Livestock Improvement Corporation Ltd. of New Zealand operates one of the largest bovine databases in the world. When they needed to reduce their licensing costs, they migrated 130 GB of dairy herd records from DB2 on IBM's OS/390 to DB2 on the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS).

Livestock Improvement's IT general manager Les Christopher stated they needed to cut $1 million from their software licensing costs. The migration project, called Project Moove, began a year ago. The migration took place over the Easter holiday, making the database unavailable to farmers for those days.

The national database contains the records of more than 16 million dairy animals, recording 97 percent of cow locations and movement, lists all New Zealand dairy farmers, their farms and locations and details 90 percent of annual mating records nationwide.

Reporter Anthony Doesburg with New Zealand Computer World reported that the project was a success. Project manager Neil Gladden considered rolling back the project at one point during the Easter weekend when the newly migrated database refused to boot up.

"It caused a few grey hairs," Gladden said. "The biggest hassle with these things is trying to identify the problem." The bug was found to be a missing file which, once located and copied over, enabled the database to run.

Livestock Improvement's Services

Livestock Improvement's MINDA herd recording service provides an electronic and paper-based service to approximately 98 percent of New Zealand dairy farmers. Approximately 3.8 million dairy cows and 1.6 million dairy young stock were recorded in 11,850 herds during the 2002-2003 season.

In 1999, Livestock Improvement launched GeneMark, the largest commercial bovine DNA analysis service in New Zealand. GeneMark has more than 50,000 animals' DNA profiled on its database and this continues to grow daily. In addition, Livestock Improvement has strategic alliances worldwide to ensure New Zealand farmers maximize advances in biotechnology, while minimizing on-farm costs.

For the Livestock Improvement Web site:

http://www.lic.co.nz

Sun's Migration Services

Sun has helped thousands of businesses move from legacy IT platforms to a solid foundation of Sun FireTM servers, storage systems and the Solaris OS. Sun has created specific programs that address common business and technology issues, drawing from more than 10 years of UNIXR migration experience. For details on the programs, see:

http://www.sun.com/datacenter/migration [...read more...]

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