Zespri expects big savings harvest from $900,000 hardware upgrade

By ADAM GIFFORD


When kiwifruit marketing company Zespri International moved its head office to Tauranga, it left nine racks of servers behind at Datacom's Auckland data centre.

Now it has replaced those Digital Alphas servers with two racks of IBM pSeries at its new headquarters in Mt Maunganui.

Information systems manager Kevin Loasby said the company was not taking back the job of maintaining the hardware. That would be done remotely by IBM partner Integral Technology, which has designed the new infrastructure.

Realtech will help support the SAP enterprise planning system, and Computerland would do some desktop support and come in when Integral needed a pair of hands actually on site.

"Key to the final decision was the desire to have as much as possible of headquarters operations in the Bay of Plenty area," Loasby said.

The total cost of the project, including the new servers, was about $900,000.

Over the next five years Zespri expects to spend about $3.5 million on operational costs, compared with the $6 million it would have cost to run the old systems.

"We had leased equipment which was starting to attract hefty maintenance costs. By making these changes we will save $500,000 a year," Loasby said.

Two IBM pSeries p630 servers (the successor to the RS/6000 line) running IBM's AIX Unix operating system will be used as SAP production and failover servers, and a smaller p615 server will hold SAP Business Warehouse.

Three other p615 servers handling testing, development and disaster recovery will be hosted at Telecom's new Tauranga data centre.

An IBM storage area network provides two terabytes of storage.

Zespri is also upgrading its Citrix farm, which allows staff around the world to access the core applications remotely, and is shifting its firewall and MailMarshal on to Telecom's Safecom network.

"We are taking the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 2003 and Lotus 6.5, and changing from Frame Relay to an end to end Private Office Network which is completely IP [Internet Protocol]," Loasby said.

Although Zespri intended to review whether it would stay with SAP, the new hardware would be suitable for any enterprise management system.