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Over & Under

Florida State University is moving from IBM pSeries servers to System p5 platforms to keep up with user requirements

Additionally, the servers were reaching the end of their three-year warranty cycle. Although this may cause consternation in some businesses, as they frantically begin to decide what to do with soon-to-be-out-of-warranty equipment, FSU looked at this as an opportunity to address its critical concerns, including both processor and memory allocation, which typically ran up to 85 percent to 90 percent and sometimes up to 100 percent. As McCausland explains, "we don't like to see anything above 80 percent, but it's tough to predict resource requirements when it comes to ERP. Things can spike very quickly due to certain activities, and then drop off to next to nothing once those activities complete. So we have systems that are taxed at certain times and then way underutilized the rest of the time."

This is, of course, a balancing act of attempting to provide enough capacity for peak periods but also not having to worry about a wasted investment in processing power. In the case of FSU, use would peak and then sharply decline, resulting in periodic moments of underutilization and overutilization. "You can't control people's work behavior, so you're a little bit at risk of having them come along with some big spikes," says Barrett. "And even when we have expected higher usage and can anticipate it, you may be in trouble if you're already running at 80 percent capacity, because you don't have enough of a buffer to handle the additional spikes."

At the same time, CPU usage on other systems may only be 10 percent to 15 percent, depending on usage rates and the types of application they're running. Compounding this issue, FSU was introducing more Oracle ERP applications and modules. This meant increased use across the board, as users began taking advantage of both existing and new modules. Although good for business, this was placing additional strain on FSU's ERP environment, in particular as it pertained to the pSeries servers.

"With the POWER4 technology, I would have to allocate at least one full CPU to support an application, even if that application didn't warrant an entire CPU," McCausland notes.

A Shrinking Footprint
To address these predicaments, FSU began looking at alternative solutions. Of course, because it was already a pSeries user-with its ERP applications running on the platform, the natural fit was the System p5 platform. Not only would the organization gain increased processing horsepower, but also the ability to both micro-partition and dynamically allocate resources as needed. It would also allow FSU to consolidate onto fewer physical servers, moving away from one-or-two processors per application to one processor, via Micro-Partitioning, for multiple applications.

Of course, a wholesale move from the pSeries to the System p5 platform wasn't feasible, given the testing and development needed for such a migration. So the school is taking a phase-in approach to deploying the System p5 platform. The first phase of this deployment began with the replacement of a 16-way p690 (a development database server) with an 8-way System p5 p570. In July, it will be using a pair of p570s to replace its entire p650 application server load, and its entire p690 production load. It will also be replacing its Web server tier and Intel based equipment with an IBM BladeCenter* system, using a mix of JS21 and HS20 blades. By September, FSU expects to have fully decommissioned its pSeries equipment.

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