GNC Mexico, the world’s biggest GNC (nutritional supplement) retailer, wanted to expand its infrastructure, save costs on technology ownership and gain flexibility around technology use.

Its system is absolutely mission-critical and the project would not only involve a change of operating system, but also a move to a completely new hardware platform.
GNC decided the solution to reach all those goals was to migrate existing enterprise applications and database from its proprietary platform to an entirely new open source platform.

With IBM’s help, and that of partner Genesys Informatica, it moved its Oracle 10g database and E-Business Suite, as well as accounting, POS and executive reporting applications to IBM System x servers and was back to full production in less than four months. The revamp is reducing purchase and operations costs thanks to open source standards and open source operating systems.

Once completed, the IBM system delivered an 80% performance in some application interface processes.

“We could have stayed with our existing vendor, but we saw an opportunity not only to improve our hardware, but also to lower our costs,” said IT manager Javier Flores.

“It was clear to us that Linux-and the support for it by Oracle and by hardware vendors like IBM-has reached a level of maturity sufficient to support enterprise-class operations like ours. That kind of industry leadership is important when considering a major migration such as this.”

Open source was a requirement as GNC wanted stability, but primary motivators were cost and flexibility in technology choice, said GNC.

Going open source eliminated recurring license fees tied to the proprietary UNIX system, and the flexibility lets GNC choose the technology it felt best suited its need.

“When we added up all the factors-the maturity of Linux plus the openness, quality and performance of the available technology, it became clear that it was a good time to make our move,” says Flores.

The first step for such a major IT effort, though, is getting support, and of course, funding from the business. For GNC that was an easy pitch to make as the existing systems were overloaded. The database was already at 320GB and growing at 1GB a month.

“That put the project on a very fast track,” Flores says. “We were able to make a very strong business case based on cost, as well as expected performance and scalability gains.”

The second step was the sizing project to define requirements for the new platform extending out a minimum of three years, and then evaluating vendors. That process took two weeks.

GNC Mexico wanted best of breed when it came to capability, technology, cost and responsiveness. IBM had already proven itself to be a good services provider.

“We had an existing relationship with IBM and Genesys,” Flores explains. “They had given us good service, so we had a level of comfort. But what drove our decision was really a combination of factors, not just our business relationship. We liked the IBM commitment to, and investment in, open standards and Linux,” he says.

The IT platform is based on two IBM System x servers running Red Hat Linux Enterprise Advanced, with the Oracle database running on one server in 64-bit for increased performance, and the applications running on the other server under 32-bit.

GNC’s processing loads involve interfacing applications and the new platform offers speed improvements for these loads of 60 percent on average, with some processes much faster.

For example, creating profit and loss statements took three hours on the old system. It is now completed in 30 minutes, and where end-of-month closing took 16 hours, it now takes four hours. Bank reconciliation time has been slashed from 16 hours to 30 minutes.

No one can argue that IBM plus open source can equal big time return-on-investments.