IBM Virtualization Powers Oracle Rollout at Amway Corporation
ARMONK, NY - 16 Nov 2007: Amway Corporation has selected a virtualized IBM (NYSE: IBM) server infrastructure for a worldwide rollout of Oracle's enterprise resource planning applications, the company announced today. The decision to run the applications on hundreds of virtual servers -- rather than an equivalent number of physical boxes -- is expected to provide a significant savings in energy, software and labor costs, Amway said.
The Oracle e-Business Suite applications -- including order entry, financials and shipping -- will be deployed on multiple System p systems, with logical partitions ranging from three to thirty on any given frame. Running the AIX operating system, these machines will handle production, development, test, and quality assurance functions and will serve organizations throughout the company globally.
"The IBM System p servers will be vital to running Amway's business, as they enable our independent business owners to order and receive product," said Randy Gast, supervisor, server technology, Amway. "The System p virtualized platform has been rock-solid, secure and extremely flexible."
"The Amway solution demonstrates how IBM's leadership in virtualization technology through Advanced Power Virtualization is helping customers consolidate their data centers and reduce energy and maintenance expenses in the process," said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. "System p servers provide customers with the performance, high availability and scalability they need to run their businesses most efficiently."
IBM Virtualization
IBM's Advanced Power Virtualization (APV) is a set of comprehensive systems technologies and services designed to enable companies to simplify their infrastructure by aggregating and managing resources through a consolidated, logical view. APV delivers key IBM System p virtualization technologies -- such as logical partitioning, Micro Partitioning(TM), virtual LAN and Virtual I/O Server software (VIOS) offering clients many possibilities for application consolidation and system utilization.
IBM System p servers
Renowned for their computing power, IBM System p servers support user needs across a broad range of applications, including transaction processing, web publishing, data mining, systems management and others. This family of 1-to 64-core IBM Power processor-based systems is designed to provide customers with leadership features for high performance, availability, scalability and dynamic resource allocation. Unique IBM virtualization features allow users to process more information on a single server than ever before, creating the potential to save on total cost of system ownership, as well as space and energy costs.
System p products are designed for smaller and mid-sized business and large enterprises that are using UNIX platforms. The servers use AIX, IBM's UNIX-based operating system, and also support thousands of Linux-based applications. Migration services enable customers to quickly and easily convert from competing platforms -- such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard -- to IBM hardware.
System p servers are powered by IBM's leadership technology, including the POWER6 microprocessor, the world's fastest chip, built using IBM's state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it, meaning customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half.
For more information on IBM System p servers and offerings, please visit www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/.
About IBM
For more information, please visit www.ibm.com.
About Amway
Amway Corporation, headquartered in Ada, Michigan, USA, and its global affiliates offer products, business opportunities, and product development, manufacturing and logistics services in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide. In its most recent performance year, Amway and its related companies reported worldwide sales of $6.3 billion. For further information, please contact Amway's media information line at 616.787.7565 or e-mail Amway's media relations staff at mediainfo@amway.com.
Contact(s) information
John Buscemi
IBM Media Relations
914-766-4495
jbuscemi@us.ibm.com
