Rabobank gains high speed and flexibility with IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator

Rabobank Group is a full-range financial services provider founded on co-operative principles, and a global leader in sustainability-oriented banking. The group is comprised of 188 independent local Dutch Rabobanks, a central organization (Rabobank Nederland), and a large number of specialized international offices. The group employs some 55,000 staff and is represented in 42 countries.

The co-operative nature means that central IT department is obliged to listen hard to the needs of the individual branches – the owners of the business – and there is no top-down or one-size-fits-all approach. The demand for business information varies from branch to branch, and the bank’s existing systems were struggling to satisfy the appetite for detail and speed of response.

Tonnie van der Horst, Manager of IT Strategy and Change within the Group Finance Department, comments, “We faced two challenges: we wanted to meet the requests for information within a reasonable timeframe and cost, and yet also provide a much more detailed and flexible reporting system. Current reporting was based on aggregated data with no drill-down to underlying information, and the IT team was spending a great deal of time tailoring reports to meet specific user requests.”

Accelerated information

Rabobank Nederland had deployed a range of SAP software, including the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component, and became interested in the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator.

This packaged solution is based around SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator) software, the Linux operating system, and the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) software, running on IBM BladeCenter hardware.

The IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator attaches directly to SAP NetWeaver BW. By exploiting SAP technology to keep indices in main memory rather than on disk storage, it enables very large data sets to be analyzed at high speed, helping businesses to significantly reduce the time taken to deliver actionable management information.

For Rabobank, the results have been dramatic, as Tonnie van der Horst reveals: “In certain areas which would previously have required significant development work to optimize the user queries, results are generated a hundred times faster with the IBM Systems Solution for SAP Netweaver BW Accelerator. Not only does this super-fast response give great service to the Rabobank branches, it reduces or even eliminates the optimization work that needs to be carried out by IT staff.”

Freeing up business reporting

The implementation of the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator was a considered response to the business demands emerging from the Rabobank branches. Working with both SAP and IBM, the Rabobank IT team created a proof of concept using real data to determine what potential benefits were available.

“The amount of data involved and the number of specialized reports requested was forcing us to standardize what was available to avoid unnecessary performance degradation on the central systems. Data sets were aggregated, preventing drill-down to the customer level for the branches, so we were limiting the freedom of the branches. We wanted to be able to allow local managers to change their reporting options without the IT team having to rework the existing data cubes,” says Tonnie van der Horst.

“On the basis of the proof of concept, we chose to move to the latest version of SAP NetWeaver BW with the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. With the joint IBM and SAP solution in place, even highly complex customized reports are returned in a matter of seconds.”

Rapid response times

Rabobank considered two business partners’ solutions for running the SAP BW Accelerator software, and selected IBM BladeCenter servers ahead of a rival offering from HP. Inter Access, an IBM Business Partner and SAP Services Partner, was chosen to pre-build and deliver the hardware.

Inter Access and IBM helped to deploy the solution at two separate Rabobank data centers, helping to provide high availability and protecting the business intelligence landscape against disaster.

Tonnie van der Horst comments, “We chose IBM because it offered a complete service that could deliver the results we wanted. We do not want to learn about the internal workings of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, and IBM offered to take responsibility for the performance, reliability and capacity while we focus on meeting our customers’ needs.”

“IBM and Inter Access provided a combined hardware and software offering that was easy to implement – providing a solution more or less out-of-the-box,” explains Tonnie van der Horst. “The IBM BladeCenter-based solution has substantially improved our SAP NetWeaver BW performance – for example, one query that previously took over ten minutes to complete without BW Accelerator can now be performed in less than six seconds – improving performance by a factor of 120.”

The performance improvement is delivered in part by the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS). IBM developed GPFS specifically for high-performance computing applications that use a dedicated fibre-channel based storage network – providing a measurable increase in transaction processing speeds. Businesses can also configure GPFS to promote resilience, by allowing any node to be taken out of the cluster without impacting data availability. GPFS is therefore an ideal solution for high-availability environments.

“The SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator software on IBM BladeCenter servers gives flexible, scalable access to data queries in a way that we were unable to deliver before. Report response times are measured in seconds, and users can tailor their queries with no intervention from the IT team, boosting their productivity and reducing the central administration costs,” says Tonnie van der Horst.

Making the most of SAP software

Rabobank’s SAP ERP application, which includes financials, controlling, payroll and purchasing solutions, as well as SAP Supplier Relationship Management and SAP NetWeaver Portal, runs on IBM System p5 servers, models p5-570 and p5-560, with IBM logical partitioning (LPAR) technologies providing a flexible virtual server environment.

Some 10,000 employees are registered users of the SAP software, of which approximately 4,000 have direct access to the BW Accelerator solution. Just over 5TB of data is aggregated from the source applications for loading into the BW Accelerator solution each month.

The next step for Rabobank is to remove the aggregation stage prior to loading data into the BW Accelerator. This will allow users to generate tailored reports that include drill-down to the underlying detail, once again placing information control fully in the hands of the local branches.

“To achieve the business benefits, it is important to work with partners that are committed to delivering the solution. For Rabobank, this means solving the challenges of a co-operative structure, where the branches are genuinely our customers. The performance of BW Accelerator and our strong relationship with both SAP and IBM are central to delivering business advantage for Rabobank,” concludes Tonnie van der Horst.