The Client
Established in 1889, Carhartt is a global premium workwear brand with a rich heritage of developing rugged products for workers on and off the job. Headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, with more than 5,100 associates worldwide, Carhartt is family-owned and managed by the descendants of the company’s founder, Hamilton Carhartt. The company has sales of over USD 600 million a year. One of America’s leading workwear brands, Carhartt operates manufacturing facilities in Kentucky and Tennessee, selling through company-owned stores, retail chains and online.
The Challenge
As manufacturing and sales volumes grew, their existing IT infrastructure was progressively extended and developed. New applications were added to their systems, along with additional storage and networking, which meant both costs and complexity were starting to increase. They began to look for possible solutions.
The Solution
With the significantly increased capacity and throughout of POWER8 versus POWER5 and POWER7, Carhartt was able to move all of their IBM i workloads to just 2 POWER8 Servers. This reduced their data center footprint by more than 70 percent. The opportunity to consolidate their physical servers was very important to Carhartt, which meant a significantly reduced workload for their IT team. Michael Karasienski, an IBM Champion for Power Systems, said “Since we made the switchover, performance has been extremely reliable, the new IBM Power Systems servers have been in place for around seven months now, and they haven’t needed to be rebooted once.” The new Power Systems servers included the IBM Power Systems Capacity Upgrade on Demand features. This allows Carhartt to increase computing power as their workloads grow in capacity, without the need to deploy new physical machines.
The Results
Since consolidating their IBM i and Power Systems environment, Carhartt has significantly reduced their total cost of ownership. Running IBM i on their Power Servers offers Carhartt a sustainable digital environment that can scale upwards to handle rapid expansion and peak seasonal workloads, at lower total power consumption and with a smaller physical footprint. The company is saving at least USD 1.1 million a year based on just the reduced operational costs delivered by their new Power Systems infrastructure. Following the success of their original migration, Carhartt is currently in the process of upgrading to POWER9 E980 enterprise servers to further reduce their IT workload and improve performance even more.
This case study was originally featured on IBM.com. Learn more about BDK’s IBM i expertise here.
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