Constantia Hueck Folien implements a scalable IBM infrastructure for SAP software

Constantia Hueck Folien GmbH & Co. KG (Hueck Folien), based in Weiden, Germany, develops, manufactures and markets flexible packaging products for the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries. The company has manufacturing sites in Germany, Belgium and the USA, as well as a worldwide network of sales representatives. In total, the company employs around 900 people and achieved revenues of €181 million in 2006.

The manufacture of packaging is a high-volume, low-margin sector, where success depends on the complete efficiency of production processes. Hueck Folien’s manufacturing costs must be kept to a minimum in order to protect profits – and to pay for an extensive research and development program, as product innovation is the best way to remain competitive.

Hueck Folien’s production processes are governed by the company’s SAP ERP application, which interfaces with a UGS FactoryLink manufacturing execution system and an Onventis e-procurement solution. Customers can place orders directly via electronic data interchange (EDI). To ensure that the company’s supply chain, production line and logistics are managed effectively, all these systems must remain online at all times – so a highly reliable IT infrastructure is vitally important.

The company’s existing infrastructure had been implemented some years before, and was based around a number of aging Linux and UNIX servers. As business demands grew, the hardware was beginning to underperform, and Hueck Folien also wanted to move to a new platform that would offer greater scalability and resilience in case of disaster.

Choosing the right partners

“We had worked with IBM hardware before, and we had a lot of confidence in the capabilities of the System p5 family, especially in terms of the virtualization of memory and processors,” says Bruno Sticht, Head of Information Systems at Hueck Folien. “IBM invited us to a briefing session about the new POWER5+ processors – and we were very impressed with what we saw. We also wanted to build on our successful long-term relationship with Profi.”

Profi, an IBM Premier Business Partner, helped Hueck Folien design a new infrastructure, deploying two IBM System p5 550 servers to its new SAP ERP application – which includes functional components for financial accounting, controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, production planning, human capital management, product lifecycle management and plant maintenance – as well as the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) component.

The p5-550 servers are divided into a number of logical partitions (LPARs), which act as virtual servers for the SAP applications. Each LPAR has minimum and maximum thresholds for the amount of CPUs and memory it can utilize, and spare capacity is allocated according to predefined policies, helping to make the most of the resources available. The high-performance quad-core POWER5+ processors offer excellent response times for demanding SAP software like SAP NetWeaver BI.

The 2TB Oracle databases that support the SAP applications for Hueck Folien’s 500 users are stored using a Network File System (NFS). The company’s network-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure is based on two IBM System Storage N5200 disk systems.

The N5200s are clustered using the IBM N series MetroCluster integrated high availability and business continuity solution, and located in separate data centers to provide resilience in case of disaster. If disaster strikes, MetroCluster’s combination of failover and data replication capabilities will make it easier for Hueck Folien to recover data quickly – in a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days.

The N5200 network-attached storage solution is designed to address the needs of business-critical applications like SAP ERP, with inbuilt features promoting high availability and system-level redundancy. Support for both Ethernet and Fiber Channel connectivity provides the high I/O speeds necessary for enterprise class databases like IBM DB2 and Oracle, making it a perfect component in building an adaptive computing environment for SAP software.

“The N5200 is an ideal storage platform for our business,” says Bruno Sticht. “Using a traditional SAN environment to create an adaptive computing environment for SAP software would have been a complex proposition. But with the N5200, we simply use NFS to mount the file systems so that they appear to the servers as local drives – it’s a much more elegant and less complex solution.”

The new disk systems are linked to the rest of the infrastructure via LACP trunks over a fast Ethernet connection, which provides transfer speeds of 2Gb/s for iSCSI and 4Gb/s for NFS.

“The new storage system will help us replace our complex, expensive Fiber Channel infrastructure with simple, low-cost Ethernet connectivity, without any adverse effect on performance.” says Bruno Sticht. “In summary, the N5200 provides a combination of high performance and high availability for our business-critical systems, reduces the overall system complexity and offers superb scalability for the future.”

He adds: “The whole implementation was completed remarkably quickly, thanks to the collaboration with Profi. It was really a highlight of the project. We were able to proceed from first concepts to go-live within six months. The migration itself – to a new system landscape, hardware and applications – took just 12 weeks. We had planned for a considerable period of downtime, but in fact we were only offline for a short time.”

Reaping the benefits

By almost guaranteeing that Hueck Folien’s SAP applications and other systems will remain available 24x7, the IBM infrastructure reduces risk for the business and helps to ensure that profit margins are preserved.

Equally, the new solution offers considerable scalability – the N5200 can hold up to 84TB of disk capacity, while the p5-550 servers contain a number of inactive processors that can be turned on when required, using the IBM Capacity Upgrade on Demand feature. As Hueck Folien may need to adapt to group-wide policy changes made by its parent company, Constantia, the flexibility offered by this infrastructure could be very important in the long term.

“We are considering introducing the SAP CRM application, and our use of SAP NetWeaver BI is likely to increase considerably,” says Bruno Sticht. “Meanwhile we also moved our Microsoft Exchange and file servers onto the N5200 platform, so our data volumes are likely to rise considerably. With the IBM solution, we can be confident that our infrastructure will be able to handle these and other challenges in the coming years.”