Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Audi gears up for continued success with IBM private cloud (IBM AIX en DB2)
https://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/STRD-8XCDVD?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us
Published on 22-Aug-2012
"This really was an impressive accomplishment by the IBM team: migrating more than 100 SAP systems to a completely new operating system and database in six months and with no disruption." - Markus Wierl, Service Owner of SAP Infrastructure, AUDI AG
Customer:
Audi AG
Industry:
Automotive
Deployment country:
Germany
Solution:
Enabling Business Flexibility, Energy Efficiency, Enterprise Resource Planning, High Availability , Transforming Business, Virtualization
IBM Business Partner:
SAP AG
Customer:
Audi AG
Industry:
Automotive
Deployment country:
Germany
Solution:
Enabling Business Flexibility, Energy Efficiency, Enterprise Resource Planning, High Availability , Transforming Business, Virtualization
IBM Business Partner:
SAP AG
Overview
AUDI AG, part of the Volkswagen Group, is a leading global car manufacturer operating in the premium vehicle segment. With three brands – Audi, Lamborghini and Ducati – the company has eight production plants worldwide and a range that runs from small luxury family cars to high-performance supercars. Audi Group employs more than 65,000 people globally, and delivered more than 1.3 million premium cars to customers in 2011 – the highest output in its corporate history.
Business need:
AUDI AG builds family, sport and luxury supercars, competing with global auto companies. As low-cost manufacturers develop their own brands, Audi seeks to turn the tables by creating super-efficient business processes. The IT Services Department at Audi needed to help the company address several broad business challenges, including: increasing demands from employees, customers and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; variable sales volumes; and growing competition.
Solution:
Working with IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Software Group, Audi migrated more than 100 SAP systems (including more than 30 SAP landscapes and 26 high-availability clusters) from HP-UX with Oracle 10g database to IBM AIX 6.1 with IBM DB2 9.7. This huge migration was completed in just six months, with no disruption to Audi’s business.
Benefits:
The IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter hardware requires 20 to 40 percent less energy than competing solutions from other vendors, while delivering higher performance and availability. With on-demand server capacity, Audi can expand and shrink processing capacity on the fly, switching on additional processors and memory on a temporary basis and paying only for what is used, enabling it to synchronize its IT capabilities and costs with changing patterns in external demand. The ability to switch on space capacity also enables greater business growth within the existing infrastructure.
Business need:
AUDI AG builds family, sport and luxury supercars, competing with global auto companies. As low-cost manufacturers develop their own brands, Audi seeks to turn the tables by creating super-efficient business processes. The IT Services Department at Audi needed to help the company address several broad business challenges, including: increasing demands from employees, customers and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; variable sales volumes; and growing competition.
Solution:
Working with IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Software Group, Audi migrated more than 100 SAP systems (including more than 30 SAP landscapes and 26 high-availability clusters) from HP-UX with Oracle 10g database to IBM AIX 6.1 with IBM DB2 9.7. This huge migration was completed in just six months, with no disruption to Audi’s business.
Benefits:
The IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter hardware requires 20 to 40 percent less energy than competing solutions from other vendors, while delivering higher performance and availability. With on-demand server capacity, Audi can expand and shrink processing capacity on the fly, switching on additional processors and memory on a temporary basis and paying only for what is used, enabling it to synchronize its IT capabilities and costs with changing patterns in external demand. The ability to switch on space capacity also enables greater business growth within the existing infrastructure.
