needs to be able to respond rapidly
to new requirements and have an
immediate view of all the available
temporary staff resources. This
requires well-integrated systems and
the ability to share information quickly
and reliably – which was previously
lacking.
DIS previously had a distributed and
largely unconnected IT infrastructure,
consisting of more than 80 different
file servers, each serving local
users with data and applications. In
order to improve information sharing
and to reduce costs, DIS started to
consolidate operations to a central
data centre, introducing a terminal
server farm to provide services
remotely to all users.
Andreas Reisch, Head of IT at DIS,
comments, “It quickly became
apparent that the new central file
server could not handle demand
effectively, in terms both of total
capacity and concurrent user access.
We wanted the ability to manage
capacity more easily and reliably,
retaining the advantages of a single
point of control.”
The right solution for the job
Using IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume
Controller (SVC), linked to a new IBM
TotalStorage DS4300 and two other
DS-class devices from IBM, DIS has
created a resilient, flexible, high-
performance storage area network
capable of supporting its business
requirements.
Says Andreas Reisch, “The
virtualization solution from IBM
provides excellent performance and
availability, with fast recovery and very
easy administration.
“We are a very dynamic business, and
our data volumes are growing rapidly.
The SAN Volume Controller helps
us to manage this growth in storage
requirements, enabling new capacity
to be added to the live system without
any disruption. SVC also makes it
faster and easier to restore data, and
supports our Linux , IBM AIX and
®
Microsoft Windows servers.”
® ®
All-in-one benefits from IBM
The business-critical applications run
by DIS include materials planning,
a CRM system, a Web interface for
shared applications, and Microsoft
Exchange. These systems now use
the IBM SAN through SVC, which
virtualizes the 6TB of capacity on the
new DS4300 and shares it between
the different computing environments.
The older storage systems – IBM
FAStT600 and FAStT700 – are used
to mirror the production storage
environment, for added resiliency.
IBM FlashCopy is used with IBM Tivoli
Storage Manager to enable rapid
backup of the live systems.
“We were able to invest in SVC as a
‘bundle’, including redundant servers,
fiber channel switches and the
DS4300,” says Andreas Reisch. “The
pricing was very attractive, as was the
ability of SVC to support a wide variety
of systems and interfaces.
“We previously suffered long delays
during backup and restore processes.
With SVC, we can restore some
systems in as little as 30 minutes, so
any failure would have a very limited
impact on the business. Another key
advantage is that we can add capacity
and perform server upgrades more
“Another key advantage
is that we can add
capacity and perform
server upgrades more
easily with SVC
– we anticipate a
significant reduction in
administrative costs.”
Andreas Reisch, Head of IT, DIS Deutsche
Industrie Service AG
easily with SVC – we anticipate a
significant reduction in administrative
costs.”
The ideal path to the future
DIS worked with IBM Business
Partner Ideal ITC (www.ideal-itc.com)
and SVA (www.sva.de) to choose,
configure and deploy the IBM solution,
resulting in rapid implementation to the
agreed budget. “It was a significant
advantage to work with a certified
IBM Business Partner,” says Andreas
Reisch, “because they know IBM
and its products very well. Ideal-ITC
provided the right consultants to make
the project run successfully, and
demonstrated excellent knowledge
of SVC.”
One of DIS’s IT strategies is to make
every business-critical system fully
redundant, to which end the company
is currently building a second data
centre 40 miles away, linked via a
dedicated Wide Area Network. This
data centre will include a redundant
SVC implementation holding a
synchronised copy of all business-
critical data.
Andreas Reisch concludes, “Now
that we have virtualized our storage
infrastructure using SVC, we are in an
excellent position for the future. As DIS
continues to grow, the benefits in terms
of resilience, performance and low
administration will become even more
important.”
IBM Deutschland GmbH
70548 Stuttgart
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IBM Österreich
Obere Donaustraße 95
1020 Wien
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IBM Schweiz
Bändliweg 21, Postfach
8010 Zürich
ibm.com/ch
IBM, the IBM logo, TotalStorage, AIX,
FlashCopy and Tivoli Storage Manager are
trademarks of International Business Machines
Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the
Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open
Group in the United States and other countries.
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the
United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks, or service marks of others.
IBM and Ideal ITC are separate companies
and each is responsible for its own products.
Neither IBM nor Ideal ITC makes any
warranties, express or implied, concerning the
others’ products.
References in this publication to IBM products,
programs or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make these available in all countries
in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM
product, program or service is not intended
to imply that only IBM’s product, program
or service may be used. Any functionally
equivalent product, program or service may be
used instead.
All customer examples cited represent how
some customers have used IBM products
and the results they may have achieved.
Actual environmental costs and performance
characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and
conditions.
IBM hardware products are manufactured
from new parts, or new and used parts. In
some cases, the hardware product may not be
new and may have been previously installed.
Regardless, IBM warranty terms apply.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved.
TSC01726-DEEN-00
IBM Case Study

