The Hartmann Group consolidates global SAP applications to just two IBM Power 750 servers

The Hartmann Group is a world leader in medical supplies, particularly disposable incontinence products, wound management and operating theater materials. Headquartered in Heidenheim, Germany, the company employs almost 10,000 people and has operations around the world, generating sales of about EUR 1.63 billion (2010).

By acting as a single source of supply for thousands of products, the company helps large hospitals and other government and private health providers achieve significant supply chain management efficiencies. Beyond its focus on medical excellence and product quality, the company also needs to enhance customer service while reducing operational costs.

Josef Rehm, Computer Center Manager, says, “We aim to be preferred solution partners to professional users, providing easy to use products, customized services and integrated solutions. Our process-oriented approach helps professionals efficiently and cost-effectively manage their daily work for the benefit of patients.”

As a long-term user of SAP applications, executives could see that the latest SAP application functionality would be a key enabler for the company’s strategic ambitions. The company was particularly attracted to features such as lot management, which would enable more detailed, automated tracking of goods to help identify and correct process inefficiencies. To take advantage of the new features, the Hartmann Group needed to migrate to SAP ERP applications with Enhancement Pack Four, which in turn would place a greater workload on the IT infrastructure.

“Not only would migrating to the current SAP ERP applications enable us to improve our logistics performance and increase supply chain efficiency, it would eliminate the cost of extended support for older applications. We wanted a way to be able to increase the number of users and handle the higher workloads that the new applications would create, yet reduce our operational costs.”

Evaluating hardware platforms
The Hartmann Group was running its existing SAP applications on eight IBM Power Systems servers, with a mixture of POWER5 and POWER6 processors. As part of a full review, the IT team reviewed the possibility of implementing the new SAP solutions on other hardware and operating system combinations.

“Our vision and goal was to build up a fully virtualized, industry-standard data center. We wanted to establish a way to extend the life of our hardware investments as much as possible while keeping pace with the increased demand for resources as we deploy additional SAP applications,” says Josef Rehm.

“During conversations with vendors, we realized that migration from our existing POWER5 and POWER6 systems to another processor platform, perhaps running Windows or Linux combined with third-party virtualization, could be significantly complex,” says Josef Rehm. “The solution landscape needs to include high availability, backup and restore functionality, disaster recovery and much more.”

The Hartmann Group started to migrate individual SAP applications to Intel servers running Microsoft Windows Server. The Hartmann Group team considered that virtualization technology for the Windows environment was not sufficiently mature for large database servers, which entailed a one-server per application landscape.

“With the advantages of the integrated IBM Power Systems platform, it soon became a matter of selecting the best POWER7 solution for the Hartmann Group,” says Josef Rehm.

Server consolidation
Although the new SAP ERP applications offer significantly expanded functionality and require additional compute power, the increased performance of the POWER7 processors allowed the Hartmann Group to consolidate from eight existing servers to just two IBM Power 750 servers, housed in separate data centers. The reduction from eight to two servers immediately reduced software license costs, cut system administration effort and simplified the IT landscape.

One server runs the core SAP ERP applications while the other runs SAP Supply Chain Management – and each server acts as the other’s hot standby in case disaster strikes. The servers support some 300 concurrent users, accessing 2.2TB of SAP ERP production data and around 700GB of SAP Supply Chain Management data.

“The effort that would have been required to complete a successful migration of so much precious data to a non-IBM platform was a decisive point in our decision to upgrade to the Power 750 servers,” says Josef Rehm. “We were also impressed by the predicted operational cost savings and the price-to-performance ratio. POWER7 offers unmatched scalability, and combines with IBM AIX to provide all the tools we need to manage virtualization and clustering, so there’s no need for third-party software.”

Follow-the-sun migration services
IBM Global Business Services provided migration support, with teams in Germany and India collaborating with the Hartmann Group staff 24/7 to provide a follow-the-sun service.

