CBH Group handles 400 percent growth with a flexible, virtualized infrastructure from IBM

The Western Australian grain belt covers 320,000 km² and produces an average annual harvest of 10 million tons—around 40 percent of Australia’s total output—95 percent of which is exported. Co-Operative Bulk Handling Group Ltd. (CBH Group) stores, markets and exports grain on behalf of its 5,500 grower-shareholders in Western Australia, and has 820 full-time employees.

Fundamental changes in the Australian grain industry meant that CBH Group was facing a significant shift in its business model. Moving from a highly regulated environment in which it effectively held a monopoly, CBH Group needed to adapt to a more open, transparent and competitive marketplace. To ensure that it remained the partner of choice for existing clients, CBH Group set out to improve its client-facing systems.

At that time, around 1,000 of the growers were using CBH Group’s grain handling solution, which is built on an application called IBIS running on IBM System i®. The organization wanted to extend usage to its full user-base of 5,500 growers. To be able to handle the estimated 400 percent overnight increase in transactional volumes without damaging performance or availability, CBH Group needed to strengthen its infrastructure.

In addition to the growth in user numbers, CBH Group identified two other factors likely to increase the strain on the grain handling system. The two preceding years had seen droughts in Australia, leading to reduced crop yields, but the forecast for the following year was for a bumper crop. The second factor was the expansion in the number of grain marketers from two to 22, as part of the deregulation of the industry. These marketers also rely on CBH Group systems, including a major payments system called Payright that was running on IBM AIX®. In parallel with the refresh of both its IBM AIX and IBM i platforms to handle this significant growth in demand, CBH Group was planning to upgrade its storage area network.

CBH Group opted to consolidate its Payright system, previously running on three IBM System p® servers, and its grain management system, previously running on IBM System i hardware, onto logical partitions on two new IBM Power 550 Express servers running PowerVM. The production Power 550 has four IBM POWER6™ processors, of which two are active and two are available for future. One of the active processors is dedicated to AIX while the other runs IBM i. The secondary data center, 9 km distant from the primary center, houses the second Power 550.

CBH Group moved business-facing reporting for the grain handling application to the Power 550 at its secondary site, leaving the production environment dedicated to client-facing activity and ensuring that performance and availability are maximized.

“High availability is a massive priority for CBH Group,“ says Mathew Regan, ICT Operations Manager. ”We are effectively a bank account for our growers, only they are depositing grain rather than cash. Grain market prices can fluctuate rapidly, so the growers need to be able to move at the right time to get the best price. To help them capitalize on what may be very brief windows of opportunity, we need to deliver the kind of always-on service they expect from their banks. Moving to IBM Power Systems gave us that capability.”


Safeguarding data

For its SAN upgrade project, CBH Group implemented an IBM System Storage™ DS4800 in each of its data centers, and introduced IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller for storage virtualization. Each DS4800 is attached to a new IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library, and the organization has deployed IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager to automatically back up business-critical data. SAN Volume Controller automatically replicates data from the primary SAN to the one in the secondary data center.

“Previously, we were struggling to manage many different backups,” says Brad Harvey, Infrastructure Manager. “Upgrading the SAN enabled us to create a single central backup procedure for all enterprise systems. The DS4800 offers both Fibre Channel and SATA disks, and SAN Volume Controller is set to steer data to the most cost-effective tier of disk storage according to the underlying requirements for speed and availability. In this way, we can match the cost of storing data to its business value.”


Virtualization on System x

CBH Group also undertook a major consolidation and virtualization exercise across its Intel® processor-based Microsoft® Windows® and Linux® servers. The organization implemented five IBM System x3850 M2 servers running VMware and one x3850 M2 dedicated to Microsoft SQL Server® in each of its two sites. Each of the 12 IBM System x® servers has four quad-core Intel Xeon processors and 128 GB RAM. Spread across the five production VMware environments are a total of 140 virtual servers, both Windows and Linux, all of which are mirrored to the five backup VMware servers in the secondary data center.

“To date, we have used the five x3850 M2 servers to replace 50 or 60 physical servers, and to meet new business requirements,” said Brad Harvey. “VMware on the x3850 M2 gives us incredible speed and flexibility in setting up new environments to meet emerging business requirements.”


More compact, efficient and flexible

CBH Group had been approaching the physical limits of its data centers in terms of the available rack space, ventilation, air conditioning and power supply. Without server and storage virtualization, the organization would have needed to make a significant capital investment to expand its data centers as its business grew. Says Brad Harvey, “With the more compact and efficient virtualized servers from IBM, the same capital investment gave us a much better and more robust infrastructure, with plenty of data center capacity for future expansion.”

The average load on the power supply to the CBH Group’s data centers has fallen from 95 percent to between 70 and 75 percent. The organization is still in the process of consolidating and virtualizing physical servers to the VMware environment on the x3850 M2 servers, so the load is expected to drop further.

The new IBM Power Systems servers are delivering excellent performance and availability, and have enabled CBH Group to handle the 400 percent increase in transactional volumes with ease.

“The Power 550 servers have dramatically improved performance in some areas,” says Brad Harvey. “For example, a batch run on the payments system that previously took seven hours to complete now finishes inside 40 minutes. We have received excellent feedback both from the internal business users and from external partners. But more importantly, the new IBM infrastructure has given us the robustness and scalability that we needed to handle the massive shift in business focus and the rapid growth in user numbers.”

Virtualization on both the Power 550 servers and the x3850 M2 environment enables CBH Group to respond rapidly to new business requirements, and to create test and development environments at no incremental cost in terms of hardware or power consumption.

Mathew Regan concludes, “The quality of engagement with the local IBM team was a major factor in the overall success of these infrastructure projects. The relationship was very open, and IBM took the time to understand our business goals, as well as the time and budget limitations.With this new, more flexible and powerful infrastructure from IBM, we can achieve our vision of effectively being an invisible support to our clients, smoothly and efficiently connecting growers and marketers with purchasers of grain.”