Colgate-Palmolive supports continuing business growth with IBM and SAP

Founded in 1806, Colgate-Palmolive is a global consumer products company which sells nearly $17 billion annually in personal care, home care, oral care and pet nutrition products in 200 countries.

Jim Capraro, Vice President of Global Information Technology at Colgate-Palmolive, explains: “To stay competitive in our marketplace, we’re faced with considerable pressure to address changing business needs while keeping cost structures lean.”

IT staff found that they were devoting increasing amounts of time on maintenance and administration of the databases supporting the company’s SAP applications. Related business-critical functions, such as daily backups and disaster recovery processes, were also impacted by the growth in data volumes.

“We were purchasing additional storage capacity in an attempt to keep up with the rising amount of data, but it wasn’t holding back the tide,” says Jim Capraro. “There was no doubt that, across the board, having more storage in place to run our business systems was impacting the quality of our IT service we were providing to the business.”

“The larger the databases became, the more time we were spending managing them, backing them up, or doing restores when we were creating new test environments. Equally, we were spending too much time making sure the end-users were not impacted.”

Colgate IT reviewed alternatives available to help manage data growth and performance, specifically for its SAP systems.

Looking for a strategic information solution
Colgate was looking for a solution that not only would cut its immediate data management and storage costs, but also would embed a strategic solution to help manage long-term growth. IBM® DB2® was chosen for its ability to provide significant data compression, and for its potential to reduce database support costs for the SAP environment at Colgate.

“We focus on doing things globally and working with our key technology partners,” says Jim Capraro. “IBM is critical to this in delivering the technological solutions we need to drive our business forward.”

“We didn’t want to go out and buy additional hardware to support data growth for no reason, so we decided that adopting a DB2 solution to help manage our storage cost was essential for us to manage our overall IT cost.” Working with SAP, Micro Strategies and IBM, Colgate’s IT team designed, developed and implemented the DB2 solution to support Colgate’s entire SAP software environment. The team installed IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager to monitor and back up Colgate’s mission-critical SAP applications, and IBM SAN Volume Controller to manage storage virtualized at the block level across IBM System Storage® units.

The solution runs on IBM POWER7® processor-based servers, ensuring maximum performance and reliability. The majority of migrations were achieved with no major changes to the SAP systems. For some SAP Supply Chain Management solutions, there were also application upgrades and conversions to Unicode at the same time as the database migration.

In total, Colgate has migrated almost 200 SAP systems to DB2, including more than 50 production instances. Using standard SAP migration tools such as heterogeneous system copy, Colgate achieved a very high throughput for database conversions, at close to 1 TB/hour for some of the larger SAP systems.

Most planned database outages lasted significantly less than 48 hours (and less than 24 hours for many of the smaller systems), keeping business disruption to a minimum.

“The initiative we undertook was certainly large, but thanks to the excellent collaboration between our partners, the work went extremely smoothly,” continues Jim Capraro. “We run SAP in over 100 subsidiaries throughout the company, and these subsidiaries account for over 99.5 percent of all the revenue we generate. In a real sense, this initiative involved moving our entire business onto IBM DB2.”

“Despite this, there were no ‘showstoppers’ – IBM and SAP enabled us to get through the entire migration on time and on schedule, delivering the results, and, at times, exceeding the benefits that we were hoping for.”

Taking advantage of DB2
By implementing the latest version of IBM DB2, Colgate has achieved its business goal of cutting the cost and complexity of its SAP database management. “As soon as the solution went live, it was very clear to our employees that SAP has been optimized to run on DB2,” says Jim Capraro.

“We found through the migration that one of the key benefits of DB2 was its deep compression feature. When we went into this project, we were expecting to achieve compression levels of around 40 percent. What we found is that we are actually averaging around 60 percent, which greatly exceeds our target. In fact, some of our SAP databases are even compressed by over 70 percent.”

Prior to the DB2 migration, the database footprint for the SAP environment was approximately 500 TB. Following the migration to DB2, the footprint was approximately 200 TB – a total reduction of 60 percent. The largest SAP system was originally 10 TB; after migration to DB2 and compression, the database size was around 2.7 TB, which corresponds to a compression rate of 73 percent.

By reducing the size of its SAP databases with IBM DB2, the company has reduced its storage requirements, cutting costs significantly. Likewise, the reduced complexity of DB2 allows Colgate’s IT function to respond more rapidly to demands from its application development group for the creation of the test systems required to work on new IT projects.

“With DB2, we’ve reduced the size of our backup systems, our test systems, our development systems and the amount of data we require for disaster recovery,” says Jim Capraro. “Thanks to the deep compression feature in DB2, we’ve been able to manage our application growth and innovation without increasing our overall infrastructure spend over the past two years. By keeping our costs stable, we can reinvest more of our IT dollars into innovative solutions to drive the business forward.” Following the migration, Colgate implemented the DB2 Database Partitioning Feature (DPF) for its largest SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) systems. This feature enables the company to split larger databases into partitions for greater ease of management, enhanced availability and improved performance.

The company also made use of DB2 Multi-Dimensional Clustering (MDC) for SAP NetWeaver BW, which improves query performance and reduces the overhead of data maintenance operations by higher throughput of huge block inserts and deletes. For all non-DPF environments in its SAP solution landscape, Colgate implemented the DB2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) feature, which provides a high-availability solution for both partial and complete site failures.

It protects against the loss of data by replicating changes from the primary database to a standby database. If a problem occurs at the primary site, this standby database can take over in seconds.

Delivering business benefits
Despite the scale of the migration, end-user experience was unaffected during the solution implementation. Jim Capraro comments: “There has been no negative business impact from us making this major transition.”

After experiencing benefits far greater than it had originally anticipated, Colgate remains convinced that its partnership with IBM, Micro Strategies and SAP was the ideal choice. “We found that the migration has delivered the results above and beyond what we expected,” comments Jim Capraro. “By reducing the storage requirements and administrative complexity of our system, we’ve been able to win back time for our IT team. By freeing our people to focus on innovative new projects rather than trying to manage existing infrastructure, we’ve gained the agility we need to stay at the top of our sector.”

Looking to the future
After reducing its database volumes by an average of 60 percent with DB2 compression technologies, Colgate expects to be able to keep its IT spend stable for two years by avoiding the need for additional processor and disk storage capacity. The reduced backup windows ensure that Colgate-Palmolive has a reliable, secure data protection and disaster recovery process in place, and that production operations are not affected by the backup process.

Jim Capraro concludes: “If you were to ask me – with the benefit of hindsight, would you again choose to migrate your SAP solutions to IBM DB2? – the answer would be a clear ‘yes’.”