Johannesburg, 06 Jul 2005
When a leading supplier to the South African automotive industry required an upgrade to its ageing technology hardware platform, it turned to Business Connexion for the necessary expertise and support.
Located in Port Elizabeth, Tenneco Automotive is the local subsidiary of a $3.5 billion global manufacturing company based in Lake Forest, Illinois. With 19 600 employees worldwide, the company is one of the world`s largest designers, manufacturers and distributors of automotive ride control and emission control products and systems. Target markets include the automotive original equipment market and the repair and replacement market. Tenneco Automotive`s most recognised product in SA is the Armstrong shock-absorber.
According to John McLean, regional IT manager at Tenneco Automotive, like many of the major suppliers to the motor industry, the company runs the SAP enterprise resource planning solution on an Oracle database.
"We had reached a situation where the infrastructure supporting these applications was obsolete and we had outgrown its capacity, with the result that performance was suffering while the cost of maintenance was spiralling. We therefore opted to upgrade the server platform and implement new storage subsystems," says McLean.
With disaster recovery requirements dictated by international policy, Tenneco Automotive acquired duplicate systems offering full redundancy at sites some 15km apart. Because of the company`s international standardisation on IBM hardware, Tenneco Automotive selected an IBM P-Series server platform, complemented by EMC Clariion CX300 storage devices.
"We had initially opted for two 2-way P520 servers, but in subsequent negotiations with IBM South Africa and Business Connexion, we settled on the higher-specification 4-way machines. As such, we have implemented two P550 4 CPU machines," says McLean.
Tommy Emery, sales executive at Business Connexion, explains that the IBM P-Series is a 64-bit, Unix-based server platform. "Based on IBM`s Power5 processor and running its AIX-5L (AIX5.3) Unix operating system, these machines offer considerable improvements in power and manageability over the hardware they were replacing," he says.
From the arrival of the hardware, the project took some six weeks to completion and included migrating from an older version of Unix, from another vendor, to the AIX operating system. Emery says no particular issues were encountered, despite the change in the hardware and operating system.
McLean notes that Tenneco Automotive selected Business Connexion based on the company`s previous track record in providing services to Tenneco Automotive, as well as favourable pricing on the goods. "We were also satisfied that the project team demonstrated an appropriate level of expertise to handle this project," he says. The regional availability of skills to support the selected platform also added weight to Tenneco Automotive`s choice.
As a result of the hardware and operating system upgrade - as well as an upgrade to Oracle 9i database - McLean says his company has experienced a dramatic improvement in performance. "While only two of the four processors in each machine are enabled at present, we have seen batch processing jobs reduced from a four-day run cycle to a matter of hours. A SAP material resource planning job that needed an hour-and-a-half is now handled in just seven minutes," he says.
He says it would be unfair to criticise the previous platform, as it was an older 32-bit system, but he is satisfied that the new hardware is performing to expectations. "With further tweaks to the software environment, and with the enablement of the additional processors in the machines, I anticipate an even better performance improvement," he adds.
Key to the success of this project, says McLean, was the use of technologies from an established and well-serviced brand, and the availability of appropriate levels of expertise and knowledge. "There was some concern around the newness of the AIX 5 L (version 5.3) platforms, but overall, Business Connexion executed this project very well," he concludes.
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