Gruppo Mediaset, with headquarters in Milan, Italy, is the largest commercial broadcaster in that country. Mediaset is replacing an IBM RISC/AIX-based environment for its proprietary TR1 broadcasting application with a solution based on HP Converged Infrastructure technologies, including HP ProLiant BL620 G7, BL680 G7, and BL460 G7 server blades, VMware, Virtual Connect FlexFabric, and P9500 storage.

This healthcare provider decided to move its business technology infrastructure from AS/400 into a new environment to meet the organisation’s modern operating needs. To allay concerns about the migration, HP provided the background information and together with the MITERA team, HP worked out the specifications for new HP servers to support uninterrupted operation at even faster speeds. MITERA now employs a potent platform of HP Services and HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium® processors running SAP, Microsoft® Windows® 2003 Enterprise Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

The leading provider of wood flooring in Italy, Stile Pavimenti, wanted to increase efficiency of production to keep pace with sales growth by increasing the speed and reliability of their ERP infrastructure. The transfer of their ERP suite from an IBM P-Series 630 AIX platform to an HP Integrity server running the HP-UX 11i v3 greatly improved server performance and availability, increasing processing time of users’ queries resulting in faster fulfillment of customer orders. With the HP solution, the company has improved operational control, performance and efficiency, and provided greater business intelligence to guide production planning and control.

Wanting to improve reliability, Bernalillo County chose to upgrade its server and storage infrastructure to reduce costs, operate more efficiently and provide additional services to county residents. In search of an end-to-end solution, Bernalillo selected HP BladeSystem technology, multiple HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs), and HP StorageWorks Business Copy EVA Software. The comprehensive HP solution has improved the reliability of its applications, cut maintenance costs and allows Bernalillo to deploy new servers far more quickly than they could have previously with their IBM mainframe. The new EVA storage gives the county a more flexible storage infrastructure, and will lead to a projected, cumulative five-year net benefit of USD$2.2 million.

The Brazilian Navy has long sought to be at the forefront of technology. Never has this been more evident than when the IT department of the Navy’s financial directorate announced its decision to phase out its last mainframe. The Brazilian Navy migrated three large, complex, mission-critical systems from mainframe platforms to HP open systems–based solutions. Now The Brazilian Navy is better able to handle the large and growing transaction levels that its financial directorate’s IT facility must process.

Carrefour Italia carried out a data centre transformation, abandoning the mainframe technology on which most of its core applications depended and migrating all of its information systems to an open platform. HP was chosen as the project partner and provided two HP Integrity rx8620 servers with a dedicated Storage Area Network (SAN) linked to an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 8000. The new platform was fully functional within 14 months and according to company management, the migration of the applications and related environments was a success and the technologically innovative solution strengthened their corporate governance, substantially improving the quality of the business support services provided.

Helping Dubai, United Arab Emirates become a leading commerce and tourist hub, Dubai World quickly realised its mixed IBM/AIX, Sun/Solaris and HP/OpenVMS/Tru64 UNIX® platform was difficult and expensive to manage. The IT staff sought to centralise the technology and streamline costs by allying with a single technology vendor. Today its data centres contain seven HP Superdome servers with Intel® Itanium® processors running HP-UX 11i v3, a combination that powers Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database 10g R2, and Oracle Application Server 10 and 11. Since implementing Superdome servers, reliable, remarkable performance has defined the ERP environment and the IT staff reports further performance improvements including 100 percent service levels and 35 percent lower licencing costs. The new technology strategy enables Dubai World to compete internationally with up-to-date computing standards.

Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc., Canada’s largest gas distribution company, made the decision to move from a mainframe to HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v3 to enhance their billing and customer service capabilities. Steady growth along with the desire to provide a richer customer relationship management (CRM) function, prompted Enbridge to modernise their legacy Customer Information System (CIS). The migration to Integrity servers has seen application services at near 100% availability while the speed of core billing batch processing has increased by 80%, with no unplanned downtime in two years.

The Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR) needed to transform and modernise its portfolio of applications to reduce costs and increase the system’s adaptability to evolving business conditions. MIUR worked with HP to replace over 20 million lines of code, encompassing over 19,000 separate programs. The enormous project was completed on-time and on-budget. MIUR now projects savings in hardware and software licencing at more than €12 million over three years, with return on investment in 18 months and a 38 percent reduction in development costs.

Kumho Tires implemented SAP ERP and migrated from an IBM mainframe to HP Integrity Superdome. In addition to the cost reduction achieved, Kumho was able to increase their business agility, improve operations efficiency and set the foundation to achieve long-term business strategies.

Morrisons modernises with Oracle Retail and HP Converged Infrastructure
(November, 2011)
Morrisons is the fourth largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom. Their existing IT infrastructure and processes could not keep up with their explosive growth. To be competitive, Morrisons launched an IT transformation called Evolve. Oracle Retail Merchandising system was selected as the software and HP won the competition for the technology platform. The HP Converged Infrastructure comprises eight HP Integrity Superdomes, HP-UX 11iv3 operating system, and four HP StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Arrays. Additionally, Morrisons depends on a mix of Integrity BL870c and the latest BL860c i2 server blades for development and test. The company also relies on 1000 ProLiant server blades in its stores and HP Mission Critical Services and Proactive 24 Service. Morrisons is a major Oracle customer, with applications from Oracle PeopleSoft to Oracle E-Business. The modern technology means Morrisons can now streamline IT processes, and it has brought immense time and people resource efficiencies.

This USD$8-billion Fortune 500 medical and surgical supply distributor modernised their heavily customised enterprise resource planning (ERP) system by migrating from an IBM mainframe to HP ProLiant DL785 servers, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The HP solution yields significant annual technology savings, which are being reinvested to implement other IT modernisation and improvements. Additionally Owens & Minor has reduced the ongoing cost of IT operations by half, increased peak time volume by four times and preserved the value of the company’s customer ERP system, avoiding a large application modernisation expenditure.

TTX needed to reduce data centre space, power, and IT overhead while enhancing scalability, speed of response, and reliability. Previously an all-IBM shop, the director of infrastructure decided to make a change, selecting HP servers for their increased performance, capacity and additional capabilities. TTX is reaping a number of business benefits, including 10 percent lower hardware costs, 44 percent projected power savings, and 69 percent projected reduction in server rack footprint. Compared with their previous mainframe environment, the company has realised 50 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Chico’s standardises on HP and Intel® technologies to manage growth and operate in the fast-paced retail industry. Migrating off of IBM blades, the company chose HP because of its broad range of solutions that enable the retailer to stay competitive. HP solutions touch every facet of the retail enterprise. HP Integrity servers, Point of Sale (POS) Systems, BladeSystems and HP Services help Chico’s gain new operational efficiencies, better insight for driving growth, and greater IT flexibility.

Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational institution that produces Sesame Street. Their IT staff previously managed 90 servers, including HP ProLiant DL-series, aging Sun and IBM x86 servers. The Sesame staff, tiring of dealing with two databases and various underlying operating environments, declared it was time to move to a unified architecture. They chose an HP BladeSystem solution running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. HP’s server TCO analysis for Sesame Workshop projected a 422 percent return on investment (ROI) and a payback period of five months. The HP solution has reduced the total cost of ownership by 85 percent compared to their previous infrastructure.