Single IBM eServer pSeries runs four Oceana companies simultaneously

With the departure of DataSoft software from the market, Federal Marine and Oceana Operations of the Oceana Group decided to run its business processes on a single IBM eServer pSeries simultaneously running JD Edwards enterprise resource management software, an Oracle database and IBM`s WebSphere software.

Federal Marine manages the new system and shares it with St Helena Bay Fishing, Lambert`s Bay Fishing and South African Sea Products.

Federal Marine and Oceana Operations IT manager, Grant Stevenson, said that reliability, compatibility and ease of use were priorities for the new system.

"Federal Marine is an FMCG company selling most canned pilchards. Our main brand, Lucky Star, has 75% of the canned pilchard market in SA - moving 500 000 cans a day.

"We simply cannot have system downtime impeding retention of our share of the market."

St Helena Bay Fishing, Lambert`s Bay Fishing and South African Sea Products are all manufacturers and will use the new system for administration, plant maintenance and human resources.

The companies` original enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, DataSoft`s Compact, ran on two RS 6000 servers, one for Federal Marine and one for the other three companies.

With Compact being phased out, Stevenson took the opportunity to centralise and consolidate software and hardware to reduce administration and total cost of ownership.

Working with consultants, Deloitte & Touche Active Era, he did extensive international research to pinpoint optimal configurations.

He chose an open platform in the form of IBM`s AIX version of Unix.

"There`s no down time with AIX," he says. "And we double-banked by building a great deal of fault-tolerance into the pSeries.

"Also, AIX`s work load manager allows you to split server resources among software components.

"That would help us achieve our aim of running all the applications on one machine."

Active Era had recommended JD Edwards to replace Compact, enabling a choice of networking the four companies via either thin client or a Web browser.

For point-and-click ease of use and because of the high number of users in remote locations where support is difficult, Stevenson opted for a Web browser.

JD Edwards recommended IBM`s web-enablement middleware, WebSphere, which is tightly integrated into JD Edwards` own products and, says Hannelie Pienaar, Active Era`s new business development manager, "a great product".

But research had turned up no precedent for putting Oracle, JD Edwards and WebSphere on a single box.

To succeed, a very powerful server able to separate processing power would be needed, so that Web traffic would not drain power away from JD Edwards or Oracle.

The pSeries, a six-way machine, became the only serious option - with competitive pricing from IBM easing the migration of Federal Marine and Oceana Operations to their new, more hardware-intensive applications.

"Also, the pSeries, AIX and WebSphere are all IBM products, so we have the compatibility we wanted," said Stevenson.

Charles Griss from Dot The I Systems Integration, the IBM business partner responsible for the AIX installation, believes that the pSeries will perform comfortably for up to five years.

"It`s a very impressive box. The only changes down the line might be some extra disk capacity and memory."

Griss is providing support on the new machine with an emphasis on optimising the performance of the SSA disk sub-system.

The sizing, configuration and installation of the pSeries took only three months.

"Working that quickly was quite a challenge because we were plugging into an existing, live system, with all the security and stability issues that that entails," said IBM SA`s Mervyn Naicker.

Active Era`s Pienaar believes that the combination of JD Edwards, WebSphere and Oracle on one pSeries will become a local and international benchmark.

"Also, there are not many combinations of AIX and JD Edwards in SA.

"So, the Federal Marine and Oceana Operations installation is of interest to everyone involved in enterprise technology."