IBM has recently revealed the details of a UK project that shows off the capabilities offered by System i and System x consolidation.

To consolidate five server farms spread across four locations, paper manufacturer St Regis worked with Premier Business Partner Logicalis to centralise its Intel-processor based servers and consolidate them to System x servers and BladeCenter systems in a single location, with the System x servers linked to St Regis’s System i using Integrated xSeries Adapter technology.

The benefits are better performance and availability for disk-intensive applications; reduced need for IT staff to travel to other sites; the ability to re-start servers rapidly on new hardware in the event of a component failure; simplified backup and restore processes; and avoiding the cost of buying additional software licences.

St Regis is one of the UK’s leading paper manufacturers, producing around 850,000 tonnes a year, about 70% of which consists of corrugated case and packaging materials. The company is part of DS Smith Plc, an international company specialising in packaging manufacturing and office products wholesaling.

Following growth through corporate acquisitions, St Regis had an IT infrastructure spread across four locations, only two of which had in-house IT expertise. Consequently, skilled staff were required to travel between sites for routine maintenance. The servers in each location tended to be under-utilised, and a per-server licensing model for a key piece of software meant St Regis was paying for more licences than necessary.

Robert Notley, IT director at St Regis, says: “We wanted to make more efficient use of hardware and software resources, and simplify management and maintenance of infrastructure. We had already consolidated our System i infrastructure, and sought a similar result for our Intel-processor based systems.”

After reviewing several proposals, St Regis opted for a solution designed and delivered by Logicalis. Following centralisation of the existing servers to a single data centre, the combined team began the process of consolidation.

“Logicalis understood our business requirements well, and built a solution that helped us keep within our tight budgetary requirements -- we’re constantly pushing down our IT costs, which are currently less than 0.75% of turnover,” says Notley.

The BladeCenter implemented by St Regis contains 10 blade servers, nine of which run Citrix Presentation Server, delivering business applications to end-users. The local hard drives on the blade servers store only the Citrix server images. All other data for the Windows/Intel environment is physically stored on a System i5 550 server and used by four external System x servers linked to the i550 using Integrated xSeries Adapters (IXA), and by five Integrated xSeries Servers (IXS) inside the i550.

“By consolidating the data from our Intel-processor based systems onto the i550, we have boosted the performance of disk-intensive applications,” says Notley. “The solution has also improved the availability of our Windows-based systems, and made it possible to restart more quickly in the event of a hardware failure.

“St Regis has used System i for a number of years. We value its reliability, ease of management and low cost of ownership. With the IXA and IXS technology, we have extended those benefits to our Intel-architecture systems, which will help us to keep reducing the cost of IT to the business.”

The externally-attached System x servers are diskless and boot from virtual disk volumes on the i550. Should an external server fail, St Regis can restore the server image stored on the i550 on a different Intel-processor based server on the network.

In addition to enabling more rapid disaster recovery, the use of the i550 as a platform for storing all business-critical data simplifies backup. Previously, St Regis had numerous local tape drives at different sites, requiring constant manual administration. Now, the disks in the i550 -- holding not only i5/OS data but also Windows data -- are continuously mirrored to a second System i, and all data is automatically backed up to the enterprise-class tape drives in both systems.

“By centralising Windows systems and consolidating them to the i5, we’ve significantly reduced time and effort spent managing backups,” says Notley. “The i550’s RAID array has cut the time to process some batch runs from an hour to a few minutes. The increase in speed means we can accomplish more runs on a single piece of hardware, maximising ROI.”

The centralisation of the Citrix server farm to a single site has enabled St Regis to grow its user base without needing to buy additional licences. Previously, licensing was on a per-server basis, and the company needed to maintain duplicate licences in multiple sites. Following the consolidation to BladeCenter, St Regis has been able to rationalise its software licensing, eliminating unnecessary duplication.

Frank Booty, industry reporter.