Keeping track of production, people and company costs was no small feat for an Australian dairy product manufacturer that exports to over 100 countries and runs nine manufacturing sites through Australia.

Murray Goulburn Co-Operative Company Limited of Melbourne, a 60-year-old business, is Australia’s largest manufacturer of dairy products.

It was using SAP applications running on servers: three for production, three for development and one to run the databases. The company was also using a SAN based on storage systems.

With 600 users to support, and ever-increasing data being created, the company’s IT infrastructure was reaching its limits both with storage capacity and backup processes.

The IT team realized it couldn’t scale the environment due to the current hardware and decided to find a more flexible and scalable platform.

It went to IBM and pulled in an IBM Power Systems server to replace all seven servers.

The ability to consolidate the server system reaped rewards on several fronts. It would require less maintenance, support and energy.

The single IBM Power Systems server running IBM AIX is divided into virtual servers, providing self-contained environments for both the original SAP applications and for deployment of the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component.

The new system allows processor capacity to be assigned to virtual servers in response to workload needs.

Within the physical server, additional processors can be added or pulled to and from the available pool using IBM Capacity on Demand.

On the storage front it is using IBM SAN Volume Controller that virtualizes available storage volumes on existing storage devices and pools them into a single resource.

The IT team has found the solution much more flexible than what it had been using previously.

IBM Global Business Services handled the migration which took just three months. The production system was done in a weekend without a glitch. Moving to AIX was simpler than the IT team realized.

IBM Global Business Services also assisted with system sizing, database migration and solution implementation.

The reduction in physical servers has cut the number of CPUs from 26 to just four, with a decline in per-processor software license fees.

The lower footprint and power requirements are not only 'green,' environmentally but are saving the company on real estate costs and energy bills.

And on top of all that the company's experiencing greater system performance. Batch jobs that once took two hours on the previous platform now take two minutes. Even IT housekeeping tasks have been sliced, with one administration effort going from 24 hours to two hours.

The company is ready to upgrade its SAP applications and plans to deploy Oracle on a system that can handle that now and provide scalability down the road.