Rex Healthcare chooses IBM systems

as foundation for On Demand Business

Overview

■ Challenge
Rex Healthcare needed to build
a foundational storage infra-
structure that could support
corporate goals of business
growth and expansion and
systems integration with key
partners.
■ Why Become an On Demand
Business?
With a central, easy-to-manage
storage infrastructure, Rex
Healthcare could achieve a new
level of business resiliency that
could help support key business
initiatives and allow the organi-
zation to flexibly accommodate ■ Key Benefits “ We provide IT for the
business growth. — Significant storage support
■ Solution whole organization—
and maintenance cost-
Rex Healthcare chose IBM sys- savings over the short term
servers, storage and
tems to build a scalable storage — Substantial productivity gains software distribution.
area network that would sup- as Rex Healthcare moves We want an IT
port efficient data management from paper-based processes environment that is
for both existing and forthcom- to electronic medical records
ing business-critical business integrated and can
and administration
processes and applications. — Infrastructure scalability to
support our business
support continued business processes from end to

On Demand Business defined expansion and evolution of end.”
An enterprise whose business systems and operations
processes—integrated end-to-end — Dave Bullamore, Manager of
across the company and with Systems Integration, Rex
key partners, suppliers and cus- Healthcare
tomers—can respond with speed
to any customer demand, market
opportunity or external threat.

On Demand Business Benefits
● Significant storage support and
maintenance cost savings over the
short term
● Substantial productivity gains as Rex
Healthcare moves to paperless
electronic medical records
● Infrastructure scalability to support
continued business expansion and
evolution of systems and operations
“ Users shouldn’t have to
think about storage.
We provide storage to
them; they get the data
they need when they
need it. And if the data
goes missing, we’re
able to recover it. It
should be—and with
our IBM SAN it is—
that simple and
transparent to the end
user.”
— Dave Bullamore, Manager of
Systems Integration, Rex
Healthcare
Rex Healthcare is a private, not-for-profit healthcare organization that tends to the
health and well-being of the Wake County, North Carolina community and its sur-
rounding area. The Rex Hospital campus at the heart of the provider’s network of
services includes a 394-bed acute care hospital; family birth center; cancer center;
convalescent care center; surgery center; heart and vascular center; wellness cen-
ter; dedicated pain management and sleep disorders clinic; and state-of-the-art
emergency services center. Expert care is also available at Rex Healthcare’s physi-
cian practices in Raleigh and Cary; at the Rex Senior Health Center in downtown
Raleigh; and from the professionals at Rex Home Services, who care for home-
bound patients. Today the company employs about 3,850 healthcare professionals
and has annual revenues of about $350 million.
In practice for more than 100 years, Rex Healthcare and its parent organization,
University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care, have innovated to remain at the
leading edge of the healthcare industry, launching key initiatives to help ensure the
best possible patient healthcare and quality of services. Six years ago, the hospital
implemented a digital picture archiving and communication system to provide
patients with advanced radiological imaging and diagnosis. More recently, manage-
ment decided to streamline administration and internal processes by moving from
paper to an electronic medical records (EMR) system.
Initiatives such as picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and EMR
technology have required the healthcare provider’s IT organization to operate in top
form. As it does with patient care, Rex Healthcare takes a holistic approach to IT,
planning carefully to build an infrastructure that can support the growing, evolving
organization. “We provide IT for all of Rex Healthcare—servers, storage and soft-
ware distribution,” explains Dave Bullamore, manager of systems integration. “We
want to ensure that we have an integrated IT environment that can support—and
anticipate—the needs of the organization now and for the foreseeable future.”
A few years ago, the IT team implemented a centralized storage system to serve
and store data, including digital images and digital video, for the PACS environ-
ment. The organization’s storage needs continued to grow as Rex Healthcare
added more facilities, healthcare providers and patients. Then, a few months ago,
management launched its EMR initiative to move Rex Healthcare from a paper-
based workflow to electronic records. The goal is to streamline administration
across the extended enterprise. “It’s a huge initiative, and it requires a huge amount
of storage,” says Bullamore. “That and the fact that we were ready to upgrade part
of our storage infrastructure prompted us to explore new options.”
IBM systems serve as the backbone for On Demand Business enterprise storage
Key Components
Well aware of IBM reliability and performance, the Rex Healthcare IT team chose
IBM TotalStorage® systems to serve as the backbone of its storage environment. Servers

