Weber Automotive drives its SAP software with Linux on POWER

Weber Automotive GmbH, based in Markdorf, Germany, manufactures drive components and fiber reinforced plastic parts for the automotive industry. Its customers include many leading brands, such as Audi, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, PSA and Volkswagen. Weber Automotive also produces downsized four-stroke engines. These are planned for hybrid-drive trains and are already sold for recreational markets. The company employs 600 people throughout Germany, the USA and Hungary.

Companies in the automotive industry depend on streamlined production processes, which makes them highly demanding customers. To ensure the efficiency of their extended supply chain, they require their suppliers to manufacture high-quality, precision-engineered components and deliver them in the right quantities, to the right places, at the right time.

To meet the demands of these just-in-time manufacturing processes, Weber Automotive relies on a highly automated manufacturing environment, managed by a suite of SAP ERP applications. The availability and performance of this environment are crucial, since downtime or a lack of responsiveness can lead to immediate and serious consequences on the production line.

"SAP ERP is at the heart of our business – without it, we simply could not operate," explains Günter Dürringer, Head of IT at Weber Automotive. "To deliver the levels of performance and availability we require, the SAP software needs to be supported by a powerful hardware infrastructure. Our existing servers were ageing and could no longer meet our requirements."

Delivering performance and reliability

To support the company's business-critical applications and MaxDB databases, Weber Automotive decided to move from its existing 32-bit Linux platform, which was running on Intel-based hardware, to a new 64-bit architecture using the IBM POWER5+ chipset.

"Our complex production environment is very highly automated, which means that to manage it effectively we require a lot of I/O capacity and memory for our SAP software environment," says Günter Dürringer. "It was very difficult to provide this in a 32-bit environment, even with 11 high-end Intel-based servers. We realized that by virtualizing our SAP applications and MaxDB databases and running them in a 64-bit Linux environment on IBM System p servers, we could solve the I/O and memory challenges."

The company worked with the Enterprise Linux Services team from IT-Services and Solutions GmbH (IT’), an IBM Global Technology Services affiliate, to implement three IBM System p5 550Q servers – one for the main SAP ERP environment, one for production scheduling and control systems, and the third as a development and test environment and backup node.

IT’ and the IBM helped Weber Automotive to deliver this first-of-its-kind solution, deploying MaxDB 7.5 running under SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the p5-550Q servers. IT Services and Solutions also installed the DS4700 hardware and configured the Tivoli SA software.

"By consolidating from 11 servers to just three, our hardware infrastructure is much easier to manage, and we save space, electricity and air conditioning costs in our datacenter," comments Günter Dürringer.

"Our SAP environment has 270 users, but most of the workload is actually generated by the automation of our production line, which generates 750,000 remote system connections per day," he continues. "64-bit Linux on the IBM POWER5+ architecture delivers the performance we need to handle the demands of our SAP software environment, and will provide plenty of headroom for future growth."

Ensuring high availability

The System p5 servers are supported by a high-performance storage area network (SAN), which is based around two mirrored IBM System Storage DS4700s, located in separate data centers on the company's main site. Should a disaster occur, the redundancy of the storage infrastructure will ensure that business data is preserved and production can continue.

To promote the high availability that Weber Automotive needs from its production systems, the company also chose to deploy IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms (Tivoli SA). The software manages the SAP application clusters and uses policy-based self-healing technologies to analyze and fix most problems automatically – whether they occur in the application, operating system, or middleware layer.

"Tivoli SA comes with a plug 'n play automation module for SAP applications, so it can deal with the majority of problems that occur in SAP software environments with minimal customization," says Günter Dürringer. "By understanding the relationships between application components, Tivoli SA finds and resolves issues quickly, and minimizes the need for IT staff to intervene."

He adds: "With Tivoli SA, we are able to maintain very high availability for our SAP software environment, ensuring that systems remain online and accessible to users at all times."

Increasing performance and flexibility

"We are very satisfied with the new IBM solution, and we are giving serious consideration to a similar migration for our US operation," concludes Günter Dürringer. "The IBM System p5 platform offers far better Linux performance than our previous Intel platform – making it an excellent environment for SAP applications and databases with high I/O requirements. The new infrastructure will help us increase flexibility for deploying new SAP applications, so we are definitely looking at a number of options for progressing our SAP software environment in the future."