Baldor consolidates hundreds of servers and cuts IT and energy cost

Baldor Electric Company, located in Fort Smith, Arkansas, builds industrial electric motors, mechanical power transmission products, drives and generators. Baldor sells its products worldwide, to distributors and original equipment manufacturers in more than 70 countries. The company operates from 50 sales offices and warehouses in North America, and 26 offices serving international markets. The company also runs 26 manufacturing sites in the U.S., Canada, England, Mexico and China.

In 2007, Baldor acquired Reliance Dodge, one of its major competitors. In the process, it also acquired approximately 200 stand-alone servers of many different types, running various operating systems and applications.

The increase in server numbers and system complexity threatened to increase IT costs considerably. Baldor aims at continual reduction in IT costs as a proportion of sales revenue, so the new acquisition sparked a review of the hardware and software landscape. Baldor wanted to integrate the two organizations as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible.

Mark Shackelford, VP - Information Services, explains: “We found ourselves running a wide mix of solutions, from IBM System z® through high-end UNIX® boxes to Intel® processor-based systems. Availability is a key issue for Baldor, and during our regular recovery tests we discovered that the complexity of the infrastructure was making it very difficult to maintain the levels of service our users require.”

“In the same review, we noticed that our System z platform had never suffered a hardware outage. Our Linux® environments, both on System z and on other servers, were similarly robust from an operating system perspective. We were already running Baldor's SAP applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on System z, and chose to make this our preferred combination for all mission-critical services.”

Consolidating on SAP, Linux, and System z

Having selected the IBM System z and SAP route, the Baldor IT team set about the migration and consolidation process.

Baldor runs its core SAP landscape on an IBM System z10™ Enterprise Class. Its IBM DB2® databases run in IBM z/OS® partitions, while 70 z/VM® partitions provide Linux environments that act as SAP application servers. The company uses six Central Processors for general-purpose workload, as well as three z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs) and 16 Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors.

“One of the great things about System z is the ability to reduce costs by deploying specialty engines,” comments Mark Shackelford. “We run about 40 percent of our DB2 workload on zIIPs, which brings the licensing cost down by about 95 percent compared to an Intel or UNIX infrastructure. All of our Linux environments run on IFLs, which again deliver a very considerable cost saving.”

Piece by piece, Baldor is transferring business systems and processes from the Reliance Dodge servers to the z10 EC. When the migration is complete, the former servers are decommissioned and removed from the data center.

“This consolidation exercise has basically reduced the size of our data center by 50 percent,” says Mark Shackelford. “We have freed up an area of about 3,000 sq. ft., which is now office space. This has also dramatically reduced the power and cooling requirements of our infrastructure—cutting electricity costs by 60 percent.”

High-performance, low-cost storage

Baldor has also rationalized and consolidated its storage infrastructure, moving all data onto two IBM System Storage™ DS8100 disk systems. The two DS8100s hold 30 TB, of which 4 TB is production data.

“The production environment alone accounts for 2 TB of storage, so it was important to us to find a cost-effective storage platform that would still provide the high performance that the SAP environment requires,” comments Mark Shackelford. “The DS8100 meets all these needs, and also provides features like FlashCopy®, which makes it possible to complete full off-site backups and perform disaster recovery tests very rapidly.”

To reduce storage costs further, IBM DB2 for z/OS enables hardware data compression, which has reduced the total data volume by an average of 50 percent.

“Some of the larger tables in the 100 - 200 GB range have been reduced by up to 90 percent,” adds Mark Shackelford. “And the great thing is that the compression doesn't impact performance—in fact, it actually improves it.”

Getting the best out of SAP Business Suite

The new infrastructure delivers response times of less than 500 ms in the SAP application environment, enabling the company's 4,300 SAP users to access real-time business data in SAP BusinessObjects instead of waiting for batch reporting processes. Across the business, from finance to manufacturing to sales, users can rapidly gain the business insight they need to make better, faster, more accurate decisions.

The migration to SAP on System z is already complete for Baldor's U.S. operations and those in Germany, China, Mexico and Canada—it only remains for Baldor to consolidate 10 of its plants to SAP.

“We have still got some way to go with the project, but the System z platform gives us all the capacity we're likely to need for the next three or four years,” concludes Mark Shackelford. “Upgrading to System z10 engines has given us such an increase in performance over the previous generation that we can run all the new systems on the same number of processors and still have plenty of headroom to spare. Thanks to the System z10 solution, we have been able to absorb the Reliance Dodge infrastructure while still reducing our overall IT costs as a proportion of sales revenue by 50 percent. We have also maintained our record of ultra-high availability, with no hardware outages for more than 10 years now.”