Case Study
AUDI AG, part of the Volkswagen Group, is a leading global car manufacturer operating in the premium vehicle segment. With three brands – Audi, Lamborghini and Ducati – the company has eight production plants worldwide and a range that runs from small luxury family cars to high-performance supercars. Audi Group employs more than 65,000 people globally, and delivered more than 1.3 million premium cars to customers in 2011 – the highest output in its corporate history. In common with many other major automotive companies, Audi had implemented SAP® ERP to manage many aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the company had expanded its SAP environment to encompass around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades. The company wanted to improve its IT efficiency, both in order to reduce capital and operational costs and in order to create a greener infrastructure, which was one of the key projects within the company’s sustainability strategy. Equally, it wanted to increase the availability and performance of its SAP systems, while making them much more scalable and flexible. In more general terms, the IT Services Department at Audi was also tasked with helping the company to face up to several broad business challenges, including: increasing demands from employees, customers and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; and growing competition. These challenges required the IT Services Department to strengthen its business process management capabilities, to enable greater focus on core competencies, and generally to improve the professionalism of its project management, service and delivery processes.Selecting the cloud option
Audi decided that an implementation which is ready for a private cloud would be the best option for the future: building a completely virtualized infrastructure with the ability to add or remove computing capacity on demand. This would solve the immediate issues with the SAP environment, and also create a new approach to managing and delivering IT services whereby the IT Services Department could focus on desired business outcomes rather than on low-level infrastructure concerns.Markus Wierl, Service Owner SAP Infrastructure, AUDI AG, explains: “We wanted to create a flexible virtualized infrastructure that would enable us to grow and add new services without needing to consider the underlying hardware or any other constraints. The IBM Power Systems™ offerings were highly attractive because of their mature virtualization capabilities. So we invited IBM to propose two options: one using our existing Oracle database, and one with the IBM DB2® database.”Proving the IBM concept
The IBM proposals suggested that the DB2 option would not only offer significantly better interactive and batch performance, but also that it would use considerably less disk capacity. Audi requested hard evidence for the DB2 claims. With the Audi IT team keen to finalize the deal within a strict deadline, IBM worked fast to build a successful Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for the new private cloud ready infrastructure for SAP. “We were impressed that IBM was able to organize the Proof-of-Concept in only three weeks,” says Markus Wierl. “IBM created an environment that enabled us to compare DB2 9.7 with a reorganized Oracle 10g database, both running on IBM Power Systems servers. The results were clear: storage savings in the range of 50 to 70 percent, and much higher performance when using DB2.” He adds: “We visited the IBM SAP International Competence Center and learnt more about the partnership and long-term collaboration between the two vendors. We also heard from SAP that they themselves use IBM DB2 to develop their software, which convinced us that migration was not a risky option. Combined with the virtualization capabilities and performance of the IBM servers we decided that our strategic platform for SAP should be DB2 and IBM Power Systems.”Large-scale migration
Audi moved ahead with the proposed solution from IBM: the creation of a ‘private-cloud ready’ infrastructure with SAP databases on DB2 on four IBM Power® 570 servers and SAP application servers on 21 IBM BladeCenter® PS702 Express servers. The key to the success of the solution was the migration process. It was necessary to migrate more than 100 SAP systems from HP-UX to IBM AIX® 6.1 and from Oracle 10g to IBM DB2 9.7.Working with IBM Systems and Technology Group and IBM Global Technology Services®, Audi successfully migrated the SAP systems – one third of them production systems. The migration took just six months to complete. The combined team added several new SAP systems to the new platform since the start of migration and the environment continues to grow in this way.The initial migrations were handled at a rate of between two and five SAP systems per week – this fast- paced approach and the criticality of the business systems made it vital for Audi to have a strong partner with a rigorous approach to project management and risk mitigation.The only available time for the migrations was over weekends, and all systems needed to be operational again in time for the restarting of the manufacturing production lines each Monday morning. The combined IBM and Audi team successfully completed all the migrations with no disruption to Audi’s business.“The outstanding collaboration between the various parts of the IBM team and our team ensured that we overcame all potential areas of risk during these highly complex migration projects,” says Markus Wierl. “The positive results we saw in the Proof-of-Concept have been reflected in our production environment, and the business is already seeing the benefits. We have improved system performance and adherence to SLAs, and we have also reduced our energy requirements and costs for IT through virtualization.”IBM provided a highly professional migration service that took into account all the potential business risks and took steps to mitigate them. The IBM project team was able to call on the experience and knowledge of IBM’s global pool of SAP, DB2 and Power Systems experts, including IBM GTS Migration Factory, ensuring that the migrations were completed on schedule and without any service interruptions.“This really was an impressive accomplishment by the IBM team: to migrate more than 100 SAP systems to a completely new operating system and database in six months and with no disruption,” says Markus Wierl.Robust and efficient platform
