Johannesburg, 11 May 2006
One of the world`s foremost producers of fine paper and related products has reaped the benefits of a consolidated, virtualised server environment. This fully redundant and high availability infrastructure solution contributes to improved business system performance and better application availability.
With its technology services partner Business Connexion, Sappi SA has reduced the physical number of devices hosting its mission-critical business support systems from 43 servers to just four Egenera blades. Instead of each physical machine individually supporting specific applications, the blade servers are virtualised with full automated failover functionality - meaning the resources are seamlessly available to applications as necessary.
The benefits, says Hennie Coleman, regional IT director (SA) at Sappi SA, include dramatically reduced infrastructure and system solution maintenance and housekeeping, higher application availability, practically limitless scalability and a firm hold on technology costs both now and into the future. And, he adds, since Sappi SA no longer owns the infrastructure - but is renting it from Business Connexion - it is in a position to always benefit from the latest technological advances for improved business system performance.
Coleman notes that businesses are increasingly reliant upon technology systems for all activities. "This is reflected in the fact that people at all levels throughout the organisation can no longer operate without many applications previously considered non-critical. Consider [Microsoft] Exchange, our e-mail application, if that goes down, many people simply can`t do their work effectively," he says.
According to Coleman, increasing demands are being placed on technology as business users are expecting more stable and reliable solutions from their technology departments. Simultaneously, business managements are reigning in technology budgets. "Our investigations have demonstrated that ownership of technology is increasingly becoming a non-viable business model. With Business Connexion providing infrastructure as a rental service, we have a fixed and predictable annual cost, and the ability to almost instantly increase capacity for any requirement - testing, additional resources for line of business applications or for the support of ad hoc applications. It literally takes around 10 minutes to scale in additional capacity or set up a new system instance."
Noting that the selection of the Egenera platform presented its own challenges, Coleman says the fact that this relatively little known vendor had forged a partnership with Business Connexion put to rest technology governance concerns. It is simply not an option to implement systems that are not fully supported around the clock.
"Egenera is not a well known vendor outside of the United States - of that we are well aware. With the growing dependence of business on technology, vendor support is critical. We`re satisfied that we have that with the present arrangement. The support we got during the migration project is strong evidence of commitment and capability," he says.
While the concepts of virtualisation, availability and redundancy may appear to belong in the realm of the technology department, the reality is that they have a direct influence on business performance, continues Coleman. "Virtualisation allows us to use our available resources far better - giving computing power to the business as it is needed, and also making maximum use of what`s available. Redundancy and availability guarantees uninterrupted service to the business - so all applications, from SAP [enterprise resource planning] to e-mail and office productivity software, are always running when business users need them," he concludes.
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