Turner Industries turns up availability to support 24/7 operations

Family-owned industrial construction company Turner Industries offers solutions in areas including heavy industrial construction, maintenance, pipe, module and vessel fabrication, equipment, rigging, pulp and paper and heavy hauling. Established in 1960, the company employs approximately 17,000 people and has its headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States. Turner Industries has built its reputation as a world-class industrial contractor serving the petrochemical, chemical, refining, energy, power generation and related industries.

Recognizing the need for greater availability
An Oracle JD Edwards World A9.1 application suite is the basis for all operations at Turner Industries, so any issues affecting the performance of these systems impacts the company’s general productivity. With upwards of 500 users submitting jobs at peak times, the company’s existing server infrastructure began suffering poor response times, tying up IT employees in managing the backlog.

Each day, Turner Industries brought its systems down for a three-hour window at midnight so that it could run back ups and roll out necessary updates. With some of the company’s employees on night shifts, this meant they were sometimes unable to input data into systems while on their shift, and either needed to wait until they next came into work or ask someone else to enter information on their behalf. This was both inconvenient and introduced a risk of errors. Turner Industries decided that in order for it to be a truly 24/7 business, its systems needed to be up and running all the time.

Finding the right solution
As long-term users of IBM POWER® technology with the IBM i operating system and integrated DB2® database, Turner Industries did not consider any other vendors besides IBM. The company looked to CMA Technology Solutions – an IBM Premier Business Partner it had been working with for 15 years – for help in sizing the solution. CMA provided tools to track usage on the company’s existing infrastructure, using this information to accurately predict the capacity and throughput required to upgrade from a Power® 550 to Power 740 system and move from IBM POWER5 to POWER7® processor technology.

“CMA and IBM worked seamlessly together to thoroughly analyze our requirements and come up with a solution that would both meet our present needs and accommodate future growth,” says Durel Braud, Director of Business Systems at Turner Industries. “We allotted 10 hours for implementation of the Power 740 machines, but they were up and running in just six, with minimal disruption to operations. In fact, some employees did not even realize the changeover was happening!”

Unleashing the power of solid-state technology
Selecting the IBM Power 740 Express server enabled Turner Industries to choose to deploy a number of IBM Enterprise Solid-State Drives (SSDs), offering exceptional performance. Initially, the company purchased four SSDs, but eventually chose to implement a total of 12 SSDs as a result of the impressive performance improvement shown.

“We now run some of our most time-critical systems on solid-state disks, including our database, finance and payroll,” explains Richy Peebles, Systems Administrator and Analyst at Turner Industries. “Since moving these systems to the SSDs, we have experienced dramatic improvements in performance. There has been an average reduction in response times of 50 percent across all applications, with some cut by up to 90 percent.

“Specifically, the impact on our annual close has been huge, with the time taken to process end-of-year batch jobs dropping from a minimum of eight hours to just one hour – an 88 percent decrease. Meanwhile, our payroll department can now process payroll in a tenth of the time taken previously. When you consider that they process 25-30 versions of payroll each week for over 16,000 employees, this represents a major productivity gain.”

The SSDs also helped the Turner Industries team reduce the amount of time needed for an operating system upgrade. They recently chose to upgrade from IBM i version 6.1 to version 7.1. The upgrade was completed in four hours, whereas previous upgrades took over six hours.

Moving to always-on systems
Since moving to the new solution, Turner Industries has experienced 100 percent uptime and has gained a fully mirrored backup, ensuring that in the event of a disaster, the company can be back up and running in less than one hour. IBM Maintenance and Technical Support Services provides 24/7 support services, and self-reporting tools integrated into the IBM Power 740 servers mean that IBM is sometimes aware of issues before the Turner Industries IT team even notices.

The project enables Turner Industries to realize its goal of eliminating the daily backup window and moving to always-on systems. As a result, night shift workers can use applications whenever they like, helping to boost productivity and increase the accuracy of the information stored on the company’s systems.

With IBM PowerVM®, Turner Industries will be able to run multiple environments on the same server, making it possible for the IT teams to carry out testing and development without affecting performance.

“Deploying the new solution helps us facilitate new application development, by making it possible for us to carry out testing in a completely isolated environment on the same server as our production systems,” says Mike Venable, Manager of Application Development at Turner Industries. “This has greatly increased flexibility for us, allowing us to try new things without affecting everyday operations, and without the need for a downtime window.”

Boosting capacity while keeping costs low
The highly energy-efficient, compact design of the Power 740 Express servers has enabled Turner Industries to triple capacity in terms of disk space while reducing its server footprint to less than a third of what it was previously.

Braud comments: “Combining reductions in our server footprint of more than 66 percent with the superb performance improvements has made it easy for us to justify the cost of the server refresh to our management, with the gains far outweighing the costs.”

Preparing for the future
The IBM Power 740 platform gives Turner Industries non-disruptive growth options, equipping it to deal with business growth in a more controlled and less risky way. Additional compute power can be added to the JD Edwards World environment simply by licensing another processor for the IBM i operating system and entering in a code, requiring zero downtime.

“The nature of our business means it is very difficult for us to predict company growth, and the IT team needs to be able to respond quickly when more capacity is called for,” explains Braud. “The Power 740 platform gives us the freedom to plug and go whenever we need more headroom. We have already implemented more SSDs ourselves, with no extra support needed, and this gives us a major competitive advantage.”

Stephen Toups, CIO at Turner Industries, concludes: “The results speak for themselves – moving to IBM POWER7 with solid-state technology has done more to please our end-users than anything else in the last three years. Looking to the future, we feel confident that the solution will accommodate our growth for the next five years, and that we have gained the ideal platform to support our vital JD Edwards environment.”