The new landscape for SAP at Audi is based around four IBM Power 570 servers with a total of 80 active IBM POWER6® cores, running the SAP database and central instance. The virtual AIX servers in this environment are all clustered for high availability using IBM PowerHA®. A further 48 POWER6 cores are available on demand – and Audi effectively only pays for these as it uses them. The Power Systems servers have a total of 1.5 TB memory, with a further 0.8 TB available on demand, and can scale from 745,000 to 850,000 SAPS with SAP ERP.Audi’s contract with IBM includes a provision for upgrading the current Power Systems servers to four Power 770 servers with POWER7® processors in 2012 which will offer up to 1.1 million SAPS with SAP ERP. The total potential of the IBM cloud ready solution could be extended almost infinitely, giving Audi plenty of headroom for business growth.The SAP application, management and monitoring servers also run on AIX 6.1, on 21 IBM BladeCenter PS702 Express servers. Of these, 18 are configured with 16 IBM POWER7 cores and three with four IBM POWER7 cores. The IBM BladeCenter servers offer a total of 300 POWER7 cores supported by 4.14 TB memory to operate and monitor Audi’s SAP applications.Audi’s SAP Infrastructure is operated by IBM. The chosen solution offered significant benefits over competing options, including 20 to 40 percent greater energy efficiency projected over four years. This comparison, made by Audi itself, was for the new IBM hardware against the new hardware from two other vendors. The higher energy efficiency not only enabled IBM to offer keen pricing for hosting the solution, but also enabled Audi to meet its internal requirements for a green and sustainable solution. The use of DB2 compression also helps here, by significantly reducing the total database size and therefore the number of disks that the environment requires.The SAP solutions used by Audi include human resources, business warehouse, financials, cost controlling, client relationship management, supplier relationship management, portals, production, logistics and an e-recruitment solution. While IBM manages the hardware, operating system and virtualization, Audi manages the SAP solutions, SAP basis and DB2.Cloud for flexibility and speed
The private cloud infrastructure based on IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter servers offers Audi high availability and performance, and enables the rapid provisioning of new LPAR’s as well as the additionof on-demand computing resources to existing systems. Audi has known costs for hardware and services with transparent pricing and on-demand billing. The IBM solution provides a day-based capacity pricing model, giving Audi the ability to precisely flex its IT resources and costs up and down as business requirements change.Server virtualization using IBM PowerVM® is the corner-stone of the new solution. It enables Audi to pack a large number of separate business systems onto a small number of physical servers, pushing up utilization and largely eliminating costly unused capacity. The use of virtualization also enables greater flexibility and responsiveness. Rather than having each logical system tied to a particular physical server, and only able to expand through the physical addition of new hardware, Audi can reallocate resources on the fly from one system to another as required.With the Live Partition Mobility feature of IBM PowerVM, live systems can be moved even from one physical server to another without any loss of service. The use of server virtualization also enables the Audi IT Services Department to respond faster and more cost- effectively to new requirements from the business. Where it might previously have taken days or even weeks to procure, install and set up a new physical server, Audi can create new virtual servers within minutes, fully configured and ready to install new applications on.“The ability to turn on and off additional server resources is a great benefit, and we make active use of this feature of IBM Power Systems,” says Markus Wierl. “We can add resources on a day-by-day basis as we need them, and pay for the additional capacity on a monthly basis.”The IBM private cloud ready solution includes integrated management and provisioning tools, enabling an approach to systems management that is more business-centric rather than IT-centric. To implement cloud functionality a proof of concept was successfully done with some use cases in 2011. At the end of 2011 the implementation of cloud functionality to support the IT operations team started.Rather than spending time and effort managing a disparate set of hardware, Audi now has an efficient, compact and highly standardized infrastructure that requires little physical maintenance and that is managed by IBM. What’s more, the cloud concept allows a group of physically separate hardware resources to be orchestrated and managed as a single pool of virtualized resources. As Audi continues to expand the SAP environment, it is also further developing the management of cloud and embedding the new management processes into its organization.Rapid results
