Case Studies: McCormick and Company Inc, Meritage Homes Corporation, and Winn-Dixie.
Throughout the 1990s, the AS/400 was the pre-eminent workhorse of America's IT infrastructure. The line was refreshed in 2000 and renamed the eServer iSeries and was again renamed the System i in 2008. This generation of midrange servers was phased out in 2008, to be replaced by the IBM Power Systems range in 2008.
As technology advances and the demands businesses make of their IT infrastructure changes, upgrading to new technology becomes a necessity. We are going to look at three companies that have achieved increased productivity and profitability by upgrading to IBM Power Systems servers.
McCormick and Company Inc is one of the world's largest suppliers of herbs, spices and speciality foods, employing over 8000 people and with a revenue of $3.19 billion. It runs all of its critical processes on SAP ERP applications. McCormick needs to be able to respond quickly to the rapidly shifting world market in spices and requires constant availability to avoid losing business advantage. In 2011 McCormick replaced their existing servers with Power 7 processor-based machines. They now run 60 Power 7 servers, with 120 partitions. The upgrade has reduced backup times by 100% and more than halved their yearly downtime. The use of DB2 on the servers has enabled a 52% saving in database sizes.
The Meritage Homes Corporation is a real estate development company that builds homes for families across America. It employs more than 1300 people and is regularly mentioned in the Fortune 1000 rankings of highest-revenue US companies. The company wanted to reduce its IT costs and save energy. Its previous servers were older inefficient models. They also intended to update their CRM and ERP software to enable real-time transactions. Meritage chose to base their new IT strategy on a Power 770 server running IBM's System i operating system. This enabled them to streamline their sales process, increasing the efficiency of their sales staff by providing instant availability data. It also improved the metrics available to management, allowing them to allocate resources more efficiently. Additionally, the Power 7's energy-efficient technology enabled Meritage to make significant savings on their data center costs.
Winn-Dixie, based in Jackson, Florida, run 600 grocery stores across the southeast of the United States. Before they upgraded to an IBM-based system their IT infrastructure constituted 600 stand-alone servers in their stores. The maintenance costs of this distributed system were enormous, and so they decided to consolidate by using PowerVM technology to support 16 stores each on JS22 Blade Servers at a central location. Doing so enabled the company to make a $5 million dollar capital cost saving, which they redirected to store remodelling. Application performance increased by 10 times, and disaster recovery was reduced from days to hours.
Each of these companies made significant savings on their IT expenditure, and increased the productivity and performance of their business operations by investing in IBM Power servers. Midland Information Systems can advise your business how to achieve the same results
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