Olympus Finds Efficiency, Reliability in System i Running Linux

Published: April 25, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. That seems to be the message coming from Olympus America, a manufacturer of cameras and medical equipment that is in the middle of an IT makeover. At the center of the overhaul are a pair of new Model 570s running new stuff, such as Linux and Web services, right alongside the old stuff, such as the tried-and-true J.D. Edwards World software.

According to an IBM announcement last week, Olympus recently selected IBM to expand its Web services environment, and as a result, it has added 50 Web services written in J2EE. These applications run on an Apache Tomcat Web application server running on a Red Hat Linux operating system, which in turn is running on one of the partitions of a 25-way System i (the latest new name given to IBM's AS/400 line). Other partitions run World and other backend OS/400 apps, in addition to Tivoli Storage Manager running in an AIX partition and backing up 300 attached Windows servers.

The performance of these new Web services applications is remarkable, according to IBM. The 50 applications only require one processor and 1GB of memory, compared to two processors and 2GB of memory on the old system, IBM says, which somehow translates to a three-to-one improvement.

Also happy is Olympus' Michael Hughes, executive director of application development and information engineering. "Running Linux on System i has provided Olympus with rock-solid availability and reliability," Hughes says. "Instead of addressing periodic failures and reboots, we can focus on our business while System i handles such key corporate functions as inventory, shipping, and finance."