Almost immediately after the migration, Audi began to see the benefits of its strategic decision to run SAP on IBM Power Systems with IBM DB2. The professional IBM migration specialists met the Audi timeline.One of the DB2 databases, a 2.8 TB database for the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse, is split into eight partitions using the database partitioning feature (DPF). This provides a shared-nothing architecture that offers greater scalability, with the ability to spread the database across multiple virtual or physical machines to use their resources.The Oracle DBAs at Audi took a one week internal training course in DB2, and were then coached by IBM DB2 experts to be capable of managing the SAP base operations.Data protection
Audi is using IBM Database Encryption Expert software help protect sensitive data associated with its SAP E-Recruiting system. IBM Database Encryption Expert includes centralized policy and key management to simplify data security management, and helps Audi to maintain and demonstrate compliance with internal audit regulations and external laws.Supporting business excellence
With the IBM private cloud ready infrastructure underpinning its SAP systems, Audi has a robust, high- performance platform for managing its business operations that also offers superb flexibility. As the company tackles increasing competition the ability to expand and contract its SAP solutions in line with changing patterns of demand will help Audi to ensure that it has the right IT resources in place, at the right cost of ownership.The IBM private cloud-ready infrastructure now runs the entire SAP landscape at Audi, serving practically a lot of business and supporting core business processes. From January 2011, operational support for production systems was handed to a team of IBM Global Technology Services as planned.“We trust the IBM infrastructure to run our production systems, which are absolutely business-critical,” says Markus Wierl. “Any significant unplanned downtime could lead to a stoppage on our production lines. Modern automotive manufacturing is based on just-in-time concepts, and involves a large and complex partner ecosystem. So any minor disruption to production can rapidly turn into a major problem for multiple parties. For this reason, we highly value the robustness and availability of the IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter technology for our SAP solutions.”
Audi decided that an implementation which is ready for a private cloud would be the best option for the future: building a completely virtualized infrastructure with the ability to add or remove computing capacity on demand. This would solve the immediate issues with the SAP environment, and also create a new approach to managing and delivering IT services whereby the IT Services Department could focus on desired business outcomes rather than on low-level infrastructure concerns.Markus Wierl, Service Owner SAP Infrastructure, AUDI AG, explains: “We wanted to create a flexible virtualized infrastructure that would enable us to grow and add new services without needing to consider the underlying hardware or any other constraints. The IBM Power Systems™ offerings were highly attractive because of their mature virtualization capabilities. So we invited IBM to propose two options: one using our existing Oracle database, and one with the IBM DB2® database.”Proving the IBM concept
The IBM proposals suggested that the DB2 option would not only offer significantly better interactive and batch performance, but also that it would use considerably less disk capacity. Audi requested hard evidence for the DB2 claims. With the Audi IT team keen to finalize the deal within a strict deadline, IBM worked fast to build a successful Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for the new private cloud ready infrastructure for SAP. “We were impressed that IBM was able to organize the Proof-of-Concept in only three weeks,” says Markus Wierl. “IBM created an environment that enabled us to compare DB2 9.7 with a reorganized Oracle 10g database, both running on IBM Power Systems servers. The results were clear: storage savings in the range of 50 to 70 percent, and much higher performance when using DB2.” He adds: “We visited the IBM SAP International Competence Center and learnt more about the partnership and long-term collaboration between the two vendors. We also heard from SAP that they themselves use IBM DB2 to develop their software, which convinced us that migration was not a risky option. Combined with the virtualization capabilities and performance of the IBM servers we decided that our strategic platform for SAP should be DB2 and IBM Power Systems.”Large-scale migration
Audi moved ahead with the proposed solution from IBM: the creation of a ‘private-cloud ready’ infrastructure with SAP databases on DB2 on four IBM Power® 570 servers and SAP application servers on 21 IBM BladeCenter® PS702 Express servers. The key to the success of the solution was the migration process. It was necessary to migrate more than 100 SAP systems from HP-UX to IBM AIX® 6.1 and from Oracle 10g to IBM DB2 9.7.Working with IBM Systems and Technology Group and IBM Global Technology Services®, Audi successfully migrated the SAP systems – one third of them production systems. The migration took just six months to complete. The combined team added several new SAP systems to the new platform since the start of migration and the environment continues to grow in this way.The initial migrations were handled at a rate of between two and five SAP systems per week – this fast- paced approach and the criticality of the business systems made it vital for Audi to have a strong partner with a rigorous approach to project management and risk mitigation.The only available time for the migrations was over weekends, and all systems needed to be operational again in time for the restarting of the manufacturing production lines each Monday morning. The combined IBM and Audi team successfully completed all the migrations with no disruption to Audi’s business.