A few years ago, Bullamore’s team installed an IBM TotalStorage 2105 F20 ● IBM TotalStorage DS4300 disk
Enterprise Storage Server® system as its first SAN. In the spring of 2004, his storage system

group added an IBM TotalStorage DS4300 system with serial ATA disk storage, ● IBM TotalStorage DS4800 disk
using it to support the PACS environment. “We had great reliability from our sys- storage system

tem,” says Bullamore. “We stored a vast amount of data-rich radiology images on ● IBM TotalStorage Ultrium™ 3584
that SAN, and we had great response times when it came to accessing the data Scalable Tape Library

stored on it.” Software

● IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume

Although Rex Healthcare’s system was a “workhorse,” in planning for the upcoming Controller
enterprise-wide EMR system rollout, the IT team decided it made sense to add ● IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software
more storage capacity. IBM Business Partner Dynamix Group let Bullamore know
● Oracle database software
that the new IBM TotalStorage DS4800 system was shipping. “The TotalStorage
● Microsoft® SQL Server software
DS4800 had some great new features, among them a smaller physical profile and
4 GBps Fibre Channel technology” says Bullamore. “Based on our experience with
the TotalStorage DS4300, we had a high level of confidence in the TotalStorage DS
Family. We thought we’d be gaining even more reliability and availability, and we
liked the fact that we would have a faster connection, which we are likely to need
in our environment as it continues to evolve.”

Storage performance and reliability meet the needs of the enterprise

Over the years, the IBM TotalStorage SAN has provided Rex Healthcare’s
physicians across the organization with reliable access to critical patient data,
enabling them to collaborate with one another to treat patients efficiently and
effectively. “The reliability of these systems has been such that they’ve never been
performance bottlenecks. Our users are able to access the information they need,
when they need it, whether they’re on site or accessing data on the Web,” says
Bullamore. “Users shouldn’t have to think about storage. They simply get the data
they need when they need it. And if the data goes missing, we’re able to recover it.
It should be—and with our IBM SAN it is—that simple and transparent to the
end user.”
The availability afforded by TotalStorage systems also helps keep Rex Healthcare
productive and resilient as the entire organization continues to evolve and add new
applications. Explains Bullamore, “Data generated in our PACS environment is a big
component of what we store on our back-end storage arrays at present. The serial
ATA drive technology of the TotalStorage DS4300 has been great for handling
those storage needs, providing outstanding access and availability. Now, with the
new TotalStorage DS4800 system, we’ve got the Fibre Channel drive, which sup-
ports load-continuous mode and greater duty cycles for very high availability and
performance. We’re in the process of moving our cardiovascular digital imaging
application from direct-attached optical storage devices to the SAN. We think the
new system will meet the requirements of that application and can also provide the
storage capacity we will need in the fully incorporated EMR environment.”

