While I was at the COMMON Europe Congress in Milan this past month, one of the highlights was seeing the Innovation Award presentation, followed up by having Jesper Omer give a presentation about his company’s award winning entry to the CEAC.
HT BENDIX A/S is a distributor of fittings and accessories for the furniture, kitchen and wood industry. They also deliver prepacked fitting bags – the kinds of bag we all find when we buy a piece of “customer assembly” furniture.
They have been on the platform for many years, but like many of our IBM i customers, they also have need for Windows servers for specific parts of their business. They wanted to get to a point where everything was virtualized, their data center could be controlled remotely, and they would have easy backups using the skills already in their organization.
Their solution is built on the iSCSI support which has been part of IBM i for more than a decade. This technology allows IBM System x servers to be attached to IBM i, and IBM i essentially serves as a SAN for those x86 servers. The x86 servers have no internal disks – IBM i carves out a portion of the disks that it owns and serves that storage to the x86. One of the clear advantages of this approach is the ability to back up the x86 data easily because it gets backed up whenever the IBM i data does.
They also used VMware on those System x servers to create multiple virtual Windows servers on the System x. This is no problem, because the IBM i iSCSI support integrates with VMware, as well.
Using this capability, as well as the software packages which run on the Power and System x, Jesper can now control operations at the plant from his home, in a totally virtualized environment.
There are many aspects to this innovative solution that I don’t have room to discuss, but the key here is that HT BENDIX A/S continues to depend on IBM i and creates up-to-date solutions on the platform they trust.
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