OS/400 Shops Featured in iNation Server Consolidation Chat

by Alex Woodie

"Server consolidation has long been a strength of iSeries, and it only gets better in 2002," Stevenson told attendees of the event. "Server consolidation continues to be a significant market opportunity for us."

Churchill China

Stevenson's first example of server consolidation was Churchill China, a British manufacturer and distributor of high-quality ceramic tableware for the home and hospitality markets. The company employs 1,000 factory workers to produce one million products weekly, including such recognizable china brands as Harry Potter china, Looney Tunes' Tom & Jerry china, and china for the Royal Horticulture Society and Historical Royal Palaces in England.

Churchill China chose to install the Wizz400 e-commerce toolset, developed by IBM business partner CLOVER Business Associates. Installed on an iSeries Model 820 between the company's ERP system and a Web server, Wizz400 allows Churchill to take live data from its ERP system and publish it through a firewall, which runs under Linux in an OS/400 logical partition. This setup gives Churchill's customers and partners secure access to accurate stock and account data, and allows the company to collect order data more efficiently, Stevenson said. "It is one example of how Linux has helped our customers," she said.

Sea Island Resort

Stevenson's next example was Sea Island Resort, which operates a luxury hotel called The Cloister on an island in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Georgia. Sea Island Resort has been an IBM minicomputer user since the early days of the System/3 in 1973 and was actually the first customer to install an IXA card on its OS/400 server last year, Stevenson said.

"What they've been able to do is mange their reservation, finance application, and their Notes mail system through the xSeries and iSeries combination," she said. "They've developed a Citrix Metaframe cluster on xSeries clusters running Windows 2000."

Citrix Metaframe is an emulator of sorts that allows companies to serve a single instance of a Windows application to multiple users over the Internet or over internal networks. The application allows Sea Island Resort employees to access their applications and data files using IBM NetVista thin clients. Since the employees are often not at their desks, the remote connection offered by Metaframe allows employees to connect to the server from anywhere on the 50-square-mile island. "That was a good example of Windows NT workload consolidation using the IXAs," Stevenson said.

Apria Healthcare

Stevenson saved the best example of server consolidation for last: Apria Healthcare, another longtime user of the OS/400 platform that provides integrated home healthcare products and services to 1.2 million patients worldwide.

Apria has steadfastly taken advantage of enhancements that IBM has made to its OS/400 platform over time, Stevenson said. One of the ways the company has improved its IT infrastructure is through consolidating AS/400 systems, which run a variety of applications. "At one time they had 175 AS/400s," Stevenson said. "Now they have 48. The goal is to have four iSeries systems supporting their entire business."

Apria uses financial software from J.D. Edwards and human resources software from SAP. "I particularly found that interesting," Stevenson added, "the combination of J.D. Edwards and SAP. It meets Apria's needs, and we're able to provide them a solution that was able to handle both workloads in a single environment."

Besides the mission-critical J.D. Edwards and SAP applications, Apria runs Lotus Domino on its iSeries server, providing Notes functionality to 1,200 users. The company also uses high availability software from Vision Solutions to safeguard against server downtime. "They are sort of our ideal customer account, from the depiction of all the things iSeries can do," she said.

The iSeries Nation is holding another online chat about server consolidation tomorrow, March 19. Hosted by Amit Dave, the topic will be the benefits of using OS/400's Logical Partitioning capabilities to reduce server footprints in the enterprise. To register for this free event, go to the iSeries Nation home page.