Manageability keeps IT costs low and information within easy reach

With tools for centrally managing all storage system resources, Bullamore’s team
easily administers the TotalStorage DS4300 and TotalStorage DS4800 systems.
“We’re able to manage both systems using the same set of storage management
tools. This means we don’t have to add more IT resources, so we keep our IT
costs low.”

The team uses IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager software for streamlined information
management. Using Tivoli Storage Manager, the IT team backs up all data on the
SAN to low-cost tape storage. “We use Tivoli Storage Manager to back up every-
thing. Our TotalStorage Ultrium™ 3584 Scalable Tape Library tape drives are
hooked up to the Tivoli Storage Manager server. We use the tape drives to store
copies of the backup data on site and to prepare copies of the tapes to go off site.
It’s a cost-effective way of managing our backup data.”

Bullamore’s team uses IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller software to man-
age all of the storage resources on the SAN, ensuring optimal utilization. “SAN
Volume Controller makes provisioning storage very easy. We can use it to manage
all of our storage arrays, quickly and efficiently allocating the appropriate class of
storage to systems that need it. With SAN Volume Controller, we can also easily
migrate data from one host or storage array to another, and we can use it for
remote replication of all of our storage from one central location, rather than repli-
cating array by array.”
In addition to simplifying storage resource management, SAN Volume Controller “ We want to ensure
also helps Rex Healthcare manage its data throughout the lifetime of patient rela-
that we have an
tionships. “For example, the new TotalStorage DS4800 will serve most of our large
databases, including our Oracle and MS SQL patient records and billing data-
integrated IT
bases,” says Bullamore. “That’s a lot of data. As a front end to all of our storage environment that can
servers—the DS4300, the DS4800, and the ESS—SAN Volume Controller allows support—and
us to delineate tiers of storage, yet host the data on the most appropriate system. anticipate—the needs of
Later, we can move things around on the fly, from the single interface—for exam-
the organization now
ple, moving data from an overutilized array to an underutilized one.”
and for the foreseeable
Rex Healthcare gains business resilience with assurance of scalability future.”
Bullamore feels confident that Rex Healthcare now has the key storage infrastruc- — Dave Bullamore, Manager of
ture in place to support continued growth and innovation. “We’re in a position to Systems Integration, Rex
grow the organization, the hospital and our systems, while introducing new applica- Healthcare

tions. We have the scalability now to do so. We can accommodate new technology
initiatives and scale to support more users on the system—whether we are adding
more patients, more physicians or more facilities. Over the year, we will be imple-
menting our EMR environment, and we plan to put some really large Oracle data-
bases on the TotalStorage DS4800–based SAN. We are confident that this system
will handle the load—that’s why we chose it.”

Bullamore observes that IBM TotalStorage systems have flexibly supported the
evolving storage demands of Rex Healthcare over the years, contributing to the
organization’s ability to grow and adopt the new technologies the will enhance
patient healthcare. “As Rex Healthcare’s management executes our organization’s
roadmap, the IT team continues to participate, planning for upgrades and increases
in storage capacity and capabilities. IBM systems help us support the growth of the
organization and the introduction of new patient services, the addition of new
physicians and the end-to-end integration of business-critical processes for greater
efficiency.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative
or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:

ibm.com/servers/storage
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2005
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States
October 2005
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, DB2, Enterprise Storage
Server, Tivoli and TotalStorage are trademarks
or registered trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the United
States, other countries or both.
Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States, other
countries or both.
Other company, product or service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products
or services do not imply that IBM intends to
make them available in all countries in which
IBM operates. Offerings are subject to change,
extension or withdrawal without notice.
The IBM home page on the Internet can be
found at ibm.com

TSC01560-USEN-00