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Computerworld - Baldor Electric Co. and Welch Foods Inc. have much in common. Both are growing, midsize companies with similar-size IT departments. Each uses packaged ERP applications and is run by IT managers who want complete alignment with the business. But when it comes to the hardware running these systems, the companies are polar opposites.
Fort Smith, Ark.-based Baldor has consolidated its hardware to an IBM z990 running Linux that hosts its SAP ERP applications. The company, which makes electric motors, moved off IBM pSeries servers running AIX and is planning to switch applications on its Intel servers to applications that run on the mainframe, including moving a Windows-based mail server to Lotus Domino.
Welch Foods, a Concord, Mass.-based juice, jam and jelly producer, is moving from a System 390 IBM mainframe as well as an IBM midrange AS/400 (now the iSeries) running a mix of applications to an Oracle ERP system that will run on Intel-based Linux servers.
The vendors involved in these projects -- Dell Inc., which supplied the servers to Welch Foods, and IBM, which supplied Baldor -- announced the migrations last week.

Mark Shackelford, IT director at Baldor Electric Co.

Mark Shackelford, Baldor's IT director, had three mainframes and eight Unix servers. Late last year, the company decided to consolidate to one new mainframe, the z990, running Linux and z/OS operating systems and using zSeries virtualization technologies.
Weighing heavily in support of the mainframe was its track record: There hadn't been any mainframe downtime since 1997, said Shackelford. The ERP applications run the business, manufacturing, finance, sales, distribution and Web applications, among others. "We have a very stringent requirement of being up all the time," he said.
The move to the mainframe was completed in June and has increased performance by 40%, Shackelford said. The cost of the z990 was offset through staff reductions; the mainframe/Unix management staff was cut from eight to three because Unix servers were eliminated, so he now has an IT staff of 38.
IT spending has declined from 1.7% of sales to 1.2%, and Shackelford said he expects additional reductions.
Three years ago, Shackelford had investigated migrating to a Windows server environment with cluster fail-over. "We thought we were going to save a ton of money," but the systems crashed all the time, he noted, and the idea was quickly abandoned.

Larry Rencken, vice president of information services at Welch Foods Inc.

Larry Rencken, vice president of information services at Welch Foods, joined the company in June, when the path was already set, but it's