“The advantage of giving such a project to IBM Global Business Services is that they can flexibly provide the skilled resources you need for 24 hours a day during the project process. You would need one or two people purely to manage the project, 24 hours a day, and working with IBM Global Business Services avoids that expense,” says Josef Rehm. “Thanks to IBM’s expertise, we only had minor downtime during the whole migration process, and system availability subsequently has been better than 99.98 percent. IBM Global Business Services helped the Hartmann Group complete the migration project on budget and on time. Internal planning was good, and communication with both SAP and IBM proved to be essential.”

Leveraging virtualization
The Hartmann Group runs a total of nine SAP production instances, with consolidation and development environments for each, and three instances of SAP Solution Manager. The Power 750 servers are divided into logical partitions (LPARs) that allow all 30 application instances to run independently, and additional LPARs are available on the hot standby server to act as failovers in case something goes wrong at the primary data center.

“Our systems need to be available 24/7, as this central data center provides SAP applications and other services for our locations worldwide,” says Josef Rehm. “Organizing downtime for maintenance, migration or management is extremely difficult to arrange – so the flexibility of the POWER7 servers is a major advantage.”

“We run a fully virtualized solution which allows us to respond very quickly to changing requirements and to the demand for temporary systems. For example, during the SAP ERP upgrade we needed about eight additional systems for testing. With POWER7 running multiple LPARs and using Live Partition Mobility, we were able to create new virtual servers exactly as we needed them, with no need for additional investment. The POWER architecture offers outstanding capabilities to move workloads from one system to another, across LPARs or physical machines, as needed, providing excellent business flexibility.”

“In addition, the POWER7 processors provide performance improvements of perhaps three- or four-fold for the same power consumption. Moreover, if you compare the total processing capacity available with POWER7 processors when compared with, for example, a traditional server farm or blade solution, POWER technology is significantly more efficient.”

Features of IBM POWER7
The company is taking advantage of Live Partition Mobility and Active Memory Expansion, both unique features available on the IBM POWER platform. Live Partition Mobility allows live SAP applications to be moved from one LPAR to another, even across servers, without interrupting production. For the Hartmann Group, Live Partition Mobility enables continuous production even during system maintenance or upgrade, allowing fully 24/7 operations from only two servers.

Active Memory Expansion (AME) increases the available capacity of the physical memory for workloads such as SAP applications – and also provides a boost to other workload types, such as transactional or web applications. AME uses on-the-fly compression technology to reduce the demands on physical memory, which increases system performance without requiring additional hardware investment.

“Active Memory Expansion on POWER7 allows the Hartmann Group to reach its system performance objectives and fulfill its service level agreements within the most cost-effective investment in POWER7 technology and appropriate system memory,” says Josef Rehm. “We use an AME expansion factor of 1.8 in the SAP environment with no impact on performance.”

Integrated SAP applications
The Hartmann Group migrated to the new SAP ERP releases in a phased program based on its business units, starting with its Eastern European operations as a pilot project. The first step was to deploy the base SAP ERP 6.0 components, and then Enhancement Pack 4. The company has implemented all the core components, such as financials, controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, warehouse management, production planning and many others.

The SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) solution runs essential forecasting and replenishment, demand planning and transport planning and vehicle scheduling (TPVS) applications. The Hartmann Group uses the analytical and predictive capabilities of SAP SCM and TPVS to serve its global customer base as effectively as possible, on the one hand optimizing its logistics and on the other ensuring totally reliable service – essential in the healthcare marketplace.

“The POWER7 platform allows the Hartmann Group to take maximum advantage of the SAP applications, where we can analyze the wealth of data rapidly and efficiently, constantly searching for improvements and better ways of working,” says Josef Rehm. “The very large workloads generated by forecasting and replenishment and by TPVS are easily managed by the POWER7 platform, and we can use the IBM virtualization technologies to allocate compute capacity dynamically to each task as necessary while continuing in full production.”

Support from IBM software
The Hartmann Group uses IBM DB2 throughout the business to support SAP and non-SAP applications. During project planning, the team considered migrating to other database technologies, and concluded that the benefits offered by the very close integration by DB2 were overwhelming.

