Knorr-Bremse puts the brake on costs using IBM DB2 for SAP Business Suite

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KNORR-BREMSE Systeme für Schienenfahrzeuge GmbH (Knorr-Bremse) specializes in braking systems for rail and commercial vehicles, and related components. With just over 16,000 employees worldwide, the company achieved sales of €3.7 billion (2010).

Economic turmoil during 2008 and onwards placed particular emphasis on costs, and Knorr-Bremse decided to look for an alternative database solution for its SAP Business Suite landscape, at that point supported by a mix of MaxDB and Oracle databases. The choice was to migrate to a new database solution, which offered potentially lower maintenance costs when compared with Oracle.

Thomas Brauchle, Director Corporate Shared Service, comments, “Reality is rarely so simple. During the last couple of years Knorr-Bremse has moved approximately 90 percent of its SAP systems to MaxDB. In the same period, the company experienced massive growth, and the size of the database grew tremendously. We recognized that we were running into difficulties regarding scalability and performance. At the beginning of 2009, the IT team concluded that we needed to reassess our strategic direction.”

Knorr-Bremse reviewed its option to return to Oracle, or migrate to IBM DB2. Provided the core functionality demands could be met, cost was the determining factor.

Setting project objectives
The most important project objective was to reduce costs while preserving functionality. Bearing in mind that 90 percent of the SAP instances in Knorr-Bremse had been migrated, executives wanted to establish the total project costs including migration, maintenance and future license costs.

“Our objective was to move to a standardized environment. Our investigations showed that DB2 was more than capable of meeting the functional and technical requirements, and offered compression and scalability features that could bring significant benefits,” says Thomas Brauchle.

“We set up a business case including licensing, maintenance and administration and the expenses of migrating to DB2. Selecting DB2 as the standard platform would, in our estimation, cost about 30 percent less than choosing Oracle.”

Knorr-Bremse migrated all its SAP instances to DB2, purchasing the licenses directly from IBM. The project took nine months, with consultants and migration experts provided by IBM. Existing HP Itanium servers running HP-UX were to be re-used for the hardware infrastructure.

“Including test migrations, there were around 65 migrations to be completed within the project period. This translates into about 10 system migrations per month, at least two each week. With assistance from IBM, we were able to create processes that amounted to assembly-line work, and the technical effort was actually very low,” says Thomas Brauchle.

“Each and every migration was entirely successful, and helped us plan the larger projects with a great deal of accuracy. For the biggest system, of about 6 TB, we predicted a total of 41 hours, which fitted well with our operations and business plans, as we were due to start on Friday afternoon and needed to finish on Sunday.”

In all, Knorr-Bremse migrated a total of 24 TB from 17 production systems, seven quality assurance systems, 17 development systems, and a project landscape of eleven SAP systems.

Benefiting from compression
The predicted benefits to be gained by the data compression capabilities offered by DB2 formed a significant factor in developing the business case, and in fact made up the lion’s share of the cost savings realized.

Thomas Brauchle reports, “If we could reduce the disk space required though compression, this would mean Knorr-Bremse could avoid investment in additional very expensive, high-availability SAN storage capacity.

“During the migration, DB2 Deep Compression achieved an average of 48 percent saving on data volumes. In subsequent tests, on precisely the same server infrastructure, the combination of compression technology and DB2 performance reduced batch job run times by an average of 15 percent.

“We saw additional performance improvements in our SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse environment, of up to 10-20 percent. Based on SAP BW Knorr-Bremse now has SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse in place worldwide, generating more than 80 standardized KPIs/reports for areas including Materials Management, Purchasing, Warehouse Management, Quality, Plant Maintenance, Production, Sales and Finance & Controlling.

“The biggest benefit for us is that all data load processes have been significantly accelerated. For example, our biggest ERP system has around 6,000 named users and about 2,500 concurrent users.

“With DB2, before tuning, we achieved comparable performance to the previous Oracle environment – which had been tuned. Despite it being technically somewhat different, we were able to migrate from Oracle direct to DB2 without significant preparatory work and without significant rework.

“In terms of cost, Knorr-Bremse gained immediate savings of €155,000 and annual savings of €50,000. With DB2, we estimate that the maintenance costs are approximately 30 percent lower and the license costs around 15 percent lower.”

Learning with IBM Global Business Services
While Knorr-Bremse provided the IT infrastructure such as test hardware and storage systems, IBM Global Business Services focused on the migration work, from system set up to the migrations themselves. Around 30 percent of the 65 migrations were completed on-site in Munich, and the remaining 70 percent were at operational or subsidiary business unit sites.

“Collaboration and communication with IBM Global Business Services was excellent, with regular Knorr-Bremse and IBM team meetings to discuss every migration in detail together,” says Thomas Brauchle. “Colleagues informed each other quickly via mobile phone and email of forthcoming issues, and migrating the off-site systems was well-planned and straightforward.

“Particularly, IBM was more than fair regarding number of test migrations, allowing us to re-test if necessary without additional fees.”

IBM Global Business Services consultants trained the Knorr-Bremse team during handover, and the internal staff now maintain the new SAP landscape.

“This critical knowledge transfer worked very well,” says Thomas Brauchle. “Our colleagues had an opportunity to sit with the IBM guys and look over their shoulders. This also created good personal contacts, and gradually our know-how is deepening with great support from IBM Global Business Services.”

Strategic partnership
Making an enterprise-wide change to IBM DB2 required confidence in the long-term partnership between SAP and IBM, as well as the technical excellence and cost-saving opportunities.

Thomas Brauchle says, “We can see that IBM has laid out a clear roadmap for the development of DB2. We know that there will be yet further improvements to come from DB2, such as the effectiveness of compression and performance optimization.

“Migrating to DB2 was a strategic decision for Knorr-Bremse. While prototyping and pilot migrations are important, we based our decision largely on references and the strategic collaboration of SAP with IBM. SAP runs some of its biggest systems supported by IBM DB2, and the very tight partnership between the two companies helped to convince us that DB2 is the correct long-term solution for SAP applications.”