Story 1
Storage Virtualization & Replication
Background: Customer has spent the last 18 months implementing a new IT architecture and design, using advanced IBM technology and virtualization.
Challenge/Problem/Requirements: Customer has a challenge with limited floor space, power availability, as well as remote replication requirements.
Solution/Implementation: Customer had many stand alone servers with all direct attached storage. We architected and implemented the following designs.
- This implementation was across two hospital buildings
- IBM Blade and System X
- Dell and HP Intel server consolidation into IBM Blades and xSeries running VMware
- Three Blade Chassis and 40 Blades
- Four large xSeries servers, running four instances of VMware ESX server and VMotion, as well as using P2V server migration tool.
- All SAN attached to central IBM Storage, DS8000/DS4000
- Migrate standalone pSeries p650 servers into six 16-way p570’s, with 6 LPAR’s each
- Implement VIO and SAN attached to central IBM Storage, DS8000/DS4000
- Implement large Cisco SAN, with 9216, 9509 and 9513 technology
- Implement TSM for full enterprise Backup and recovery, with IBM TS3500 and LTO3 and 3592 Tape technology with encryption
- Implement IBM SVC technology to virtualize all the Disk Storage and enable remote mirroring between buildings
IBM Systems Implementation:
- (6) p570 Servers with 24 LPARs
- (4) System X servers running VMware with VMotion
- (3) IBM Blade Centers, 40 Blades
- (1) DS8000 with 20TB’s
- (1) DS4300 with 11TB’s
- (2) SVC 2-node clusters with remote mirroring and Flash Copy
- (2) IBM TS3500 Tape Libraries, one with LTO3, one with encryption 3592 drives
- (4) Cisco director/switches, 9216, 9509 and 9513
- (2) TSM servers for Enterprise Backup and Recovery
- Benefits (Maximize investment of resources)
- Server consolidation of 50 standalone systems
- Eliminate dedicated processors
- Maximize utilization of all processors
- Virtualized systems with VMware
- Virtualized Storage with SVC
- Remote replication for business continuity
Story 2
Performance Optimization
Company: Worlds leading producer of delicious and distinctive tasting juices, jams & jellies made from Concord and Niagara grapes grown only in the US and part of Canada.
Background: Customer spent 1½ years implementing a scale out architecture for the corporate applications (ERP, Demantra, Oracle) using Linux/Oracle/RAC on 2/4 way Intel Xeon servers with OCFS, NFS and SAN storage. Customer has spent the last 18 months implementing a new IT architecture and design, using advanced IBM technology and virtualization.
Challenge/Problem/Requirements: As the migration to the new architecture progressed, along with continued business growth and demands on the I/T computing infrastructure, they out grew the 2-node (4-way processor node) RAC clusters and scaled out to 4-node RAC clusters only to find they still could not meet their requirements as the scaling was not linear. Customer has a challenge with limited floor space, power availability, as well as remote replication requirements.
Test /Benchmark: ATS configured a trial IBM p570 4-way p5 1.65Ghz processors with 8G of
RAM and SAN storage with AIX/Oracle to parallel run one of the customers two hour Demantra workloads which was hosted on Dell 4-way 3.2Ghz Xeon processors with 8G of RAM and EMC Clarion CX600 storage with Oracle. ATS configured and tuned AIX, p570 and SAN for optimal performance for Oracle based on ATS Best Practices.
Results were a 2.8 times through-put improvement with the workload completing in 43 minutes and a price/performance ratio of 1.9 times the cost. Some workloads experienced a 5 times improvement.
Solution/Implementation: Customer switched to pSeries Oracle/RAC and pSeries virtualization for scale up and scale out architecture. A Server consolidation was then performed of the 30 DELL servers (86 CPUs) and SAN storage to (2) IBM p570 with 25 LPARs, GFPS, Oracle RAC and IBM DS6800 SAN storage for both Open and zSeries storage. Customer had many stand alone servers with all direct attached storage. We architected and implemented the following designs.
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