“In the end, migrating from DB2 to another platform was not a consideration,” says Josef Rehm. “We have built up excellent experience with our DB2 environment and are very satisfied. We know that SAP works closely with IBM to improve performance on DB2 and optimize both systems, and this collaboration offers clear advantages to the Hartmann Group in terms of both productivity and confirming the long-term strategy. We decided to use DB2 more than 10 years ago, and, looking back, we have to say this has been confirmed as the best choice for the Hartmann Group.”

“Of course we also knew that the combination of POWER systems and DB2 would offer the best combined performance, which in business terms translates to lower expenditure to achieve the same business service. We are looking to take advantage of DB2 compression features in the very near future, which will reduce our data storage needs and may increase performance, too.”

The Hartmann Group uses IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backup, restore and archive processes, with data stored on devices from multiple vendors. Tivoli Storage Manager provides storage management capabilities from a single point of control, simplifying the protection and management of data even as it continues to grow. Tivoli Storage Manager addresses business continuity issues by helping to shorten backup and recovery times, and maximizes application availability with advanced data recovery management technologies.

Most importantly, Tivoli Storage Manager helps to control storage management costs with its simple interface and easy integration with storage devices from IBM and other vendors.

To manage the physical storage environment, the Hartmann Group has deployed IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), which consolidates available disk storage from multiple vendors’ devices into a single virtual pool, managed by a single console. Virtual storage volumes can then be allocated according to need, and even moved from one device to another without requiring any changes at the application level.

For unstructured data and other business information, the Hartmann Group uses IBM Content Manager to provide electronic document management services. Content Manager manages all types of digitized content across multiple platforms, databases and applications. Content Manger is designed to provide the scalability to grow from a single department to a geographically dispersed enterprise, ideal for the Hartmann Group.

“The IBM data storage and management technologies help the Hartmann Group to control very large stores of information cost-effectively,” says Josef Rehm. “SAN Volume Controller enables us to maximize the use of available disk capacity as efficiently as possible, Tivoli ensures our data is safely backed up, and Content Manager offers us access to and management of multiple file types to simplify data control.”

Benefits of the new landscape
With the POWER7, DB2, SVC and Tivoli landscape in place for the SAP application environment, the Hartmann Group has an integrated, simplified IT infrastructure that is immensely powerful and easy to adapt to changing business requirements. Just two Power 750 servers support a company of nearly 10,000 people, with 3,000 SAP users and more than 3TB of production data.

Josef Rehm notes, “Of course we have significant cost savings with the POWER7 environment, and in license costs alone it is highly competitive with other platforms, even before you allow for reduced complexity and lower administration.“

“We have realized big performance improvements with the migration to the SAP ERP applications and the storage virtualization using SVC. In areas like the controlling module of SAP ERP, the move to POWER7 and SVC achieved significant runtime improvements, which allow us to deliver vital information to the business more quickly and more reliably than before.”

The improved performance and efficiency from the underlying SAP systems has also had a direct impact on the business.

After the ERP upgrade, average system response time was reduced from 1.082ms to 0.752ms, and although the new applications have an 11 percent higher demand for processor resources, overall response times have been cut by 30 percent.

“We estimated the new application server workload during peak hours would rise by 25 percent, and in fact it rose by 33 percent. In practice, the POWER7 processors are more than powerful enough to manage the peak hours without problems. This shows us just how much potential there is in growing the POWER7 environment without the need for further investment.”

Following the successful migration, the Hartmann Group is now looking at the benefits of adding SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and business intelligence tools. Using the virtualization capabilities of POWER7, the Hartmann Group team expects to be able to manage the increased analytical workload without the need to add processors or servers, a significant cost advantage when compared with many other platforms.

Josef Rehm concludes, “SAP applications and IBM technologies help the Hartmann Group fulfill its strategic ambition to be the preferred solution partner for healthcare professionals. Our process-oriented approach helps professionals efficiently and cost effectively manage their daily work for the benefit of patients.”