System i LPAR Keeps T-Mobile Expansion On Track

Published: December 12, 2006

by Alex Woodie

German mobile phone giant T-Mobile reports that the System i server was instrumental in helping the company to greatly expand its retail presence in England over the past year, IBM announced last week. In particular, the Deutsche Telekom UK subsidiary, T-Mobile Direct, cited the System i's advanced virtualization technologies as a key component of the upgraded IT environment.

The IT folks at T-Mobile Direct had their work cut out for them when their corporate bosses gave them 12 months to more than double the number of retail outlets in the United Kingdom, from 128 to 303 stores. For many IT organizations, such an aggressive expansion would entail loading up on new X64 servers, adding racks upon racks to the data center, bringing in more power and cooling capacity to keep things running, and hiring more people to manage the additional complexity.

However, groups experienced with the i5/OS server, such as T-Mobile Direct, would realize they could avoid these typical IT pitfalls and grow smartly, if they played their cards right. According to IBM, that is exactly what T-Mobile Direct did, with a little bit of assistance from Triangle, an IBM Premier Business Partner based in England.

With a new i570 server carved into six logical partitions (LPARs) serving as the backbone of the new system, T-Mobile Direct was able to roll out more than 2,000 new point-of-sale (POS) devices located in the 300-plus stores across the country. What's more, the organization did this while improving the performance of its core applications, reducing rack space by 25 percent, and reducing personnel costs, according to IBM.

IBM's dynamic LPAR technology, and, in particular, the Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM) tool, were critical in maximizing T-Mobile Direct's investment in the i570 and keeping the big server running efficiently. For example, each night, when the T-Mobile Direct stores report their daily sales numbers, EWLM automatically moves more 64-bit processing capacity to the partition running the polling application. The company has consistently met its goal of accomplishing this nightly reporting process in 30 minutes or less.

T-Mobile Direct has also begun to deploy other virtualization tools, including IBM Director, IBM Remote Management Agent, and the Virtualization Engine Console. These offerings replaced the existing storage polling solution and provided other benefits, such as the capability to monitor and manage the POS devices and other applications.

Paul Baucutt, T-Mobile's technical support manager for retail systems, says IBM's virtualization technologies helped T-Mobile become more efficient. "In the three months since the implementation, the simplified architecture has already offered improved performance, as well as cost savings, and has proved that it is capable of supporting our ongoing growth," he says.