“The outstanding collaboration between the various parts of the IBM team and our team ensured that we overcame all potential areas of risk during these highly complex migration projects,” says Markus Wierl. “The positive results we saw in the Proof-of-Concept have been reflected in our production environment, and the business is already seeing the benefits. We have improved system performance and adherence to SLAs, and we have also reduced our energy requirements and costs for IT through virtualization.”IBM provided a highly professional migration service that took into account all the potential business risks and took steps to mitigate them. The IBM project team was able to call on the experience and knowledge of IBM’s global pool of SAP, DB2 and Power Systems experts, including IBM GTS Migration Factory, ensuring that the migrations were completed on schedule and without any service interruptions.“This really was an impressive accomplishment by the IBM team: to migrate more than 100 SAP systems to a completely new operating system and database in six months and with no disruption,” says Markus Wierl.Robust and efficient platform
The new landscape for SAP at Audi is based around four IBM Power 570 servers with a total of 80 active IBM POWER6® cores, running the SAP database and central instance. The virtual AIX servers in this environment are all clustered for high availability using IBM PowerHA®. A further 48 POWER6 cores are available on demand – and Audi effectively only pays for these as it uses them. The Power Systems servers have a total of 1.5 TB memory, with a further 0.8 TB available on demand, and can scale from 745,000 to 850,000 SAPS with SAP ERP.Audi’s contract with IBM includes a provision for upgrading the current Power Systems servers to four Power 770 servers with POWER7® processors in 2012 which will offer up to 1.1 million SAPS with SAP ERP. The total potential of the IBM cloud ready solution could be extended almost infinitely, giving Audi plenty of headroom for business growth.The SAP application, management and monitoring servers also run on AIX 6.1, on 21 IBM BladeCenter PS702 Express servers. Of these, 18 are configured with 16 IBM POWER7 cores and three with four IBM POWER7 cores. The IBM BladeCenter servers offer a total of 300 POWER7 cores supported by 4.14 TB memory to operate and monitor Audi’s SAP applications.Audi’s SAP Infrastructure is operated by IBM. The chosen solution offered significant benefits over competing options, including 20 to 40 percent greater energy efficiency projected over four years. This comparison, made by Audi itself, was for the new IBM hardware against the new hardware from two other vendors. The higher energy efficiency not only enabled IBM to offer keen pricing for hosting the solution, but also enabled Audi to meet its internal requirements for a green and sustainable solution. The use of DB2 compression also helps here, by significantly reducing the total database size and therefore the number of disks that the environment requires.The SAP solutions used by Audi include human resources, business warehouse, financials, cost controlling, client relationship management, supplier relationship management, portals, production, logistics and an e-recruitment solution. While IBM manages the hardware, operating system and virtualization, Audi manages the SAP solutions, SAP basis and DB2.Cloud for flexibility and speed
The private cloud infrastructure based on IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter servers offers Audi high availability and performance, and enables the rapid provisioning of new LPAR’s as well as the additionof on-demand computing resources to existing systems. Audi has known costs for hardware and services with transparent pricing and on-demand billing. The IBM solution provides a day-based capacity pricing model, giving Audi the ability to precisely flex its IT resources and costs up and down as business requirements change.Server virtualization using IBM PowerVM® is the corner-stone of the new solution. It enables Audi to pack a large number of separate business systems onto a small number of physical servers, pushing up utilization and largely eliminating costly unused capacity. The use of virtualization also enables greater flexibility and responsiveness. Rather than having each logical system tied to a particular physical server, and only able to expand through the physical addition of new hardware, Audi can reallocate resources on the fly from one system to another as required.With the Live Partition Mobility feature of IBM PowerVM, live systems can be moved even from one physical server to another without any loss of service. The use of server virtualization also enables the Audi IT Services Department to respond faster and more cost- effectively to new requirements from the business. Where it might previously have taken days or even weeks to procure, install and set up a new physical server, Audi can create new virtual servers within minutes, fully configured and ready to install new applications on.