Case Studies > Manufacturing

The Same but Different

Innovative consolidation and disaster-recovery principles transfer to SNF Holding Company

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CUSTOMER: SNF Holding Company's Chemtall production facility HEADQUARTERS: Riceboro, Ga. BUSINESS: Manufacturing and distributing water-soluble polymers HARDWARE: An IBM System i 525, BladeCenter system, System Storage DS300 storage device and Linear Tape-OpenSQL Server, Exchange Servers, VMware CHALLENGE: Upgrading an aging System i platform and consolidating its PC environment SOLUTION: Using the System i 520 to consolidate servers and storage and to create ease of management and simpler disaster recovery

Although businesses may operate in different niches, they have essentially the same back-office requirements, not the least of which is sound IT architecture. So when Tracy McBride, MIS/IT director with SNF Holding Company and its North American production division, Chemtall, read this magazine's July article about Amelia Island Plantation he felt compelled to send an e-mail about his own recent IT upgrades. "My company and I just went through the same type of consolidation - but with a twist," he wrote.

Not surprisingly, the two cases were similar even though Amelia Island Plantation specializes in hospitality and SNF in producing and distributing water-soluble polymers used in wastewater treatment. Worlds apart when it comes to specialty, but not so much when it comes to using IT to support their core operations.

"Like Amelia Island Plantation, we had consolidated onto an IBM iSeries 810 box with both internal and external IBM System x servers to eliminate 27 standalone PC servers, so that part of the article really rang true to us," McBride explained. "Then we faced new challenges as the growth of our company compounded. So we chose to migrate to a new System i 525 with an attached IBM BladeCenter chassis populated with HS21 servers. To leverage our investment in equipment we already owned, we took our migration one step further and integrated all of our internal and external System x servers to the 525. The result so far has been astonishing!"

His enthusiasm is real. SNF not only consolidated a great number of servers, but also created a sound disaster-recovery (D/R) infrastructure. Given Chemtall's near-Atlantic Coast headquarters in Riceboro, Ga., this was more a matter of necessity than convenience - which became especially apparent when one of SNF's production locations fell victim to Hurricane Katrina. "It came through and devastated one of our plants down in Mississippi," McBride says, noting with relief that it's now 100-percent operational.

Regardless of industry or location, nearly every organization can benefit from rethinking its IT infrastructure, whether to consolidate, create a workable D/R model or both.

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