What do you do when your legacy hardware can’t do what you need it to do and it’s playing havoc with your Oracle system? Well in the case of Aviza Technology you migrate to IBM.

The semiconductor equipment maker faced that exact scenario when its Sun Solaris-based infrastructure began negatively impacting performance of its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) with downtime events and errors.

So it went about investigating potential vendors and options and it chose IBM as it was concerned about uptime, maintenance and having specialized skills available

It decided to deploy a two-tier Oracle configuration, with Oracle EBS v11.5.10 on one IBM System x3850 4-socket server and Oracle Database 10g on one IBM System x3950 16-socket server. Both are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

The migration brought more than a few benefits, from better performance to greater scalability.

In fact Aviza tech leaders say the System x has exceeded expectations around reliability and performance and it’s very happy about headroom capabilities. The system could grow to three or four tiers with ease.

As part of the migration effort the company also upgraded from Oracle EBS 11.0.3 to 11.5.10 and from Oracle Database 8i to 10g.

The company’s finance group is reaping productivity rewards. The department’s monthly cost roll-ups used to take anywhere from eight to 18 hours to run, and now they take less than four.

Not a shabby return-on-investment.