“The ability to turn on and off additional server resources is a great benefit, and we make active use of this feature of IBM Power Systems,” says Markus Wierl. “We can add resources on a day-by-day basis as we need them, and pay for the additional capacity on a monthly basis.”The IBM private cloud ready solution includes integrated management and provisioning tools, enabling an approach to systems management that is more business-centric rather than IT-centric. To implement cloud functionality a proof of concept was successfully done with some use cases in 2011. At the end of 2011 the implementation of cloud functionality to support the IT operations team started.Rather than spending time and effort managing a disparate set of hardware, Audi now has an efficient, compact and highly standardized infrastructure that requires little physical maintenance and that is managed by IBM. What’s more, the cloud concept allows a group of physically separate hardware resources to be orchestrated and managed as a single pool of virtualized resources. As Audi continues to expand the SAP environment, it is also further developing the management of cloud and embedding the new management processes into its organization.Rapid results
Almost immediately after the migration, Audi began to see the benefits of its strategic decision to run SAP on IBM Power Systems with IBM DB2. The professional IBM migration specialists met the Audi timeline.One of the DB2 databases, a 2.8 TB database for the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse, is split into eight partitions using the database partitioning feature (DPF). This provides a shared-nothing architecture that offers greater scalability, with the ability to spread the database across multiple virtual or physical machines to use their resources.The Oracle DBAs at Audi took a one week internal training course in DB2, and were then coached by IBM DB2 experts to be capable of managing the SAP base operations.Data protection
Audi is using IBM Database Encryption Expert software help protect sensitive data associated with its SAP E-Recruiting system. IBM Database Encryption Expert includes centralized policy and key management to simplify data security management, and helps Audi to maintain and demonstrate compliance with internal audit regulations and external laws.Supporting business excellence
With the IBM private cloud ready infrastructure underpinning its SAP systems, Audi has a robust, high- performance platform for managing its business operations that also offers superb flexibility. As the company tackles increasing competition the ability to expand and contract its SAP solutions in line with changing patterns of demand will help Audi to ensure that it has the right IT resources in place, at the right cost of ownership.The IBM private cloud-ready infrastructure now runs the entire SAP landscape at Audi, serving practically a lot of business and supporting core business processes. From January 2011, operational support for production systems was handed to a team of IBM Global Technology Services as planned.“We trust the IBM infrastructure to run our production systems, which are absolutely business-critical,” says Markus Wierl. “Any significant unplanned downtime could lead to a stoppage on our production lines. Modern automotive manufacturing is based on just-in-time concepts, and involves a large and complex partner ecosystem. So any minor disruption to production can rapidly turn into a major problem for multiple parties. For this reason, we highly value the robustness and availability of the IBM Power Systems and BladeCenter technology for our SAP solutions.”
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
BladeCenter, BladeCenter PS702 Express, BladeCenter running OS - AIX, Power 570, Power Systems running AIX 6
Software:
DB2 for AIX
Operating system:
AIX
Service:
GTS Data Center Services, GTS ITS Server: Server Managed Services, IBM-SAP Alliance, IBM Global Services
Hardware:
BladeCenter, BladeCenter PS702 Express, BladeCenter running OS - AIX, Power 570, Power Systems running AIX 6
Software:
DB2 for AIX
Operating system:
AIX
Service:
GTS Data Center Services, GTS ITS Server: Server Managed Services, IBM-SAP Alliance, IBM Global Services
Legal Information
IBM Deutschland GmbH, D-71137 Ehningen. ibm.com/solutions/sap. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, BladeCenter, DB2, Global Technology Services, Power, PowerHA and PowerVM are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. A current list of other IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks, or service marks of others. This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many factors have contributed to the results and benefits described. IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy. All customer examples cited represent how some customers have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may show design models.© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. © 2012 SAP AG. All rights reserved. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary. These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies (“SAP Group”) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
SAP On IBM i: The Best Alternative?
Published: August 27, 2012
by Dan Burger
IBM considers SAP to be one of its top independent
software vendors (ISVs) on the IBM i platform. As such, SAP gets preferred
treatment. If SAP suggests certain features for the operating system or the
database that would help its game, it is likely to get done. Technical advice
from IBM that benefits its SAP software development is part of the living
arrangements. Some of the best brains IBM i has work with SAP customers.
How's that working out?
A lot of people would rather slow dance with a half-starved grizzly
bear than mess with an existing ERP system. What makes companies want to bring
in SAP on i if they never ran SAP or IBM i? What gets the deal done?
