Power 7

The Business Challenge:

The City of Farmington, which is located in San Juan County in New Mexico, has a deep history with IBM technology. In 1987 Farmington purchased an IBM midrange computer – an IBM System 38 – to manage the city’s essential municipal services. Then in 1992, the first AS/400 was installed. Rick Weinstein, the Enterprise Systems Administrator, has been an employee with the city since 1989, and he has worked on the implementation of subsequent AS 400, IBM i series, and IBM Power Systems over the years. Recently, the city was ready for an upgrade from its Power 6 server to a Power 7. Although there were not any operational issues or problems with the current system, Weinstein knew that moving to newer technology would provide higher service levels delivered in a more cost effective manner for the city’s growing amounts of data.

Weinstein requested a proposal from Mainline Information Systems, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to address the city’s latest needs and requirements. After fully evaluating the City of Farmington’s situation, Mainline’s team of experts presented a solution that consisted of an upgrade to IBM Power 720 with an i5/OS and Mainline Professional Services.

The Solution:

IBM Power 720 Express server
The IBM Power 720 Express is built on the foundation of Power 7 processor technology to handle rapid growth and manage business risk while meeting higher required service levels. As a distributed application server, the IBM Power 720 Express is designed with capabilities to deliver leading-edge application availability and enable more work to be processed with less operational disruption. It offers comprehensive virtualization technologies designed to aggregate and manage resources while helping simplify and optimize the IT infrastructure and deliver one of the most cost-efficient solutions for UNIX, IBM i and Linux deployments.

IBM i (formerly known as i5/OS®) on Power 7
IBM i on Power 7 delivers a highly scalable and virus-resistant architecture with a stable database and middleware foundation for efficiently deploying business processing applications. IBM i applications provide world-class performance plus dynamic infrastructure flexibility, with the opportunity to lower monthly operations costs. IBM i integrates a trusted combination of relational database, security, Web services, networking and storage management capabilities. It provides a broad and highly stable database and middleware foundation for efficiently deploying business processing applications, with support for more than 5,000 solutions from more than 2,500 ISVs.

Mainline Professional Services
Mainline Professional Services provided the design, configuration and implementation of the hardware and software as well as the testing and maintenance of the solution.

The Result:

“When we decided to upgrade to the IBM Power 720, I didn’t realize how noticeable the difference would be,” Weinstein said. “From my system accounting software, I discovered that there was a 33 percent increase in processing speed and throughput. In addition, we’re experiencing amazing savings with the increase in processing power as a result of the upgrade.”

“Our lease costs with the IBM Power 720 upgrade are now more than 50 percent less than those of the IBM Power 6,” he added. “We also have a tremendous amount of excess capacity for anticipated growth in the next 26 months. In the end, we have a more powerful and resilient machine, for less money.”

“The Mainline account executive, who has been working with us since 2005, is very responsive and professional, and has a sense of urgency,” he continued. “In fact, everybody at Mainline was extremely knowledgeable and responsive to all issues and questions, from the configuration to the implementation. The Mainline team has a wide spectrum of professional experience for anything we need,” he concluded.