Bundeswehr accelerates business intelligence performance with IBM and SAP

The Bundeswehr is the national defence force of Germany, with army, navy, air-force, joint support service and central medical services, as well as the territorial defence administration and armaments organization. It has around 400,000 employees, all managed in a single hierarchy. Conscription results in high staff turnover, contributing to a rapid rise in human resources (HR) data volumes.

The Bundeswehr uses SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) to analyze complex data sets for controlling, balanced scorecards, logistics and HR planning/reporting. With the number of SAP NetWeaver BW users set to double to 4,000, the Bundeswehr needed to boost query performance and enable more concurrent user sessions. The upgrade to the latest SAP NetWeaver BW version took approximately two months for the existing 3TB data warehouse.

The SAP NetWeaver BW runs on IBM System p5 570 servers under IBM AIX 5.3 with an IBM DB2 database. The Bundeswehr is exploiting DB2 specific optimizations such as Multi Dimensional Clustering (MDC) to increase performance – an option uniquely available on IBM DB2.

To further optimize performance and gain greater query flexibility, the Bundeswehr implemented SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator – an innovative analytical engine within SAP NetWeaver BW. It enables customers to analyze large amounts of critical business information, crunching through terabytes of data in a matter of seconds. IBM and SAP have created an easy to install appliance that enables customers to deploy SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator in an easy, cost-effective way. The IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is based on 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based blade servers.

The Bundeswehr currently uses the application to accelerate 100 InfoCubes from the SAP NetWeaver BW system. These cubes have on average 10 key figures and up to 80 million rows, together totalling around 1.5TB in the database. The SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has compressed these cubes by a factor of 12 (original GB size/indexes in memory). The entire indexing process took only around 60 minutes per 100 million rows to complete.

Part of this performance improvement results from the implementation of the General Parallel File System (GPFS), which is part of the IBM solution. GPFS is specifically developed for high-performance computing applications, and uses a dedicated fibre-channel based storage network, delivering a performance advantage. To ensure resilience of the configuration, GPFS can be configured in a way to ensure that any node can be taken out of the cluster without impacting data availability, thus it is an ideal basis for high-availability scenarios. “IBM provided an easy to install solution that was quick to implement, accelerating our SAP NetWeaver BW performance. This results in almost near-real-time-reporting, which tremendously improves the decision-making process,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jörg Steinhorst, SASPF project leader BW/SEM for the Bundeswehr.

He adds, “The advantage of the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is that it can optimize speed and concurrent queries at the same time. Fifty concurrent users can now complete a query in just 30 seconds that previously took 60 seconds for a single user, and 90 seconds during concurrent execution. An even more impressive benefit is that the time-consuming building and maintaining of aggregates in the data warehouse has now been eliminated. This results in both improved response times and reduced effort on data maintenance. For ad-hoc queries, we've improved performance by a factor of 116.”

Lieutenant Colonel Steinhorst concludes: “We aim to drive SAP NetWeaver BW to the masses, and performance is the key issue. Now we can support 50 concurrent users, employees don’t have to wait while queries are processed. Our next goal is to achieve more than 100 concurrent queries, which we can easily achieve with the current setup. In the longer term, the BladeCenter offers linear scalability so we can easily and cost-effectively grow the solution as our user numbers increase.”