Here's what I got from a conversation last week with Alison
Butterill, IBM i product offering manager; Jim Effle, manager of IBM i top ISV
development support; and Ron Schmerbauch, technical leader of IBM's SAP on i
team.
SAP customers, at least the ones that Schmerbauch works with, are
technologically savvy and willing to take on more than a
hardware-software-operating system upgrade. The projects involve independent
ASPs, external storage, solid state drives, PowerHA clustering, PowerVM
virtualization, and even live partition mobility. Not all the projects
are wrapped in all these technologies, but this panorama is indicative of
the business discussions Schmerbauch and Effle are having with SAP and SAP's
customers. These are all important aspects when preparing an infrastructure,
Schmerbauch points out.
Infrastructure that supported an ERP foundation that is 20 years old
or more is not the infrastructure that is built for the next 20-plus years. At
some point, old tires will blow out. However, the cost of infrastructure
upgrades has to be covered somehow within budgets that, if increased at all,
have only inched upward. For many shops budgets have stayed even or retracted as
part of the "do more with less" philosophy that haunts IT initiatives.
The infrastructure integration capability of IBM i is one of its
strengths and it is emphasized to a large extent when companies are comparing
whether to run SAP on IBM i or another platform.
Schmerbauch works exclusively with customers that run SAP on IBM i
and DB2 with Power hardware. These are constants. They can be a big deal when
attempting to add new levels of effectiveness to infrastructure. When SAP runs
on other platforms, he says, the typical scenario includes a variety of
operating systems and databases, which complicates integration and frustrates
infrastructure upgrades.
To make some points in budget discussions, IBM i has some built-in
assets that require getting beyond initial cost. Savings on the infrastructure
side, projected over several years, have been a part of the IBM i story since
the days of its ancestors. The integrated database has been a factor. Simplified
system management is another. But lately there is more attention being paid to
subsystems capability and its impact on server consolidation and the savings
that brings in terms of hardware and the people who manage systems.
The IBM i operating system's use of subsystems is an intrinsic
advantage emphasized by Schmerbauch. "Subsystems allow a consolidation to fewer
footprints," he notes. "They allow more money to be spent on the SAP side
(software features and functions) because less is spent on the infrastructure.
When customers move from Windows to i, they typically move into fewer LPARs
because they are taking advantage of subsystems. SAP systems install to
subsystems. It's how it works. Customers set up multiple SAP systems within an
LPAR. We have some that are using 10 to 20 SAP systems in the same LPAR. On
other platforms, it is usually one SAP system per partition or server."
From the IBM i perspective, this lowers SAP implementation costs and
allows companies with IBM i skills to move to an SAP solution as an alternative
to whatever legacy ERP system they are struggling with.
An example of how this can work is illustrated by AriZona Beverage
Company, where the core SAP distribution business ran on Intel X86 servers, while IBM i on
Power ran other SAP business applications.
According to a case study on the IBM website, capacity limits on Intel-based
processing side led to reliability and performance issues. It was estimated that
the existing 80-core Intel architecture with 10 TB of external storage would
require an additional 48 Intel processor cores to provide development, quality
assurance, and SAP services.
Taking into consideration memory, disk, operating system, database,
and virtualization, along with the savings in maintenance and license expenses
it was determined that a three-year savings by moving to IBM i on Power would be
close to $100,000.
The replacement SAP architecture supports 200 users, on a single
instance running on one logical partition (LPAR) on an IBM Power 720 Solution
Edition server, which has the processing capacity of the previous six-server
Intel set up (that's because the Power system is running at very high
utilization). It also includes 9.2 TB of integrated storage. It's the kind of
integrated system that other platforms are working to create and maniacally
market as ground-breaking technology.
The migration and upgrade work was accomplished with the help of IBM
Lab Services connected to the SAP on i Center of Excellence. This is a
four-person team specifically organized for this type of assignment involving
optimized software and integration. The CoE is one of those things that result
from being a top ISV.
I get a little uneasy because no one will provide estimates that
could lead to even a sniff of the frequency with which these projects are
occurring, but it's probably safe to say a few have been completed during the
past five years or so, and a few more are under way.
In addition to the AriZona Beverage case study, which was published
in 2012, there are four others to support the SAP on i migration: Pentair, 7-Eleven Stores, