IBM PowerHA & Linux Increase Availability and Lower Cost

Client: Distributors of plastic sheet, rod, tube, film and related materials with 60 locations throughout North America.

Issue: The client dramatically increased their Information Availability, reduced cost, reduced risk and reduced complexity.  Their core Oracle JDE ERP software application runs on IBM’s OS/400 operating system on a single 550 machine.  The Disaster Recovery Plan in place was a subscription service which replaces the machine after the time of disaster with similar IBM equipment, load tapes, restore, and rebuild data connectivity to their many remote office locations.  They felt the plan was antiquated and could be improved with more current methods of technology.
 
Solution: The cost to continue running the single system combined with the equipment replacement service turned out to be more expensive than two new IBM Power 7 servers linked together constantly replicating data with IBM’s PowerHA solution. The additional system also allowed them to create a development environment separate from the main production system, which is a “best practices” method. Not ready to put the entire project to rest, their IT Director decided to create some native Linux environments virtually on the Power System in place of purchasing separate physical hardware servers, once again lowering their total cost of ownership.

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[Wattoorie]

LVM allows multiple physical disks or partitions to be treated as a single logical disk. When using LVM, logical volumes replace raw physical partitions. File systems and database tables can be mapped to logical volumes instead of raw partitions