SPAR saves a “six-figure sum” using a virtualized environment for SAP ERP with IBM System p

Auf Deutsch

SPAR Handels AG in Switzerland is growing at around 15 per cent a year, expanding into new markets as well as increasing its existing market share. Based in St Gallen, SPAR generates sales of around CHF 855 million (€525 million) and employs 1,000 full-time staff.

To support operations, the company runs an extensive portfolio of SAP applications on IBM System p servers. With the planned introduction of new SAP applications and extended functionality, the existing IT infrastructure was not capable of delivering the performance, scalability and flexibility that SPAR needed. Senior IT managers, knowing that the technology leases were due for renewal, took the opportunity to review the company’s IT systems, looking for the best way to satisfy performance demands from the business, offer a flexible environment capable of dealing with changing market conditions, and reduce operational costs.

Wolfgang Maehr, IT Director, comments, “There were basically two choices: upgrade existing systems or implement a totally new solution. For the long-term perspective, an upgrade would have simply delayed the decision and have left us with old hardware that was relatively expensive to operate. We selected new IBM System p servers that would enable us to take advantage of features such as virtualization, which would both reduce costs and introduce the kind of flexible environment that was needed to meet SPAR’s business requirements.”

SAP ERP – a core solution

SPAR has been using SAP applications for many years, starting with retail applications and subsequently migrating to SAP ERP 6.0 software, including core solutions such as finance and controlling, materials management, sales and distribution, warehouse management, SAP ERP Human Capital Management and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI).

Wolfgang Maehr explains, “Application performance and availability are crucial since SAP applications are ‘the’ system at SPAR, used in the stores as well as at headquarters. Our existing SAP application environment was running on IBM System p servers, with response times of around 500-600ms. The reliability of these servers gave us confidence, so we decided to consider moving to the latest IBM systems. We reviewed several benchmarks and IBM was the clear winner.”

Working closely with partner TDS Multivision on system specification, SPAR selected two IBM System p5 570 servers, configured using the IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) environment. Should one of the servers fail or suffer a disaster, workload is automatically transferred to the other server without interruption.

The two p5-570 servers support a total of eleven logical partitions (LPARs), each providing what amounts to an entirely separate server for different purposes. The SAP and other applications are distributed between the LPARs on the two systems so that each physical machine has approximately the same workload. The eleven LPARs include production, integration and test environments for the SAP applications, for SAP NetWeaver BI and for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

Policy-based flexibility with Partition Load Manager

SPAR is using IBM Partition Load Manager (PLM), a tool that extends the basic Advanced POWER Virtualization features of IBM System p5 servers, by providing additional policy-based balancing of workload. Partition Load Manager provides processor and memory resource management and monitoring across logical partitions within a single managed system. According to customer-defined PLM policies CPU and memory resources can be requested and donated by LPARs as their workloads change over time.

“Partition Load Manager gives SPAR excellent flexibility,” says Wolfgang Maehr. “When we are faced with very high workload demands from a particular application, the system automatically re-balances the resources to ensure the best possible performance and response. In practice, we are only using around 75 per cent of the total system capacity at present, and using IBM Capacity on Demand we can enable more compute power exactly as we need it. Partition Load Manager can then take advantage of the additional resources. IBM virtualization technologies give SPAR perfect scalability – on demand.”

SPAR is also making use of the Virtual I/O Server (VIO) feature of IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization for System p, a special-purpose partition that enables the other LPARs to share physical network adapters. VIO helps maximize efficiency of physical I/O resources and reduces the requirement for – and expense of – numerous I/O adapters and their related peripherals, by distributing physical I/O bandwidth across application partitions on POWER processor-based systems. Using the integrated Web interface, VIO allows LPARs to be provisioned with suitable network connections in a matter of minutes. With VIO techniques, it is possible to create more application partitions than there are I/O slots or physical Ethernet, Fiber Channel or SCSI devices. Running two independent VIO partitions per server guarantees full data path redundancy as with dedicated physical adapters.

Safe data storage from IBM

SPAR’s SAP application landscape has around 500 named and 300 concurrent users, who access upwards of 1.6TB of data. To manage and secure this precious operational information, SPAR has implemented a storage area network (SAN) based on an IBM System Storage DS8100 for its SAP applications.

“The DS8100 provides enterprise-class data storage at a very effective price point for SPAR,” says Wolfgang Maehr, “offering excellent performance and very high levels of data integrity.”

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, running on an IBM System p5 505 server, provides system administration services, which include data backup to an IBM System Storage LTO 3584 Automated Tape Library. The two principal p570 servers are situated at separate offices, and the DS8100 storage server is kept at a third location for maximum physical protection.

“We use Tivoli Storage Manager to control backup processes, with Libelle BusinessShadow, a third-party data mirroring solution, for continuous database shadow copy,” says Wolfgang Maehr. “The combination of the hugely reliable IBM hardware, Tivoli Storage Manager and Libelle software offers SPAR excellent data protection.”

IBM Global Finance offers a great deal

SPAR and IBM have shared a long-lasting commercial partnership for IT infrastructure. Wolfgang Maehr comments: “The IBM solution provided the best price-performance ratio for SPAR, offering very attractive cost savings.

“IBM Global Finance created a package tailored to SPAR’s financial needs, enabling us to take advantage of the higher performance, greater scalability and lower total costs of operation that could be immediately offset against the purchase price. It was a compelling business case. With this arrangement, SPAR has already negotiated a maintenance contract for the next four years, helping us fix and stabilize IT costs.”

Looking to the future

SPAR has seen immediate performance gains from the new IBM System p570 server environment, with response times cut to around 300-400ms. SPAR estimates this has saved a high six-digit sum in boosted productivity.

Wolfgang Maehr comments, “In some ways the performance gain is relatively modest, at 40 percent, because the older IBM servers were so good. However, the new landscape is much easier to maintain, which reduces our administration, maintenance and operational costs. The virtualized IBM environment is ideal for SPAR, because we gain very high availability, higher SAP application performance, greater flexibility and lower operational costs, and yet we only have to maintain a single physical system.

“We have a very constructive, collaborative approach with IBM, which encourages us to consider new projects and new technologies to help us run a more efficient business. IBM Partition Load Manager ensures that application performance is fully optimized, exploiting available resources to the maximum extent – and we have the flexibility to add new application workload as SPAR continues to expand.

“The new IBM solution has the scalability to meet SPAR Switzerland’s needs until 2010, maximizing the return on our investment,” concludes Wolfgang Maehr.