Sirius client Group Dekko, Inc. (Dekko) was established in 1952 with five employees producing ready-made wiring harnesses for manufacturers of commercial refrigerators. Today, Dekko is a highly diversified company that employs approximately 1,500 associates across 11 facilities in three states and Mexico, manufacturing a broad variety of products for the office furniture, transportation, industrial, architectural lighting, appliance and medical markets.
Dekko had older IBM Power Systems servers based on POWER6 and POWER6+ processors, which were coming off lease. And the older servers were a performance bottleneck; overnight, monthly and year-end batch processing times for the Infor and Domino workloads had steadily crept up until they threatened to interfere with workday processing tasks.
Dekko chose one new IBM Power S824 server for production workload and one new Power S814 for application development and testing at the company’s primary data center in its Garrett, Indiana headquarters. Another Power S814 for replication of the production server was installed at a secondary site in nearby Kendalville. The production server is configured with multiple IBM i LPARs for their Infor and Domino workloads, with a separate AIX LPAR for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). The IBM i primary production LPARs are replicated to the secondary production server using Vision Solutions MIMIX.
To improve I/O performance and simplify the physical footprint, Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS) are used to host network connectivity for all IBM i LPARs. VIOS uses a combination of 2- and 4-port 10Gb Ethernet adapters, along with 2-port 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters. In the past, each LPAR had dedicated, physical I/O cards, but VIOS allows Dekko to dramatically reduce the number of cards in each server.
For performance reasons, Dekko went to all solid-state disk (SSD) technology on the two production servers, significantly reducing the number of mechanical drives while improving performance. The applications access (34) 775GB SSD internal drives through the IBM i virtual storage LPAR.
According to Dekko VP of Systems Chris Edwards, “We’ve had a great relationship with Sirius and IBM over many years, and this is just the latest success for us.”
You can download the Group Dekko case study here (.pdf).
