Volkswagen Financial Services drives down response times with IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator

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Volkswagen Financial Services AG (VWFS) provides a comprehensive range of services for the worldwide market, including financing, insurance, leasing and banking for the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda automotive brands. The company is based in Braunschweig, Germany, and employs 6,139 people. Its annual net income totals around €719 million (2007).

Automotive finance is a highly competitive field, as consumers are increasingly prepared to shop around in order to find the best deals. For this reason, it is vital for VWFS to be able to react quickly to changing market conditions if it is to remain competitive – and its ability to react depends primarily on its ability to access and analyze the latest business data.

VWFS is a long-term user of ERP software from SAP, which provides financial management, HR, customer relationship management and other key functionalities. The company has also deployed the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component, to provide detailed analysis of the current and historical business information stored in its data warehouse.

“With about 10TB of data in the data warehouse and up to 500 concurrent users, performance was becoming sluggish,” says Frank Semrau of Volkswagen Financial Services. “Even more of a problem was the variability of response times – some database queries took five seconds, while others could take more than 500 seconds. It was possible to optimize these queries and reduce the response times, but this was a significant effort for our IT staff and increased the cost of operation considerably.”

IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator

VWFS runs its SAP application environment on IBM System p servers, and has been impressed by the quality of both the hardware and the support that IBM provides. When the company decided to invest in an accelerator solution to resolve its response speed issues, it was natural for the IT team to evaluate the IBM offering – the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator.

“We have other hardware partners, and there are other accelerator solutions on the market, but where SAP is concerned we tend to believe that IBM is the best option,” says a spokesperson for IT Central Services. “IBM and SAP have a close and long-standing alliance, and our experience of using IBM hardware in our SAP application environment has always been positive.”

VWFS worked with c.a.r.u.s. Hannover, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to implement the solution. IT Central Services comments: “We are more than satisfied with the performance of c.a.r.u.s. on this project. They did a great job of implementing the hardware, and are still working with us to maintain and support it.”

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator deployed at Volkswagen Financial Services is based around an IBM BladeCenter with five Intel Xeon EM64T processor-based IBM HS21 blade servers, running the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator software under SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The solution leverages 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based blade servers to provide superb performance. Intel collaborated with SAP in the development of the BW Accelerator, using advanced Intel software and hardware technology to maximize performance and scalability.

The HS21 blade servers in the IBM BladeCenter provide enormous processing power that is applied directly to the creation and processing of data indexes – considerably increasing the speed of database response to user queries. The hot-pluggable BladeCenter infrastructure enables more blade servers to be added as the amount of data or number of users increases, making it a highly cost-effective means of scaling the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator solution.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers a highly stable, high performance operating system for the solution. The IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) is used to optimize performance for the Linux cluster and provide a high availability configuration to minimize downtime.

Boosting response speeds

“In a nutshell, SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator means that there is no longer any need to create aggregates to improve performance when querying large InfoCubes,” explains Frank Semrau. “The disadvantage of using aggregates to boost performance was that it only worked if you could predict the kind of queries that users would make.

By contrast, SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator indexes the InfoCubes, and uses the power of IBM BladeCenter to find the right information very rapidly. As a result, it can deliver consistently excellent performance, regardless of the kind
of query.”

Database query response times, which previously ranged from five to more than 500 seconds, have now stabilized at just over one second. This helps business users access the data they need rapidly, and make important management decisions based on the most up-to-date information.

Aggregate change runs are also much faster with the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator. A typical change run at VWFS used to take several hours, whereas now it can be accomplished much faster, significantly reducing the delay in delivering results to business users. Equally, system traffic is decreased.

A scalable solution

The indexes used by the accelerator are stored on a high-performance IBM System Storage DS4700 disk array. Both the DS4700 and the BladeCenter are highly scalable, so whenever VWFS needs more performance from its BW environment, it can simply plug more disks or more blade servers into the existing infrastructure. The solution will therefore be able to expand cost-effectively as the company’s data warehouse grows. Significantly, the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator offers near-linear scalability – such that, for example, doubling the number of blade servers will double the amount of data that can be processed.

Reducing workload for IT staff

“The components of the IBM solution are very well-integrated, so it is practically a ‘black box’,” says Marcel Bode. “You plug it in to your SAP NetWeaver BW environment, and suddenly performance improves – there is no need to worry about customization or optimization any more.

“By eliminating all the effort we used to spend on designing new aggregates to boost performance for specific kinds of queries, the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is probably saving us around 25 man-days every year.”

VWFS is very satisfied with the contribution that the new solution has made to its business intelligence environment, and is now rolling it out to some of its international businesses. The company is confident that reductions in workload for the IT department and the improved service delivered to business users will combine to deliver a rapid return on the initial investment.

Frank Semrau concludes: “The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator delivers excellent, consistent performance within our business intelligence environment – offering a real advantage to our business users and helping us reduce workload for our busy IT staff.”