Tupperware Heats Up for Holidays with New Power Servers
December 7, 2010 Alex Woodie
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Tupperware Australia recently unwrapped an early Christmas present it bought for itself: a pair of brand new Power Systems Model 750 servers running the IBM i operating system. The shiny new IBM gear will allow the company to process twice as many orders on the Internet, and provide headroom for future growth. Tupperware Australia is in charge of distributing the popular food-preserving products through its own direct-sales force of 6,000, plus 32 other Tupperware distributors in Australia and New Zealand. The company has long been a customer of IBM’s midrange gear, and recent demands placed on its Web-based ordering systems mandated an upgrade in hardware and software capacity. The two new Power 750 servers that went live in October will provided a much-needed boost to the back-end processing power of the company’s two Web-based ordering systems, one used for the direct sales force, and another, called TupperNet, that’s used by its distribution partners. A gaggle of six new System x3550 servers were brought in to run the e-commerce Web sites, but orders and fulfillment activities are still managed using IBM i gear. The new IBM i servers have boosted the transactional throughput for Tupperware Australia, says Gary Zuccala, a client consultant with Advent One, the large VAR that helped install the new gear. “Performance is better, processing and response times are faster. Back-up times have halved so uptime has significantly improved,” he states in a press release. In addition to the Power7-based processors, the company installed IBM i version 6.1, a new release of WebSphere Application Server, and IBM’s iCluster High Availability (formerly DataMirror), which is used to replicate data and objects from the primary Power 750 to the backup. The migration took only a couple of hours, according to Tupperware Australia’s IT operations manager, Con Sardellis. “This business cannot afford any significant outage. With the support of IBM and Advent One, the migration to the Power 750 was painless,” he states in a press release.
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