IBM reduces cost and supports growth with a consolidated solution for Wells’ Dairy

Founded in 1913 and based in Le Mars, Iowa, Wells’ Dairy, Inc., is the largest family-owned and managed dairy processor in the United States, known for their popular BLUE BUNNY® ice cream and novelties.

Wells’ Dairy has a peak selling season from April to September, and during the heaviest part of that season, from June through August, they have a zero downtime requirement which requires maximum availability and high performance to keep up with production and distribution.

Looking for a sweet deal to refresh the enterprise computing environment

In 2005, Wells’ Dairy replaced their existing HP systems running mission-critical UNIX® applications with the modular IBM Power® 570, enabling their infrastructure to grow without the need for additional datacenter resources. “We were faced with purchasing larger and larger HP hardware,” says Mike Kooistra, Director of Information Technology for Wells’ Dairy. “But the Power 570 was a very good move for us, and the performance was even better than we anticipated.”

As the popularity of Wells’ Dairy’s products grew over the last few years, so did the need for a solution that would work within the existing data center facility—and enable the IT team to quickly meet service requirements while ensuring high availability. Wells’ Dairy turned to IBM Premier Business Partner Forsythe Solutions Group, Inc., to implement a solution for both their UNIX applications on IBM Power Systems™ and Linux applications on IBM System x® that would allow them to reduce overall costs while enabling them to improve service and manage risks—especially during peak summer months.

Serving up a smaller footprint with an IBM BladeCenter solution

Forsythe worked with Wells’ Dairy to consolidate their existing hardware onto 14 IBM BladeCenter JS22 blade servers and 52 IBM BladeCenter HS21 blade servers in seven IBM BladeCenter H chassis. This solution met the company’s requirement to run AIX and Linux applications in the same footprint.

“We have a database that has nearly a terabyte of data in it, and we wanted to stay on the AIX platform for the ease of migration, so we needed to be binary-level compatible,” recalls Ron Zellers, Enterprise Computing Manager for Wells’ Dairy. “We also migrated to AIX on our HR applications platform, while we run Linux on most of the other enterprise systems. No one but IBM could provide offerings that would let us run both AIX and Linux in the same blade environment.”

The solution also reduced the IBM infrastructure footprint in the Wells’ Dairy data center from five racks to two. “We were planning to expand our data center,” Zellers explains, “and we didn’t have to because of the IBM BladeCenter implementation.”

Gaining flexibility, scalability and efficiency

Wells’ Dairy runs Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on the Power blades running AIX, including databases for their Oracle ERP suite and their Lawson human resources application. By spreading the Oracle RAC load across three different BladeCenter JS22 POWER6™ processor-based blades, Wells’ Dairy gained a more scalable and cost-effective solution than they had before. The company deployed BladeCenter HS21 blades for their Linux-based workloads, which includes the Oracle ERP suite middle-tier software and other applications. This environment is virtualized with VMware.

Zellers says this implementation has made the IT organization more efficient and more flexible. “It is much easier to add Oracle modules if we want to,” he says. “If we need more horsepower, we can just add another blade. Virtualizing has made things more efficient too—because we don’t have idle systems just sitting there.”

As for performance gains, he says, “We’ve also seen an estimated 25 percent average increase in speed, and some of the larger application processing sped up even more than that. The summer months present us with a challenge to meet the business needs for high-performance processing, and we have been able to meet that demand this year.”

Implementing a state-of-the-art disaster recovery solution

Wells’ Dairy also engaged Forsythe to conduct a business impact analysis to identify critical applications for consideration in their disaster recovery planning. They set up a secondary failover site where redundant BladeCenter systems reside. The savings realized through the IBM consolidation enabled Wells’ Dairy to implement a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy in a very cost-effective manner.

“With the efficiencies we’ve gained, we were able to implement disaster recovery much more easily and more cost-effectively,” says Zellers. “Prior to the move to a full DR site, we could just recover from backup disk. However, when we implemented the blade servers, it enabled us to have true disaster recovery systems. The new disaster recovery solution provided significant cost avoidance.”

“It’s a state-of-the-art disaster recovery strategy,” adds Kooistra. “We’re able to support our Tier 1 applications within 8 hours of any type of disaster.”

A cost-effective solution designed to support future growth

Thanks to their recent consolidation and disaster recovery strategy implementation, Wells’ Dairy has benefited from higher performance, a reduced footprint, reduced power usage, improved scalability, and significant cost savings and cost avoidance.

“We’ve saved over $380,000 in annual operating costs by making the move to BladeCenter,” reports Kooistra. “And that doesn’t include the data center expansion costs we avoided, or the savings we realized with our disaster recovery solution.”

With the new solution in place, Zellers says the company is well-positioned for whatever IT challenges they may face in the coming years. “We feel like we have a solution in place that will last for several years, and we feel really good about that.”

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: ibm.com/systems/bladecenter

For more information about Wells’ Dairy, visit: www.wellsdairy.com

For more information about Forsythe, visit: www.forsythe.com