Heavy equipment manufacturer exploits benefits of SAP ERP on IBM Power Systems and IBM XIV Storage System

This manufacturer has grown almost eight-fold in five years, both organically and by acquisition. With growth have come immense challenges, and its IT infrastructure struggled to keep up with the demands of the business.

A spokesperson comments, “We started with a single SAP ERP instance, and now run 26. The IT service tended to be reactive, and adding SAP instances, servers and storage tended to increase complexity and cost. Soon we realized that we had to find a way to keep up with business growth, yet continue to offer an extremely lean, cost-efficient service.”

On this basis, the IT team predicted that its data center would be full within five months. There was therefore a pressing need to find a sustainable IT infrastructure strategy that would enable business growth, reduce complexity, cut physical data center space requirements and, of course, reduce costs.

Five-month data deadline solved by IBM XIV Storage System
With a five-month deadline in mind, the IT team set out its key policies: the solution must reduce complexity, cut costs, and hit the timeline. The company engaged IBM Business Partner Meridian International to advise on technology options for the critical processor and data storage components.

The most pressing issue was the data storage landscape. The company relies on a full suite of SAP ERP applications to run its core business processes, generating some 20 TB of production data in Oracle databases, with a further 40 TB for non-production and non-SAP applications. The existing landscape was a mix of eight SAN and other network attached storage devices from several vendors.

The team leader comments, “We chose the IBM XIV Storage System because it met our requirements to simplify the technical landscape, reduce the operating costs, and meet the five-month deadline for migration. The XIV offers a standard interface that is easy to operate, and the embedded tools made the migration process quick and easy.”

The company implemented two XIV units, one of 79 TB for production and the other of 89 TB for backup and disaster recovery. The two XIV systems replaced all the previous storage devices that were supporting the company’s SAP applications running on the IBM AIX operating system and general business applications running on Microsoft Windows.

“With XIV, we no longer have to spend time considering where to put data, and we have eliminated the concept of tiered data storage. The XIV systems provide data protection capabilities, and we use the Snapshot functionality to ensure we have instant copies of data without interrupting production. The Snapshots are transferred from the production to the backup XIV on a rolling basis.”

System backup itself is handled by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Data is regularly stored to tape, and Tivoli Storage Manager automates the backup, recovery and archive processes.

Following a pilot program, all 26 SAP instances and some 40 Oracle databases were migrated within three months, along with five legacy Baan instances and 60 custom applications. The team of seven internal staff and two external consultants used a combination of the tools from the XIV system, SAP and Oracle to complete the migration, after which the older storage devices were retired.

Planning for the future with POWER7
Alongside the data migration to XIV, the company evaluated its server landscape, and chose to upgrade to IBM Power 770 servers featuring POWER7 processors. The capacity of the POWER7 technology enabled the consolidation from 11 to four servers and at the same time deliver improved application performance.

Two of the Power 770 servers are allocated to production, with nine of 14 processors activated. The consolidation solution typically runs at around 50 percent server utilization. In case the headroom is not sufficient to cover temporary peak load demands, passive processors can be instantaneously activated through the Capacity Upgrade on Demand capability available for Power 770 systems.

“We estimate that with current headroom on processor utilization combined with Capacity Upgrade on Demand, our system workload could quadruple before we would need to add another physical server. This fits exactly with our desire to do more with less, allow us to grow without filling the data center, and reduce complexity.”

The company chose the Power 770 as the server platform of choice for SAP because of its enterprise class reliability, availability and security characteristics, and the immense scalability capabilities. By implementing two 770s at each facility, the company has created a highly reliable SAP application environment, which is essential in providing services to a worldwide business.

POWER7 processor technology in combination with IBM PowerVM enables advanced virtualization capabilities such as Live Partition Mobility (LPM). The company runs its multiple SAP instances in logical partitions (LPARs), with 12 LPARs on each server. LPM allows the partitions to be moved from one server to another without halting the applications.

“LPM means we make many fewer requests to the business users for an application outage, which allows them to remain productive. On the IT side, LPM allows us to move applications, for whatever reason, during business hours. For a lean IT team, constantly requiring out of hours or weekend working can be demoralizing, and LPM makes a significant contribution to our internal productivity.”

Mining insight with SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
The company runs a comprehensive suite of SAP ERP applications, including financials, logistics, quality management, and warehouse management, and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW). The SAP applications are genuinely business-critical, since failing to close the books accurately and on time would incur penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The simplicity of the new IT infrastructure has directly improved the IT team’s ability to assist the business in meeting its growth targets. Technicians no longer spend time on storage tiering and management or routine system maintenance, and are now available to dedicate their efforts towards the next phase of information analysis. While core business activities are managed through SAP ERP, the focus is now on developing SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse functionality.

The team leader comments, “Insight unlocked from SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse shows us how to reduce costs, speed up delivery, and forecast our future resource needs. This predictive element is critical, and was missing in the previous years. SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse is a key strength, and helps us become more competitive.”

Exploiting real-world benefits from IBM infrastructure
The IBM infrastructure for the SAP landscape meets all of the company’s objectives, and delivers real-world benefits for the business.

The IBM Power 770 and XIV Storage System solution has enabled this major manufacturer to cut its physical landscape from 11 to four servers and from 11 to two storage arrays, which has reduced physical space requirements in the data center by 60 percent.

The team estimates that the energy savings of the smaller and more efficient IT infrastructure has cut annual CO2 emissions by approximately 240 lbs (110 kg), some 40 percent. Allowing for acquisition price, management and ongoing maintenance, the IBM solution has cut the total cost of IT operations by 50 percent, a yearly saving of $2 million.

“The IBM infrastructure for our SAP and other applications has met our key objectives, with reduced complexity and lower costs. With the POWER7 and XIV combination, typical SAP ad-hoc query responses are now three times faster. One of our standard background jobs that previously took an hour to produce now takes 15 seconds, an improvement of more than 99 percent.”

With the new solution in place, the importance of scalability without increasing footprint or complexity is coming to the fore. On first implementation, relatively little use was made of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse tool. Currently, it is one of the most-used services in the SAP suite, with users constantly seeking new ways to compare business performance and tune business processes.

For example, the company has implemented barcoding on all its products and components. Manual warehouse counts have been replaced by barcode scanning, and data is captured directly to the SAP warehouse management solution, eliminating manual keying errors.

“The barcode system is a great example of how the XIV and POWER7 systems are able to manage additional workload without the need for physical expansion. The SAP solutions on IBM Power Systems and IBM XIV deliver direct benefit to the business.”