This Chicken's No IT Coward

A major catalyst behind Tyson's upgrade was its September 2001 purchase of IBP Fresh Meats, a larger company and the world's No. 1 beef producer. The acquisition, which made Tyson the largest meat company in the country, added $17 billion in revenue to Tyson's $11 billion, and 50,000 more employees. It also made Tyson more of a global player, so data served by the systems now has to be available all the time from virtually every time zone.

Tyson had little time to choose a migration path. It decided to stick with Compaq (now merged with HP), which inherited VAX with the purchase of Digital Equipment. Compaq, in turn, tapped systems integrator Avnet Enterprise Solutions to assemble and configure a three-node cluster of Compaq AlphaServer ES40s, along with a new Compaq MA8000 StorageWorks storage area network (SAN).

What made the difference was Avnet's ability to assemble, configure and test the systems off-site at the VAR's 20,000-square-foot, ISO 9001-certified facility in Phoenix, before shipping them as an integrated package to Tyson's headquarters, according to Avnet and Compaq officials.

"The systems came in on a Friday evening. By Saturday, people were working on it, and on Monday everyone was up and running on the new system," says Herb Wong, the Compaq technology consultant who supervised the rollout. "If they hadn't done the off-site testing, we would have had to build in some significant testing on-site."

No doubt, the pressures of a sluggish economy have been affecting clients' decisions about whether to buy certain value-added services.

"In a $1 million or $2 million deal, the extra $20,000 or $30,000 is looked at as a frill," says Emily Arbuckle, the Avnet account manager involved in the Tyson deal.

It can take up to two weeks longer to get a new system running at a customer site if it hasn't first been tested off-site, she adds, but despite the time and money savings, many clients these days are reluctant to spend the extra 1 or 2 percentage points for off-site assembly and testing.

"Everyone wants white-glove service, but they want to buy it off the 99-cents menu," Arbuckle says. Those clients that choose direct delivery "run the risk of having 1,000 boxes show up and having to have an engineer sort it all out," she adds.

A Well-Cooked Solution

By late November, Avnet had the AlphaServer systems built, tested and delivered. From that point, Avnet, along with Compaq's Global Services unit, laid out the database storage area across the SAN disks to ensure optimal performance. The systems ran parallel with Tyson's legacy systems for 30 days to test them, says Dan Pelligrini, a district sales manager at Avnet.

Tyson chose the AlphaServers, each with four processors running the OpenVMS operating system, because they represented a quick and easy migration path. "Users couldn't even tell they were running on a different architecture," Wong says.

Tyson already was doing its development work on two AlphaServer systems. The StorageWorks storage solution allowed Tyson to consolidate its data for improved failover. The SAN architecture also gives Tyson more flexibility in the future to add Intel-architecture systems running Windows 2000 Server, because just about any operating environment can hang off a single SAN implementation, Arbuckle says.

The centralized storage approach can ease the fear that Wintel environments can't scale, Pelligrini adds. "You can get a lot of stability out of Wintel if the storage is centralized in a SAN environment," he says. The SAN architecture is driving many more enterprises to consider Wintel systems for high-end applications, he says.

As it is, Tyson and other AlphaServer users are on a path to Intel-based systems. Compaq has said it plans to replace the RISC-based Alpha processors in AlphaServer with Intel's forthcoming Itanium chip. All applications and Compaq's OpenVMS operating system will be ported to the new processor, Wong says.

Trimming the Fat

In all, Tyson spent nearly $2 million for the equipment and services, according to a Compaq spokeswoman. Today, it runs virtually its entire operation on the AlphaServers. Custom applications written in COBOL control Tyson's sales, materials, purchasing, logistics and financial systems. An old Digital message-queuing system handles transactions. Data is stored in an Oracle relational database.

In addition, compatibility between the VAX and AlphaServer systems meant the applications were easily recompiled for the new systems, Wong says. Already, Tyson has seen a 66 percent faster turnaround time on reports and a 400 percent improvement in batch run times, he says.

Another big savings for Tyson is Avnet's license-migration service. Avnet examines the many software licenses related to the OS,which could number well above 100 in some cases,and transfers applicable licenses to the new environment.

"Basically it's taking a stack of paper six inches tall, lining up all the serial numbers and dates of purchase, and seeing which ones are upgradable," Arbuckle says.

It's a service customers won't receive directly from Compaq, largely because it does better if the customer has to replace licenses. "To them, upgrading is a small fee compared to buying all new licenses," she says, adding that Tyson saved "a couple of hundred thousand dollars" by upgrading, rather than replacing, licenses.