Challenges
Kerry Logistics wanted to simplify its server infrastructure by reducing the number of Oracle servers it needed to manage, and improve overall performance and scalability.
Solution
Two IBM p5 570s running AIX 5L, each featuring 3 CPUs and 24GB of memory, were deployed to consolidate five Oracle servers. HACMP was used to improve the resilience of both servers.
Benefits
Kerry Logistics was surprised by the numerous performance and availability advantages gained from the deployment, surpassing the company’s initial expectation and providing a future path to further consolidation.
Kerry Logistics is a story of successful transformation from a warehouse management company to a total logistics solutions provider.
Before 2000, Kerry Logistics was mainly concerned about the finding storage space for its customers’ goods—and was successful at it. However, after the turn of the century, the Hong Kong-headquartered company expanded its operations to offer different pieces of the logistics puzzle to all its customers, using information technology (IT) as the key platform to deliver them.
Today, the company, which is part of Kuok Group diversified business, is the leading Asia-based provider of logistics services and supply chain solutions. It operates in 200 cities globally, 20 countries worldwide and serves 1,100 cities throughout mainland China, and offers a wide range of services including supply chain management and contract logistics, freight forwarding, warehousing and distribution, transportation and distribution, and trading and merchandising.
Unraveling complexity for manageability
Kerry Logistics’ success in using IT to provide logistics services introduced a new challenge to the company’s operation: complexity. The chief reason for this can be traced to how the company expanded its business.
“We built each system based on Oracle for each new business venture. So after a while, we had many separate Oracle systems in our environment,” said Wilson Lee, Director of Information Technology, Kerry Logistics (Hong Kong) Limited.
By 2005, the number of systems numbered at ten—each with its own cache of servers to house the system. “For example, for warehouse management, we had one server for Hong Kong and one for mainland China,” said Mr. Lee.
This growth in servers made it difficult for Mr. Lee to manage their entire infrastructure and to optimise his resources. At the same time, Kerry Logistics was also growing rapidly, adding further to this complexity.
So to simplify complexity and to ensure that the IT infrastructure is streamlined for future business growth and not impact on the company’s operational efficiency, the company started to look at server consolidation.
Outperforming rival bids
Server consolidation was a huge step for Kerry Logistics since many of its mission-critical applications were depending on the numerous Oracle servers for the latest data.
So the company took its time to evaluate the options available in the market. And to help them select the right solution, they built their own application performance test.
Overall, the company had six major selection criteria: brand name, references, performance, scalability, roadmap and price. And for six months, Mr Lee and his team evaluated HP servers running HP-UX, Fujitsu servers running Solaris and IBM System p5s running AIX against these.
Although the company was well-versed in operating in a Solaris environment, they were impressed with IBM’s performance during the evaluation.
“When we used our in-house application performance test, we were surprised that IBM outperformed other vendors. It was an eight- to 10-fold increase in performance over existing servers—a clear winning factor for IBM,” said Edward Tsang, Assistant Technical Service Manager, Kerry Logistics (Hong Kong) Limited.
Another pleasant surprise was the number of actual CPUs that was utilised by IBM systems.
“Before evaluation we guessed that we needed more CPUs, since we were consolidating so many servers. But I was surprised that six CPUs already gave us a 30 per cent buffer in terms of performance,” said Mr. Lee.
Comprehensive support for logical partitioning was an additional plus point for IBM. It allowed Kerry Logistics to partition its physical several into several logical ones to house the various company systems. This dramatically improved the company’s resource allocation and utilisation.
“The fact that AIX allowed us to logically partition the servers and optimise the use of our available resources for a dynamic logistics environment was important to us,” said Mr. Lee.
However, IBM System p5 provided more than just server partitioning. “In the beginning, I started looking at partitioning between CPUs. During the evaluation we started to look into partitioning within a CPU—giving us additional flexibility to meet future scalability needs,” said Mr. Lee.
Allaying migration fears
Understandably, Kerry Logistics was at first concerned about moving from a Solaris operating environment to a new AIX-based one.
Although Mr Tsang was confident that the Oracle database server will be well supported on AIX, he was worried about the learning and training that his staff would have to go through in order to be provision in AIX.
“But after using AIX, I found that it is easy to learn and the commands were very consistent. In addition, AIX come with a lot of features that would have required us to purchase separately in other platforms,” said Mr. Tsang.
These features also provided the company immense savings, that would have been otherwise spent in acquiring them separately on other platforms.
“We felt comfortable of these features since they were migrated from the mainframe environment. And we did not have any doubts in the applicability of these features in our environment,” added Mr Lee.
Although IBM excelled in performance, scalability, brand and solid references, it was AIX’s long roadmap that sealed the deal with Kerry Logistics.
“The roadmap is important to us as we see ourselves using this new server environment for the next three to five years. And we found the AIX roadmap very convincing. Some of the competing vendors had similar roadmaps but were based on relatively new platforms that have not been deployed or used in Hong Kong extensively, making us less convinced about them,” said Mr. Lee.
Boosting flexibility and resilience
With IBM onboard, the company took only five months to complete phase one: the consolidation of five Oracle servers.
This phase saw the deployment of two IBM p5 570 systems, which easily scale from 2 to 16 CPUs and include mainframe-inspired reliability, availability and serviceability features. They also furnished Kerry Logistics with IBM’s modular SMP architecture that allowed the company to add new processing capability when they needed.
Initially, the two servers deployed each featured three-way processors and 24GB memory that consolidated Kerry Logistics’ existing five Oracle servers. Kerry Logistics had also the option to upgrade to another 16 CPUs and 24GB of memory each whenever they needed.
The innovative virtualisation and partitioning features also helped increase Kerry Logistics’ utilisation of processors and system components, improving overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and investment protection.
Both servers were protected from failures with the deployment of clustering technology, High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing (HACMP). This provided Kerry Logistics with a resilient infrastructure that improved critical IT systems availability while protecting it from unforeseen or planned outages.
At the same time, both servers were setup to maximise resource utilisation. This furnished Kerry Logistics additional flexibility to handle higher workloads by utilising idle resources without having to purchase additional servers.
Mr. Lee praised IBM and its partner for their comprehensive support of Kerry Logistics throughout the entire implementation. He commented that this close working relationship especially helped to reassure of IBM’s support for this project and speeded up the transfer of key knowledge.
Conclusion
Overall, Kerry Logistics is glad that they chose IBM for their server consolidation.
“Thanks to IBM, our server infrastructure is now much more simplified and easier to manage. And that is the theme of the consolidation process,” said Mr. Lee.
By taking out the complexity from their server infrastructure, Kerry Logistics could now concentrate on streamlining its entire global infrastructure, encompassing a storage area network and disaster recovery facilities, for efficiency and effectiveness.
“And the fact that we now have the ability to leverage our available resources more effectively to meet any immediate growth demands gives us room to grow confidently as an organisation to capitalise on new market opportunities,” said Mr. Lee.
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