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Seed supplier keeps ERP flourishing with Stratus^® ftServer^® system

Rijk Zwaan helps put food on the world's tables by being among the largest producers of vegetable seeds used by commercial growers. Established in The Netherlands in 1924, today the company operates plant breeding stations internationally in order to provide varieties suited for cultivation in different climate zones. With production and operations spanning a global field, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one of the company's most strategic information technology systems.

The company relies on a specialized ERP application for seed producers, the Agro Business System (ABS) from HAPit B.V.

Making certain that ERP runs without fail is the duty of Rijk Zwaan's IT staff at the data center at its De Lier headquarters, which is also one of the locations where the company processes and packages seed output for distribution worldwide. As is the case for many enterprises, however, maintaining the ERP system is one of many responsibilities carried out by a small group of professionals.

So when the time came to upgrade the ERP server from Microsoft^® Windows NT^® 4.0 to a new version of the Windows^® operating system, Rijk Zwaan considered replacing the two-server cluster that had been running the application. The cluster hardware was seen as too complex, fault-sensitive, and time-consuming to support and maintain. That's when the built-in reliability of the fault-tolerant Stratus^®ftServer^® system attracted the company's notice.

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Sowing reliability

"We had a cluster solution consisting of two servers, one active and one passive, with shared disk storage. The shared disk represented a single point of possible failure. And this was a complex solution to support with our limited IT staff; only one person knew all the details in-depth," comments Rien van Dartel, service team manager at Rijk Zwaan.

"With the Stratus ftServer system, one machine runs as a standard Windows system that is easy to maintain in terms of fault tolerance and very high availability. All of the reliability is combined in one server with five-nines availability," van Dartel observes.

The ftServer family of Intel^® processor-based systems automatically guards against unplanned downtime with Stratus Continuous Processing^® technology that includes lockstep hardware, failsafe system software, and ActiveService^TM capabilities. This built-in protection benefits applications from the instant they begin running on the server, with no need for the extra modifications or supplemental testing involved in a high-availability cluster implementation. With uptime features designed in, affordable ftServer systems have demonstrated that they meet or exceed 99.999% availability in customer installations.

In addition to reliability, a major advantage provided by the Stratus ftServer system is that it lets Rijk Zwaan make the most of the IT group's knowledge of the Windows operating system. Says van Dartel, "The people on our staff are all familiar with the Windows environment and the Stratus ftServer behaves just like another Windows machine."

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Transplanting the application

Rijk Zwaan began to migrate the ERP application from the server cluster to a top-of-the-line, 4-way symmetric multiprocessing ftServer model.

The company’s initial requirements called for running the ERP application on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system base instead of the then-current version of Windows Server™ 2003. This would involve extra support from Stratus Technologies to ensure the deployment proceeded smoothly.

“We are happy and satisfied with how Stratus reacted to accommodate what was a non-standard setup. The Stratus staff here was in close communication with the engineers
at their headquarters to provide professional and quick feedback,” van Dartel notes.

Rijk Zwaan credits the inherent robustness of the ftServer architecture and Stratus Technologies’ responsiveness for the server’s “nearly flawless” performance from the time that
pre-production testing of the ERP system began.

Harvesting the benefits

For example, virtually unattended operation is one of the advantages that the company projected the server would bring. Now the IT team is pleased to report that unattended
operation of the ftServer system has proven true in practice.

“The ftServer system is doing what we expect. We don’t want surprises, and there have been no surprises with this Stratus server,” says van Dartel. “We no longer have to
spend as much time to make sure we get the availability we count on.”

The assurance of uptime is essential for an ERP system that will ultimately support over 11 Rijk Zwaan locations around the globe, approximately 150 users, and 24/7 operation. The
rich set of features that the ftServer system uses to enable industry-leading continuous availability has begun yielding a bumper crop of advantages for the seed producer, and the
company expects to reap positive results for years to come.

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