Univar extends computing capabilities with IBM System z9

Univar USA is the leading industrial chemical distributor in the United States, providing chemical products and distribution services. With over US$3.2 billion in annual sales reported in 2006 and almost 4,500 employees, Univar USA is growing rapidly and faces the ongoing challenge of responding to this growth from an IT infrastructure standpoint.

Contributing to the company’s growth was Univar USA’s recent acquisition of CHEMCENTRAL, another top North American chemical distributor with 2006 revenue reported at US$1.4 billion. Univar USA also had plans to take on a portion of the processing workload from Univar Canada. These two factors resulted in an immediate need for IT upgrades to handle the increased data processing requirements.

Univar USA’s Manager of Technical Services, Dean Schultz, says, “Our business was really taking off at an exponential rate. The ability to respond to growth from an architectural perspective was a major challenge. We had too much to do and not enough time.”

Addressing the challenge of growth
To address the company’s growth challenge, Univar USA turned to Sirius Computer Solutions, a long-standing vendor and IBM Premier Business Partner. Sirius worked with the Univar USA team to plan and implement an evolved IT infrastructure to support the increased data load. They quickly determined that the company’s existing IBM eServer™ zSeries® 890 mainframe was running out of capacity, in terms of both storage and memory and would need to be replaced to accommodate the new growth.

The replacement system would need to support Univar USA’s existing software environment and be able to scale to meet future requirements. Addressing the issue of planning for future scalability, Greg Mueller, z/OS Systems Programmer for Univar USA, says, “One of the problems we’ve had over the last decade is that we were looking for a new box every 15 to 18 months. We wanted something that would stay with us for a while. The IBM System z9 Enterprise Class fit this requirement.”

The natural mainframe choice
Univar USA’s software environment includes a highly customized enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is tied to their Customer Information Control System (CICS) and will operate only on a mainframe. The IBM z9™ Enterprise Class (EC) was a natural choice for the company, which needed a system that would be flexible enough to accommodate future needs while continuing to support these requirements.

The z9 EC also offers Univar USA the capability to handle the increased workload anticipated for the company’s CICS-based applications. If the CICS environment ultimately grows beyond the current capacity of the z9 EC, additional memory and processor capacity can be added to the z9 to support it.

“Valuable resources”
Extending the capabilities of the solution, the IBM z9 EC is configured to include two special purpose processors designed to add flexibility to IBM mainframes—IBM System z9 Integrated Information Processor (IBM zIIP) and IBM System z9 Application Assist Processor (IBM zAAP). zIIP is designed to support ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), data warehousing and other IBM DB2® utilities, while zAAP supports dynamic Web-based applications and service-oriented architecture-based technologies such as Java™ and XML.

“I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what those resources can do for us,” says Mueller. “Over the long term, they’re going to be very valuable resources and we will continue to look for opportunities to leverage that investment.”

The IBM z9 EC also allows Univar USA to continue leveraging Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), a central specialty processor dedicated to Linux® workloads. IFLs allow Univar USA to use logical partitions (LPARs) to run Java applications on the Linux operating system, while other LPARs run IBM z/OS®.

“A couple of year ago we started testing the idea of running Linux machines on IFLs as part of our virtualization effort,” Mueller explains. “At last count, we have about 40 Linux machines running in development and production. We’re attempting to try to leverage virtualization on all of our platforms.”

The IBM z/VM® operating system enables the virtualization of these applications, which include the company’s e-commerce applications, an FTP server and IBM Domino® and IBM WebSphere® software.

Key benefits
The choice of an IBM z9 EC offered several key benefits to Univar USA, including the ability to consolidate a variety of open systems applications on both Linux and z/OS. The implementation of the z9 EC not only simplified the environment from an administrative and management perspective, it also made it easier to recover applications when facing disaster recovery scenarios. In addition, although CICS throughput has increased with the additional workload, administrators are reporting a drop in CPU utilization per transaction. The ability to utilize increased memory has also improved paging speed.

“I run a monthly series of jobs that show process utilization for the entire z/OS complex and we’ve seen a decrease,” Mueller reports. “That means that a processor upgrade won’t be necessary for a while.” In fact, Univar USA expects to utilize the new mainframe for at least three years. “To get specific on the metrics,” Schultz adds, “the old box was running at 85 MSUs and the new one is currently sitting at 115 MSUs to support the CHEMCENTRAL load. When Canada is ready to go live, we’ll increase again to 140 MSUs.”

A true partner
Sirius Computer Solutions was involved in each phase of the project, from planning to implementation, advising on big-picture planning as well as attending to logistical concerns such as power and environmental requirements. Prior to the z9 EC installation, Sirius conducted a Solution Assurance Review to ensure that the solution addressed Univar USA’s needs and that it was properly configured.

Schultz says he’s been very pleased with the team effort Sirius provided. “Sirius met every commitment they made to us,” he reports. “We’re an unequivocally satisfied customer at this point.”

Looking to the future
These results have caught the attention of technology planners in other parts of the company, Schultz says. “They’re now looking at what we did in the U.S. and saying, ‘They have a cost effective, scalable distribution control system and we are a global distribution control company. So why don’t we look at what we could do there?’”

Thanks to the success of this effort, discussions are now taking place regarding ways to extend the solution within Univar USA as well as to other sectors of the company. “The z9 was the perfect solution for what we needed,” Schultz concludes. “No matter what the business does in the future, we have a footprint that we can grow in.”