Thiess

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Thiess has used Sun hardware to run its Oracle database and JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) system since 2002; however, due to impressive growth, its three Sun Fire 3800 servers had reached full capacity. The company’s Sun storage and backup systems were similarly stretched. Overnight backups were extending into the new working day, further affecting the performance of the system. To ensure it had the processing power and storage capacity for often unpredictable growth spikes, Thiess needed to upgrade its server and storage infrastructure. Any new solution also had to be easily scalable. “The nature of our business is that we can win one job and have 400-500 new users within six months,” says Brett Milton, Manager of Information Systems at Thiess. “We needed hardware that could scale progressively, and in big spurts. It also needed to serve us for the next three to four years.”

It was also critical to minimise risk during the upgrade as the business could not afford any outages in its production environment. “An infrastructure upgrade can be disruptive to the business if it’s not done carefully,” says Milton. “We still needed to use the system during the implementation, so we wanted to avoid any unnecessary downtime. We also wanted to complete the upgrade before the end of the financial year, which added an extra level of pressure.”

Sun Professional Services and Dimension Data developed a roadmap to complete the project on time and within budget. “Sun and Dimension Data have a very good working relationship and we certainly benefit from that,” adds Milton. “The level of engagement and support we received from the two companies was great during the project.” Both understood that a seamless upgrade was critical and devised a low risk strategy that leveraged Thiess’ current technology investments, along with new technology from Sun. Upgrading to new Sun hardware reaped performance and scalability benefits while protecting Thiess’ existing Sun hardware investments. “We could take the system boards in the current servers and put them in the new servers with minimum hassle,” explains Milton. “This means we could leverage our existing investment and have the option to improve performance at a later date by installing faster boards.”

Thiess now has one Sun Fire E6900 server powered by UltraSPARC IV processors and running the Solaris 9 Operating System. A Sun Fire E4900 server serves as its testing and development machine. The company also uses Sun StorageTek 9985 storage arrays with Sun StorageTek 9900 software and a Sun StorageTek SL500 modular tape library.

The most obvious benefit of the upgrade has been the improvement in performance due to greater capacity. “Before the upgrade, we needed to spend a lot of time at month-end processing watching batch queues and adjusting and removing jobs,” says Milton. “Now it all runs smoothly with no intervention needed. Previously, our month-end processing took about three days to complete. On the new system, we reduced processing time by two and a half hours a day over the three days. Despite a 25 percent jump in transactions, we now complete the job 30 minutes faster than before the upgrade. Just recently, we had the largest number of transactions for month-end close in the company’s history and we were half a day early.”