Imagine it.

Reduce IT costs through infrastructure standardization, including the globally used Oracle ERP environment, without sacrificing performance, scalability, availability, or ease of use.

Done.

Unisys migrated its Oracle-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) application and database from a distributed UNIX environment to a higher-performing and more flexible Unisys ES7000 and Microsoft Windows platform. The move complemented the company’s strategy to standardize its IT infrastructure and cut costs.

Visible Breakthrough:  Standardization Reduces IT Costs, Improves Performance

Unisys Oracle ERP environment supports worldwide operations using a 24-processor Unisys ES7000/420 server employing Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. As a result, the company has significantly lowered its total cost of ownership, improved user response times, and maintained high availability.

 

Secure Business Operation

Improved support for global Oracle ERP operations

 

Innovation Metrics

  • Cost: More than $400 million savings over a six-year period due to infrastructure standardization, consolidation, and migration efforts
  • Growth: Provides greater scalability to handle heavy processing demands in Oracle ERP environment
  • Speed: Enables processing to be completed in less than half the time previously required
  • Performance: Improved user response times while continuing 99.9%+ availability

Business Challenge: Reduce Costs and Increase Operational Efficiencies

Faced with the need to both reduce costs and increase operational efficiencies, Unisys launched the Cornerstone program in order to deliver a global, standard set of simplified processes and systems to streamline companywide business operations.

 

Under this initiative, Unisys IT developed a strategy to standardize the entire database and applications infrastructure on Unisys ES7000 servers running Microsoft Windows instead of its existing distributed UNIX environment. Although Linux is supported by the Unisys ES7000 today and could have been an alternative, the company’s IT organization had extensive operational experience with Microsoft Windows and realized that a Microsoft Windows platform would offer Unisys comparable availability and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits to Linux. The company seized the opportunity to standardize on a single operating system and further cut costs. A Unisys Intel processor-based server, whether running in a Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system-based environment, is about 2.5 times less expensive than a RISC/UNIX environment. This standardized, cost-effective approach proved to be more beneficial to the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other applications environment.

 

Solution: Standardizing on a Higher-Performing, More Cost-Effective Platform

The Unisys Oracle ERP environment was previously supported by a UNIX based 24-processor Unisys ES7000 server employing Intel Xeon™ processors MP. This platform was sufficient for processing requirements until early 2004 when the company required increased scalability and performance.

 

In keeping with its standardization strategy, Unisys decided to migrate its ERP Oracle 9i database from the 24-processor Unisys ES7000 server running a UNIX based operating system to a 24-processor ES7000/420 server employing Intel Itanium 2 processors and running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. Implementing a 64-bit architecture suited the intense processing and high-availability requirements placed on the Oracle database by the Oracle ERP application. Now, large-scale Oracle database deployments on Microsoft Windows are more viable because the increased scalability and performance available with 64-bit processors eliminates the memory limitations of the 32-bit operating environment.

 

Unisys runs two instances to support its global operations, one for North America and the other for the rest of the world. The instances are approximately equal in size and each has a 600 GB database. The company established a disaster recovery (DR) environment at another location and uses EMC SRDF software for remote replication. The DR platform is also used for quality assurance and staging activities.

 

“The implementation of the ES7000 server employing Intel Itanium 2 processors allows Unisys to continue to expand its use of the Oracle ERP environment by further eliminating legacy applications, and provides additional capacity for future growth,” says David Gardiner, Vice President of Information Technology. The Unisys ERP implementation includes many of the Oracle 11i E-Business Suite applications, such as Financials, Project Accounting, and Order Management. Unisys employees in 100 locations in 40 countries use these applications. With 5,000 registered users worldwide and more than 3,000 concurrent sessions, this system is accessed 24x7 and handles more than 80,000 batch processes daily.

 

Results: Lower Total Cost of Ownership and Greater Responsiveness

Unisys scale-up infrastructure environment continues to pay dividends and support the company’s ongoing operations. Unisys has:

  • Realized more than $400 million savings over a six-year period
  • Established a more scalable infrastructure to handle the heavy processing demands of Oracle ERP environments
  • Reduced the elapsed time on processing functions by more than 50 percent
  • Improved user response times while continuing greater than 99.9 percent availability

The Unisys ES7000/420 server using Intel Itanium 2 processors and running Microsoft Windows not only scales up to meet growth requirements, but also addresses heavy processing demands in the Oracle ERP database environment. As a result, Unisys can continue leveraging this platform to further execute its IT architecture strategy of standardization, centralization, consolidation, and simplification.

 

“Large-scale Oracle databases on Microsoft Windows platforms require more addressable memory, which the Intel Itanium 2 processors provide,” says Rao Bhamidipati, Director of Global Systems Services in Unisys IT. “This migration could not have been accomplished without that technology.”

 

And neither could the resultant cost savings. By standardizing the infrastructure, server consolidation, and migration of Unisys strategic databases and applications from UNIX to Windows on the ES7000, Unisys netted more than $400 million in IT cost savings over six years. These results demonstrated the value of Unisys Best Practices, placing the company in the first quadrant of the industry-standard Hackett Benchmark—a category reserved for proven leaders in IT cost and efficiency. When the benchmark was executed again in 2006, it showed further improvements and confirmed Unisys leadership position. Unisys has also experienced lower TCO for its ERP implementation and ongoing support.

 

In addition, Unisys has seen improved performance through 64-bit computing. “Our end users are very pleased with the performance and availability of the ES7000 server employing Intel Itanium 2 processors,” says Bhamidipati. “Some batch programs that used to take up to 16 hours to run now finish in less than six hours.”

 

Unisys move to Oracle solutions powered by ES7000 enterprise servers continues to provide business benefits. Standardization on Oracle software has reduced the number of deployed applications from 750 to 300. And, the move has dramatically improved overall productivity. For example, Unisys is now able to close its books in two to three days, compared to fifteen days or more. 

 

Profile: Unisys Corporation 

  • Headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania
  • Employees in 100 locations in 40 countries
  • Awarded first quartile position for IT cost and efficiency using the industry-standard Hackett Benchmark
  • Visit http://www.unisys.com

Solution at a Glance

  • Unisys ES700/420 server employing Intel Itanium 2 processors for the database tier
  • Unisys ES5000 server employing Intel Xeon  processors for the application tier
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition
  • Oracle 9i database tier
  • Oracle 9iAS Application Server
  • Oracle 11i  E-Business Suite applications
  • Oracle Portal
  • EMC Symmetrix storage

Partners

  • Intel
  • Microsoft
  • Oracle
  • EMC