Case Study #1

Client: World’s largest food and beverage company

Migration of Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP to IBM Power8 Systems

IBM Migration Factory partnered with Famsoft to migrate customer’s old versions of applications and Oracle databases to new IBM Power8 Systems servers.

Business challenges:

The customer had several business challenges to deal with as a result of aging hardware and software. Some of the key business challenges were:

• Operating expenses for aging hardware and software were costly.
• SAP software and database versions were old with high support costs.
• Several old Oracle databases running PeopleSoft application were desupported.
• Resources supporting custom applications were expensive and hard to find.

Solution:

The customer’s requirements and business challenges were thoroughly analyzed and assessed based on which the following solution was developed to assist the customer address its ongoing business issues:

• IBM replaced old Power5 servers with new Power8 servers to increase performance.
• IBM replaced old HP servers with Power8 servers to increase processing efficiency and also to reduce the operating expenses to maintain them.
• Famsoft installed SAP software and Oracle database on Power8 WPAR running AIX 5.3 and successfully migrated SAP data from HP to IBM P8 using SAP supported tools.
• Famsoft used IBM’s proprietary migration software, Xenobridge, to migrate old Oracle databases from HP to Oracle 12c on IBM Power8 servers.
• Famsoft modified the custom application code written in C and C++ for HPUX, debugged compilation issues, successfully compiled and tested the application for AIX OS, and ported it to customer’s test environment for a final round of testing before it is ready for production migration.

Benefits:

As a result of the above solution, the customer benefited as follows:

• Migration of applications and databases was done successfully, on time and within budget.
• IBM Power8 servers have greater processing power to run more virtual machines with fewer physical servers. This allowed a significant reduction in space and cooling costs which in turn helped the customer to reduce its operating expenses significantly.
• Customer was able to considerably lower the support costs for old hardware and software.

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Case Study #2

Client: Regional Supermarket Chain

Conversion of Legacy Systems to Modern GUI Technology

Business challenges:

The customer had several business challenges to deal with as a result of aging hardware and software. Some of the key business challenges were:

• Old hardware and software were becoming a liability for the business and very expensive to support.
• Servers were failing at an ever increasing rate costing more time and money to be functional thereby significantly increasing the operational expenses.
• Character based software was in use which was slowing down productivity.
• Informix database had an expensive monthly licensing fees.
• Limited resources were available to continue support of the old infrastructure.
• In-house developers were unable to develop new application due to knowledge, size of team and priority for other urgent support issues.

Solution:

Famsoft did a thorough assessment and analysis of the customer’s infrastructure, understood the business requirements and challenges, analyzed the old character user interface, and determined that the solution to address the business challenges involved both hardware and software. As such, the following solution was provided:

• Old, aging servers were replaced by new Lenovo servers to run modern applications and technologies thereby providing stores with more options. These powerful new servers allowed cameras to be installed above each register for a new monitoring system.
• Aging Informix database was migrated to MySQL.
• Old character based Informix 4GL and Embedded C code was redesigned and developed as a modern GUI application in PHP using the classic LAMP stack.
• Virtual machines were configured to allow for transportability in case of server outages.

Benefits:

As a result of the above solution, the customer benefited as follows:

• Servers are now more stable with greater uptime and less maintenance.
• More resources are available to support the LAMP stack.
• Code is modular and easier to maintain with ability to roll out a new store very quickly.
• In case of a server outage, software layer can be run from a remote location until the server is fixed.
• Customer was able to considerably lower the ongoing operational expenses for hardware and software.

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Case Study #3

Client: Kitchen Appliances Manufacturer

Migration of Oracle ERP to IBM Power

Viking Range engaged IBM Business Partner, Famsoft, to migrate its ERP system to a new server platform featuring IBM Power7 System.

Solution:

Famsoft did a comprehensive assessment of the customer's existing ERP setup, analyzed the business requirements, reviewed the customizations to ERP, and provided the following solution:

• Consolidated numerous SUN Microsystems servers onto IBM Power 750 Express servers with separate logical partitions (LPARs).
• Converted multi-node setup to single node on IBM Power.
• Migrated ERP customizations to work with IBM Power.

Benefits:

As a result of the above solution, the customer benefited as follows:

• Reduced its physical server count and rack space while improving availability, scalability and security.
• Reduced power consumption by 75 percent and cut operation and maintenance costs, thus achieving a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Offers tremendous configuration flexibility capable of supporting the client's future growth and software upgrades.
• Carried out the migration services remotely so that no travel costs were involved, allowing customer to reduce migration costs to meet its budget and get its applications and database up and running on time without affecting its business.