Greif, which is located in Delaware, Ohio, and runs 160 plants in 40 countries, has been an SSA BPCS customer for a long time, and engaged IBM, SSA, and reseller Sirius to come up with a server consolidation strategy that would save it some money.
Greif has acquired some companies that ran the Baan ERP suite on a mix of Windows and Unix, and decided to consolidate its OS/400-based BPCS applications and those Baan applications (which were running on iron from Hewlett-Packard) onto a single i5 Model 570 that is running OS/400 and AIX partitions and supporting those same applications.
Greif has a 16-way Model 570 with half of the processors turned on to support its combined ERP applications, and this server has replaced a total of 17 OS/400, Windows, and Unix servers. Greif says it has plans to activate some of those spare partitions for running Linux, but doesn’t say why. The odds favor it moving some network infrastructure workloads onto the i5 box.
