Aircraft manufacturer saves more than 60 percent on data storage with SAP and IBM

This aircraft manufacturer is one of the global industry leaders in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft, with the associated spare parts, maintenance and overhaul services.

The business has grown rapidly, from $2 billion to $7 billion annual sales in five years. Running this fast-growth business requires constant and detailed reporting. In the past, information was often locked in separate solutions, and it needed to be extracted, consolidated and analyzed manually. The team wanted to eliminate the delays and possible inaccuracies introduced by manual reporting processes, and chose to introduce SAP software several years ago. The company has been pleased with the efficiency and functionality of SAP software, adopted as one of its standardized solutions.

Once the SAP solutions were in place, the situation improved significantly. However as the business continued to expand and workload grew, the time taken to generate some essential reports was beginning to impact the company’s efficiency. The SAP production database was growing by up to 70 GB each month, an annual growth rate of more than 20 percent, reaching a total of around 3.5 TB. The original SAP software had been implemented on a database and hardware from other vendors.

The IT team leader explains, “For example, we need to complete our materials planning requirements run by 5.00 am every morning, so that suppliers can collect their schedules. To be able to achieve the deadline, we had to close off procurement requests by 4.30 pm the previous day, which had an impact on manufacturing productivity.

“Similarly, our target to complete month-end financial closing within three days was becoming a risk for us. As a result of our growth, we either had to start the closing process earlier or run a later delivery schedule, losing half a day of productivity. As the business more than tripled in size, the sheer volume of transactions meant that financial reconciliation took from midnight until 6.00 pm, a total of 18 hours, and in effect the team had lost a whole day of working.”

Rethinking the IT infrastructure
These highly visible challenges created the opportunity to review the infrastructure supporting these critical SAP solutions, and the company invited vendor proposals for refreshing the server platform.

IBM proposed Power servers for the SAP applications, along with the IBM Migration Factory, part of IBM Global Business Services, to execute the migration from the existing Sun servers, running Oracle databases. In addition, IBM and SAP both proactively recommended a migration to DB2 using the IBM Migration Factory team, for increased capacity, scalability and performance. The company wanted to be certain that migrating both processor platform and supporting database would be commercially justified at minimum business risk, and agreed to a proof of concept offer from IBM.

The IBM team demonstrated to the database administrators how effortless it would be to learn this latest version of DB2 and to manage the environment. The Migration Factory showed how the entire SAP environment could be migrated to the new Power, AIX and DB2 platform with minimal risk and disruption to day to day business operations. The team also showed how the IBM Power architecture was the top choice for demanding SAP application workloads, especially with new IBM POWER processor multi-threading capabilities, as both DB2 and SAP software are already optimized to take advantage of its high-performance capabilities.

The company agreed that if IBM demonstrated at least 35 percent reduction in data volumes then a migration to DB2 would be confirmed. Additionally, the Power platform would ensure batch jobs would complete overnight without running into the next working day. The combination of reduced data volumes and increased processor capacity would not only resolve the immediate pressing technical challenges, it would also provide a long-term strategy for continued business growth. The results delivered by the proof of concept using DB2 row and index compression showed that the company would achieve 60 percent savings in data volumes.

The DB2 license includes DB2 Enterprise Server Edition (ESE), DB2 Database Partitioning Feature (DPF), DB2 Deep Compression, DB2 Multi-Dimensional Clustering (MDC) and DB2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR). With DB2, users can create as many test, QA, development and high availability environments in as many physical locations as needed for SAP instances.

Advantages of IBM DB2
“Migrating to DB2 cut our database size by an average of 60 percent,” says the IT team leader. “Our first reaction was ‘did we lose data in the migration?’ because the savings were so high. The result was a production database cut from 3.5 TB to 1.4 TB. Our original intention had been purely to save costs in terms of reducing our storage needs, but this opened up new possibilities for us to optimize our system performance and storage infrastructure.”

The company had recently invested in a new storage device, containing both traditional disks and high-performance solid state disks (SSDs). The reduced production database was able to fit entirely within the SSD array, maximizing SAP performance without the need for complex tiered data management, saving further administration effort and cost.

“From a technical perspective, the migration went extremely well. The IBM team did a great job in explaining how to optimize DB2 for SAP application performance,” says the team leader, “and the IBM Migration Factory, part of IBM Global Business Services, provided a comprehensive migration plan that helped take a lot of the risk out of the project. Optimizing DB2 performance and eliminating migration risk were instrumental in ensuring that we gained the maximum possible benefit from DB2 on Power.”

“We were certainly expecting improved performance, but in fact the gains were even better than we had hoped. For example, we saw more than 50 percent reduction in dialog response times, from 1.1 seconds to 0.4 seconds. The savings we made in database volumes meant that we did not have to buy more disk capacity, and those savings enabled us to purchase more SSDs to improve performance for other business areas.”

Running on IBM Power
The IBM Migration Factory migrated the entire SAP software landscape from Sun servers to the IBM Power platform, running the IBM AIX operating system. Using the advanced virtualization capabilities of the Power servers, the company runs a complete range of SAP applications including financials, controlling, procurement, sales and distribution and aftermarket from within a single server footprint. The SAP production, development and test instances run in separate logical partitions, which are assigned appropriate processor and memory resources automatically to ensure that the business service levels are maintained or exceeded.

The refreshed Power and DB2 landscape has transformed the company’s business capabilities and provided a stable, long-term platform for growth.

“With the new Power and DB2 combination, and with the data on SSD, the procurement teams can continue working until 7.00 pm, and we can comfortably complete the materials requirements planning before 5.00 am, increasing internal productivity and efficiency,” says the IT team leader.

“For the month-end closing reports that took 18 hours to produce, we now complete them between midnight and 6.00am, 66 percent faster. As a result we can make the figures available to the finance teams a whole working day earlier. Executives running ad-hoc sales reports say that what used to take two hours now takes ten minutes, a 92 percent improvement, allowing them to run comparative reports more often to determine trends and difficulties at an earlier stage.”

Looking to the future
“From a capacity point of view, we know that IBM Power and DB2 will be able to absorb the workload,” says the team leader. The time we have been able to return to the business units, such as procurement, is an elegant example of how performance improvements enable people to be excellent at their jobs without being constrained by technical issues.”

The company’s CIO comments, “For the IT team, our roadmap is matched by the IBM strategies for the Power architecture and for DB2. Corporate acquisitions have recently and will continue to be brought onto the SAP platform, supported by IBM infrastructure. The global partnership between SAP and IBM gives us confidence that running SAP applications on IBM infrastructure is the best long-term route to support our business objectives.”