INTERSPORT improves fitness and business flexibility

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With retail turnover of €8.37 billion and more than 4,900 associated retailers in 32 countries, INTERSPORT Group has the worldwide leading position in the sporting goods retail market. Based in Austria, INTERSPORT International Corporation (IIC) is the purchasing and management holding company for the INTERSPORT Group. INTERSPORT Deutschland eG is the German cooperative for more than 1,500 sport outfitters in Germany.

Managing business growth
IIC relied on the insight generated from its business intelligence systems, created by analyzing transaction data captured from SAP applications using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. As business volumes increased, system response started to grow worse, to the point where daily sales reports were delayed or unobtainable. For those outfitters with online access to stock and delivery information, the situation was impacting their sales capacity, and restricting opportunities and potential profits.

The problem was particularly severe at the start of the working day, when up to 350 users log on simultaneously. INTERSPORT realized that these performance issues were likely to become even more severe. To create a foundation for international expansion and improve multi-language support, the company was planning to upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 with Unicode support. This upgrade was likely to increase data volumes and put even greater load on the company’s infrastructure.

Leveraging virtualization technology
Working with IBM and Base-IT, the INTERSPORT Austria IT team designed and deployed a new server architecture designed to support the business for the long term, based on two IBM Power 550 servers running the IBM i 6.1 operating system. The primary server has eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 256 GB of memory, while the secondary server has six cores and 160 GB of memory.

Unlike the previous landscape, where one main server supported the production workload while a second smaller server handled non-production workload, the new architecture distributes the logical partitions (LPARs) for production between the two machines using IBM PowerVM technology.

By dividing the production workload for the SAP and ISIS applications between the two IBM Power 550 servers, INTERSPORT Austria has been able to significantly enhance its disaster recovery capability.

With the previous solution, it would have taken more than two days to re-configure the secondary server and recover all systems, and since the secondary server was less powerful than the primary server, application performance would have been significantly degraded.

INTERSPORT Austria upgraded its storage architecture to eliminate I/O bottlenecks that were affecting SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) performance. To increase throughput, the company considered expanding its existing IBM System Storage DS8100 disk systems with a further eight Fibre Channel disk ranks – but this would have required the introduction of an expansion unit, occupying valuable rack-space and increasing power and cooling requirements.

The IT team calculated that to achieve the required level of performance from the Fibre Channel ranks, it would not be possible to utilize more than 60 percent of the available disk capacity. As a result, 40 percent of the new disks would remain unused, reducing the value of the investment. IIC worked with IBM and Base-IT to migrate to two new DS8700 systems. Each of these storage systems contains 12 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks for SAP ERP and ISIS production LPARs, as well as two ranks of Solid State Drives (SSDs) for SAP NetWeaver BW.

Optimizing resource utilization
Consolidating the SAP application landscape to IBM POWER6+ processor-based servers, DB2 and IBM DS8700 disk systems with SSDs has resolved INTERSPORT Austria’s performance issues, while also providing sufficient capacity to support the explosive growth in data volumes and analysis of SAP NetWeaver BW data.

The company can utilize up to 98 percent of the available capacity of the SSDs, and provide far higher performance in terms of throughput and response times in the SAP NetWeaver BW environment. As a result, INTERSPORT Austria only needs two bays of SSDs to provide the same level of performance as eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks.

Rapid recovery from disaster
Should disaster strike one of the data centers, by sharing workload between two identical Power servers, full recovery is possible within two hours. Each server is already configured and has sufficient capacity to handle production workload. This is the first step in the longer-term strategy of removing dependency on physical assets and towards a cloud-like infrastructure, where technology is almost invisible to business management.

Enjoying the benefits
The average time taken to load data into SAP NetWeaver BW has been reduced from 120 minutes to 30 minutes – a 75 percent improvement. The time taken to build aggregates has been reduced by approximately 75 percent, and the time taken to generate reports has been improved by approximately 66 percent.

The company’s 350 SAP users are able to access business intelligence data much more rapidly, even at times of peak load. This helps to improve their productivity, and also encourages them to use the SAP NetWeaver BW system as part of their daily routine.

DB2 data compression technology has delivered significant performance improvements, and the compression of 110 million datasets that was expected to take 96 hours took less than 17 hours – 83 percent faster than expected, releasing productive time to the business.

Choosing the more compact SSD-based storage solution has enabled INTERSPORT Austria to avoid purchasing a DS8000 expansion unit and eight additional Fibre Channel disk ranks, saving rack-space in the company’s data center. Data is contained within a single physical infrastructure, controlled and managed by DB2, simplifying the IT landscape and improving ease of management.

The combination of the SSD solution with the new Power 550 servers has also reduced energy and cooling requirements. The POWER6+ processors are highly energy-efficient, and two ranks of SSDs consume around 90 percent less electricity than eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks, directly reducing energy costs and saving 75 percent in rack space.

By equipping more employees with the latest business information, INTERSPORT Austria improves their ability to make rapid and well-informed business decisions, which should ultimately result in improved efficiency and increased sales. The company has experienced significant sales growth since the solution went live, supported by rapid business analysis of data enabled by the new IT landscape.

Additional Smarter Computing information

Designed for Data: INTERSPORT extracts, analyzes and responds to information derived from huge quantities of transaction data to ensure that it has the right stock in the right store at the right time to meet predicted consumer demands.

Tuned to the Task: With IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage Systems, INTERSPORT has consolidated and virtualized its IT infrastructure. IBM DB2 compression features allow INTERSPORT to keep critical business data on high-performance solid state drives, moving less-needed data to less expensive traditional spinning disks.

Managed in the Cloud: Virtualization and integrated service management capabilities enable INTERSPORT to create new business services rapidly and cost-effectively without the need for further hardware investments.

Driving Innovation: This is the first step in the longer-term strategy of removing dependency on physical assets and towards a cloud-like infrastructure, where technology is almost invisible to business management.