The tales of replacing banks of Intel servers with a single, more efficiently run iSeries are becoming more common as examples of the versatility of the platform.

Take, for example, the case of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The museum houses the largest Asian art collection in the United States, valued at about $4 billion.

IT Director Jim Horio joined the museum in 2000 as the facility was planning to move from an old shared building in Golden Gate Park to a facility across town. At the time, Jim says, “I inherited a nightmare of mixed servers, hardware, and software. My charge was to bring the museum to a high IT standard and manage the infrastructure move into the new building.”

The applications were mixed — with software for fund raising, accounting, retail, and inventory control for the museum’s collection — as was the hardware. “Each application was running on a separate server, usually Dell,” says Horio. “We needed to replace seven Dell PCs and 80 Gateways and standardize the server and PC operating systems. Each server had excess capacity to handle the program it was running, so the total combined excess capacity was significant — but it couldn’t be shared system to system.”

After defining the system requirements, Horio settled on two alternatives: the standard Wintel systems or the iSeries. Using the Wintel systems with Raid 5, the museum would have had to purchase nine servers, each with 3 disk drives, and most servers would have had disk space that would never be used.

Instead, the museum installed a Model 820 iSeries configured with eight Integrated xSeries Servers in one box. The IXSs use one Raid 5 card instead of nine, and have 157 GB of swappable disk space instead of 972 GB. An additional benefit is that recoveries are done in 20 minutes instead of four hours — with no drag in system response time.

Horio applauds other benefits of the new system. “It has great stability,” he says. “And now backups take only two hours for 150 GB instead of 12 hours for 72 GB with the old system. And finally, we didn’t have to add staff. The whole thing is run by me and one other person.”

The server consolidation story at customs brokerage firm George H. Young (GHY) is equally impressive. GHY had been running an AS/400 and seven other servers with a mix of Windows and Linux to operate their firewall, Web hosting, and business applications. Backup and effective resource utilization were big problems, and, according to Nigel Fortlage, vice president of IT, “we were looking at putting in nine Intel servers and adding three additional staff members.”

Once GHY took a look at the numbers, Fortlage says, the financial decision was easy. The shop installed an iSeries 820 for $30,000 less than the nine Intel servers would have cost, and the shop didn’t have to hire any additional staff. Furthermore, Fortlage says, “The performance data is incredible — two times the Intel servers. On top of that, our bandwidth performance is also excellent.”

While these server consolidations are impressive enough, both Horio and Fortlage share some level of surprise and pleasure that Linux will be such a great fit in the new iSeries environments.

For Fortlage, Linux was already a component of the system. What he wasn’t expecting was the outstanding performance of Linux on the iSeries platform. While he still rates OS/400 as the most reliable operating system GHY uses, he ranks Linux second — ahead of both Windows and SCO Unix. As a result, GHY is now taking Linux on the iSeries more seriously in its move toward more realtime applications.

Though the Asian Art Museum hasn’t installed Linux yet, it is also headed down the Linux path. “One of the reasons we got the iSeries,” says Horio, “is for Linux. It’s the next logical step.”

The museum’s current Web site is vendor-hosted. But the shop is moving to “Webify” more and more of its applications. For example, the museum currently stores images of each of the 15,000 pieces of the collection on an Apple computer. These images are all being moved to the iSeries, and 2,500 of these will be available online to the public. Linux will play an integral role in that Web environment.

“It wouldn’t make any sense to put it on another machine,” says Horio. “The iSeries is a good combination box that can do multiple things.”

Horio prides himself on being an accountant by trade. “I come from the viewpoint of cost reduction,” he says. “The iSeries has proved itself as the best choice.”