Foxworth-Galbraith builds success with IBM SAN

For over a hundred years, Foxworth-Galbraith Lumber Company has been supplying lumber and building materials to professional builders in the Southwest. With locations throughout Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, Foxworth-Galbraith is one of the largest building materials suppliers in the country. The company proudly carries “just about everything to build just about anything,” and offers a host of specialized services to meet the needs of professional, government and retail customers.

Central to the company’s success is its business management system, which supports point of sale operations for the company’s 65 locations, as well as corporate accounts receivable, inventory, payroll and general ledger operations. Also included is a bid system to help inside and outside sales people create estimates. In all, the system supports nearly 1,000 users.

Until recently, the business management system was powered by an IBM eServer™ pSeries® 660 server and approximately 30 servers running the Microsoft® Windows® operating system—all with their own direct-attached storage.

When the p660 was nearing the end of its lease, the IT team decided it was time to upgrade the server and storage infrastructure by moving to a SAN. “It was very time-consuming to manage all that distributed storage,” notes Martin Dalton, IT administrator at Foxworth-Galbraith. “We also wanted to improve storage performance—end-of-month processing took a couple hours, during which users were locked out of the system. And scaling was cumbersome at a time when IT needed to be more responsive to the expansion needs of the business. Basically, we wanted a solid foundation for growth.”

In addition, the IT team expected that the SAN would dramatically improve storage utilization. “Having so many independent storage devices on the Windows servers wasted a lot of capacity,” notes David Davis, operations manager at Foxworth-Galbraith. “Most servers were nowhere near using their full storage capacity.”

IBM and Sirius lay the SAN foundation
To assist in the upgrade, Foxworth-Galbraith turned to IBM Business Partner Sirius Computer Solutions, with which the company had worked on previous projects. “Our Sirius team is very professional and highly skilled—we rely on their advice. Also, demonstrations at the Sirius Innovation Center in Dallas helped us understand the pros and cons of each alternative,” states Dalton.

Together with Sirius, the IT team installed an IBM System p5™ 570 server running the AIX 5L™ operating system to support the business management system. A SAN, based on a powerful IBM System Storage DS4800 storage subsystem, was configured to serve the storage needs of both the new p5-570 and the Windows servers. “We chose the DS4800 because it was built on a proven platform and demonstrated outstanding performance,” notes Dalton.

The Foxworth-Galbraith IT team selected IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software to protect the information storage on the SAN. A mix of IBM Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and LTO tape drives was replaced with an IBM LTO Ultrium Generation 3 tape library. Explains Dalton, “We wanted to consolidate onto one tape format in order to simplify management and reduce media costs.”

Fast backups and high performance help increase user productivity
Before the upgrade, backups, as well as end-of-day and end-of-month processing, used to prevent users from accessing the system. According to Jason King, Windows group supervisor at Foxworth-Galbraith, “Previously, we were backing up to several different tapes every night—mostly full backups. Now, the business management system is backed up directly to disk using the progressive incremental feature of Tivoli Storage Manager, which makes the process transparent to users.”

In addition to speeding backup times, the new system has dramatically cut batch processing times for day-end and month-end closing procedures. “Since implementing the SAN and Tivoli Storage Manager, our end-of-day processing has gone from five and a half hours down to under an hour,” states Dalton. “At the end of month, when we used to have to lock out users for seven or eight hours, we are now down to about an hour and a half.”

Restores are quicker, too. “On the old system, we were sending each night’s backup tapes offsite for safe storage. Whenever a user accidentally deleted a file, we had to recall the tape and load it on the system. File recovery could take days,” continues King. “With Tivoli Storage Manager, we access the disk copy to restore files, and it only takes a few seconds for us to give a user the lost file. Ultimately, that means less interruption to business operations.”

Thanks to the exceptional performance of the p5-570 and DS4800, users of the business management system are seeing improved response times. Notes Dalton, “When IT provides fast and reliable service, our employees are more productive. And that makes us look good.”

Impressive reliability and disaster recovery create confidence
One of the most attractive features of the new system—and IBM hardware in general—is its reliability. Dalton says, “We have an IBM RS/6000® Model F50 system that has been here since 1999, and it has never, ever crashed. If anything is going to go wrong with the system, it’s likely to be due to human error rather than a hardware issue. And the more reliable our system is, the more smoothly our business runs.”

Dalton appreciates the reliability features included in the SAN. “The DS4800 has RAID-5 arrays, and we are striping across drawers—the technique is called channel protection. Therefore, if we lose a drawer, we do not lose any data. And we have multipath connections to servers and redundant power supplies.”

In addition, Tivoli Storage Manager disaster recovery management (DRM) capabilities offer management a high level of security regarding the safety of their critical business data. “The DRM functionality gives us a self-managed disaster recovery solution for the business management system,” explains King. “Every day, Tivoli Storage Manager offers us a customized ‘instruction manual’ for rebuilding the system in the event of a failure. Having that report in hand is essential so that we can bring up our disaster recovery site very efficiently if we need to.”

Automation saves time for small IT team
One of the most impressive benefits of the upgrade has been the boost in IT efficiency and administrative productivity: Simpler storage management using the DS4800 tools, less time spent jockeying tapes and managing backups and the automation of unattended operations. Training for all those capabilities was provided by Sirius.

The result has had a profound effect on Dalton and his team. “We’re a very small IT shop. We no longer have night or weekend operators. Now our end-of-day process runs unattended in the middle of the night,” he explains. “We used to have problems with tapes loading and other issues, and we would have to deal with them remotely or come in to the office to fix them. The reliability and automation of the system have made life much easier for our team.”

Reduced processing windows open up business opportunities
The IT team isn’t the only group at Foxworth-Galbraith benefiting from these greatly reduced batch processing windows. “Over the years, there have been a lot of requests from our business development folks to receive more information at the end of the day. But because our end-of-day processes were already so long, we were unable to accommodate those requests,” Dalton says. “Now that our end-of-day process can be completed quickly, we can meet those requests and provide much more insight into our business. Thanks to the IBM system, we have more information to help improve the way we do business.”

The new system is also having a direct effect on the company’s retail operations. “In the past, some stores wanted to stay open later in order to compete with the bigger national chains, and to better serve the customers. However, because our end-of-day processes ran so long, we had to tell them no,” concludes Dalton. “But now, the stores each have the flexibility to set their own hours to meet their customers’ needs. Ultimately, that is huge, because catering to our customers is what our company is all about.”

For more information
For more information, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us on the Web at:

ibm.com/servers/storage/