WACKER speeds BW query response by up to 500 per cent with the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator

Background, starting point and objectives

WACKER strategy
WACKER is a globally active chemical company headquartered in Munich. With a wide range of state-of-the-art specialty products, the WACKER Group is a leader in numerous industrial sectors worldwide. WACKER’s products are required in countless high-growth downstream markets. These include solar power, electronics and pharmaceuticals, as well as household and personal-care products.

The company consists of five business divisions and is expert in fields such as silicone and polymer chemistry, specialty and fine chemistry, polysilicon production and semiconductor technologies. The WACKER Group has production facilities at locations in Germany and other parts of the world. Some 14,700 employees on five continents devise innovative solutions for maximum customer benefit, leveraging the expertise and synergies of the wider group.

For some years WACKER has used SAP software, including the SAP data warehouse solution (SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7.0) for business decision support. SAP NetWeaver BW runs on the SUN/Solaris platform using an ORACLE 10 database of approximately 1.9TB. WACKER had already migrated to SAP NetWeaver BW prior to the decision for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator.

The SAP NetWeaver BW system is utilized by different user groups within the company, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. WACKER relies on SAP R/3 Enterprise software to manage multiple lines of business in all its worldwide locations. SAP NetWeaver BW reporting is used for all aspects of business performance, including financials, sales, supply chain, environmental, information technology, maintenance, strategic enterprise management and business planning and simulation, management cockpits, production cockpits, and for the extranet. Presently more than 2,000 people within the company access the SAP NetWeaver BW system, and therefore also the BW Accelerator solution.

With increased utilization of SAP NetWeaver BW as a key business tool, the results it generates have become more and more time-critical. WACKER needed to boost query performance and enable more concurrent user sessions.

Project description

The BW Accelerator solution was planned by WACKER in 2006 after a SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator road show in Munich. IBM was asked for a proposal, delivered in August 2006. After the initial briefing, IBM performed the system sizing. The SAP NetWeaver BW component is currently running on non-IBM hardware.

There were some early uncertainties within the BW environment – for example, BW Accelerator performance improvements were unpredictable. WACKER agreed to a proof of concept, commencing in January 2007, with the proposed infrastructure consisting of the small (“S”) size configuration. IBM and WACKER jointly defined the acceptance criteria, with WACKER committing to buy the solution if the goals were met.

The proof of concept was carried out with the support of IBM Global Technology Services and the IBM System x team. All criteria were met or exceeded, and IBM received an order in the first quarter of 2007 for two IBM System solutions for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator – one for production and one for test/QA. The production system has three blades, one of which acts as a standby for high-availability purposes. The second system has two blades, and is designated as the disaster recovery system.

PROFI, an IBM Premier Business Partner, covered all of the logistics, while IBM Global Technology Services was responsible for delivery and installation of the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator .

WACKER identified 16 specific queries from SAP SCM, purchasing, production, materials planning, and sales operations, and measured existing performance. These 16 queries became the benchmarks for the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator implementation. Within one month of operating the proof of concept system, WACKER decided to take the solution into production.

IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator
SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator 7.0 provides high performance analytics and is an evolution of SAP’s business intelligence approach that extends the standard SAP NetWeaver BW offering. It is a key building block in SAP’s Enterprise SOA strategy. The goal is to provide “near real-time analytics”, giving large numbers of end users access to data in a data warehouse in close to real time.

The technology enables customers to analyze large amounts of critical business information, crunching through terabytes of data in a matter of seconds. IBM and SAP have created an easy-to-install appliance that enables customers to deploy SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator in a cost-effective way.

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is based on 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based blade servers. Intel collaborated with SAP in the development of the BW Accelerator, using advanced Intel software and hardware technology to maximize performance and scalability.

The solution at a glance
IBM BladeCenter H
The IBM BladeCenter integrates multiple computing resources into a cost-effective high-density enclosure. BladeCenter H provides power efficiency, high performance and scaling capabilities, helping to extract the most from SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator.

BladeCenter HS21 blade server
WACKER’s solution is equipped with dual-core Intel Xeon blade servers delivering leading-edge performance and efficiency for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator.

IBM System Storage DS4700 Express
The DS4700 Express offers high-performance 4Gbps Fiber Channel connections and powerful system management, data management and data protection features. All BW Accelerator indexes are stored on the DS4700 for rapid loading into the memory of the HS21 blade servers.

IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS)
GPFS achieves higher levels of performance by making it possible to read and write data in parallel, distributed across multiple disks or servers. Because multiple disks or servers contain the data, it also achieves a higher level of fault resilience for BW Accelerator. Use of GPFS is key to the very high performance delivered by SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator with very fast data access and exceptional ease of management. The high availability features of GPFS make it an ideal solution for environments such BW Accelerator that need to deliver information 24x7.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM BladeCenter
The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on the HS21 blades, offering high performance and almost linear scalability, with enterprise-class support from Novell.

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator fits seamlessly into existing environments. It can be delivered in predefined standard configurations sized to fit a wide variety of customer environments. All the components are intensively pre-tested by SAP and IBM. The solution can be activated for selected InfoCubes without making changes to InfoCubes, DataSources, or queries within SAP NetWeaver BW. The sole prerequisite for deploying this technology is SAP NetWeaver BW 7.0.

The reasons for choosing IBM
Having reviewed presentations from SAP showing very high performance gains, WACKER wanted to see proof of the technical and business case before committing the expenditure.

IBM was able to prove its competence with an installation that demonstrated that the IBM solution would dramatically improve the performance behavior of BW queries. Part of this performance improvement results from the implementation of the General Parallel File System (GPFS), which is part of the IBM solution. GPFS is specifically developed for high-performance computing applications, and uses a dedicated fiber-channel based storage network to deliver a performance advantage.

The IBM proof of concept achieved:

• Five times better response times for queries running against aggregates
• Fifty times better response time for queries running against the InfoCubes in the SAP NetWeaver BW system.

This was the basis for WACKER’s decision for the IBM Systems solution SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. WACKER started with the small (“S”) configuration, consisting of three blades for production usage. One of these blades acts as a standby to protect against outages.

Solution infrastructure
For test and development purposes, WACKER is using an additional system, which started with two HS21 blades implemented as a fallback solution in case of outage of the production system. WACKER operates two data centers, one housing the test and development environment, and one for the clustered production SAP NetWeaver BW system and IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator 7.0.

Worldwide, about 2,000 users from different business areas within WACKER run queries in SAP NetWeaver BW. A total of 103 BW InfoCubes have been indexed, and queries against those InfoCubes are handled by IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. By implementing the IBM solution, query performance has increased by between 14 and 500 per cent, in comparison to native BW query performance without aggregates.

Services
On the implementation side, WACKER decided to work with IBM Global Technology Services and PROFI, an IBM Premier Business Partner.

The major tasks to accomplish were planning and sizing the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator 7.0, implementing the complete solution at the customer site, and connecting to the existing SAP NetWeaver BW component. The entire project was implemented, commissioned to production and completed on time and on budget.

Project results
The project has been a major success for WACKER, and is now being rolled out to more users – causing the customer to extend the original installation by adding more blades and more disks. In the meantime, the production and test/QA systems have been expanded by adding further blades, two for each installation. The easy scalability of the IBM solution makes it an ideal platform as business data volumes increase and more users require access to business analytics.

The integration into the existing infrastructure at WACKER was simple and easy, and the performance gains so convincing that the solution was put into production within a very short time. Plans for further enhancement of management reporting with SAP NetWeaver BW, and further expansion of the IBM Systems solution for BW Accelerator, are under consideration.