“The Business Partner Suministra provided a great service throughout the project, but probably their most important contribution was to educate us on IBM’s clustering technologies,” comments CTO Francisco Friderichsen Herrera. “We designed an environment with dual-node IBM PowerHA clusters for the SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse production environments – so if one SAP application server fails, the other is able to take over the workload. This is a major step forward in terms of availability: Our old HP infrastructure, just didn’t offer this kind of clustering technology, and the maturity and reliability of the IBM PowerHA technology was a decisive factor in our choice of IBM hardware.”

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/STRD-855DQJ?OpenDocument&Site=corp&cty=en_us

Founded in 1948 and headquartered in Santiago, Agrícola Nacional is one of Chile’s leading manufacturers of agricultural products, including pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, seeds and animal feed. The company has expanded internationally, and now has offices and subsidiaries throughout Latin America. It employs more than 900 people, and generates annual revenues of around US$160 million.

Business need:
Agrícola Nacional’s existing JDEdwards ERP solution was inflexible and unable to cope with international business expansion. Software development costs were high, achieving standards compliance across a mixed environment was difficult, and data center power demands were rising. The company wanted to move to a new solution, running on a more powerful and energy-efficient infrastructure, as well as relying on the support of certified consultants with a strong presence in the region.

Solution:
Working with IBM Global Technology Services and Suministra, an IBM Business Partner, Agrícola Nacional implemented the necessary architecture to support SAP Business Suite 7, running in an IBM AIX environment on IBM POWER6 processor-based blade servers in an IBM BladeCenter. The BladeCenter also contains Intel Xeon processor-based blades that run the company’s Microsoft Windows applications.

Benefits:
SAP Business Suite facilitates international expansion with multi-company support and easy localization for different markets, helping to reduce software development costs by 80 percent. Compliance with international standards is estimated to be 40 percent easier. Versatile IBM BladeCenter architecture enables Agrícola Nacional to run both AIX and Windows environments – supporting all major business systems in a single energy-efficient chassis, cutting data center power costs by 20 percent.