Emil Frey drives up availability with IBM

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The traditional Swiss automotive company Emil Frey AG is active in various European countries. In Switzerland, it represents 25 different brands of car and works in close cooperation with its eight car importers to ensure a smooth flow in the import and subsequent transportation of vehicles. Its network of dealership consists of 30 garages, and the Emil Frey Group also owns a specialised financial solutions company for vehicle leasing.

With an IT infrastructure composed of heterogeneous servers and direct-attached storage devices, Emil Frey was struggling to maintain high availability for applications and data. The numerous different hardware, operating system and software components were complicated and costly to manage, and the infrastructure was not able to adapt to the changing needs of the business.

Gustav-Adolf Meyer, Vice-Director and Manager of IT Technique: “We wanted to improve availability and increase flexibility, and consolidate our servers and our storage. By implementing an IBM solution based on IBM System i5 servers and IBM System Storage DS6800, we have achieved our goals and virtually eliminated downtime.”


Simplified infrastructure
Emil Frey had a cluster of legacy servers running the VMS operating system, and a total of eight other servers, including one previous-generation IBM System i running financials and human resources on OS/400. The legacy applications are now being redeveloped in a new Oracle environment to run under IBM AIX and Linux® in logical partitions on two new IBM System i5 570 servers.

The financial and human resources applications were transferred from OS/400 to IBM i5/OS into partitions on the i570s. These systems include several Integrated xSeries Adaptors (IXA) linking them to servers running Microsoft® Windows® and several VMware servers. The two IBM System i5 machines are in a clustered mutual failover configuration, so that the production workload of either one can be restarted on the other server in the unlikely event of a failure.

Once the migration is complete, all of Emil Frey’s business-critical systems will run in the IBM System i5 environment – enabling the company to phase out a total of 22 separate servers. To support this consolidated environment, Emil Frey has implemented four IBM System Storage DS6800s, connected via eight 2Gbit fibre channels. The DS6800 systems are mirrored using IBM Metro Mirror (formerly Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy) – part of the IBM System Storage Productivity Center offering – so that two complete copies of all data are maintained at all times.

“Just as we have consolidated our application servers to the IBM System i5, we have consolidated all our data to the IBM DS6800s,” says Meyer. “In the future, all our systems – whether i5/OS, AIX, Linux or Windows – will share the same storage resources on the DS6800s, managed and backed up from a single point of control. And thanks to Metro Mirror, we have extremely high-availability storage because we can automatically switch all systems to the backup DS6800 during planned or unplanned outages.”


Minimising downtime
Emil Frey worked on the new solution both directly with the IBM account and brand team and with an IBM Business Partner, Rosenheim AG. As can happen in any IT project, certain critical phases during the implementation necessitated a redesign of the original concept. IBM called on its worldwide network of specialised laboratories; in close cooperation with experts from these laboratories the local team was able to build a first-of-a-kind solution for Emil Frey AG, consisting of several native operating systems on a single IBM System i5, with attached external storage on IBM System Storage DS6800.

Meyer comments: “With the IBM DS6800 solution, we can take one of the IBM System i5 servers offline for maintenance and move its production workload to the other System i5. The data will continue to be synchronised by the DS6800 systems, so we can later, after completion of the maintenance work, simply reconnect the System i5 to the DS6800 and immediately in a planned process the production load can be re-distributed onto both i5 servers.”

He concludes, “The DS6800 systems provide a standardised, high-availability storage environment for all our data, and enable us to run a single enterprise backup process. The IBM solution has not only simplified our infrastructure and created full redundancy for both servers and storage, it has also helped to boost our business continuity capabilities.”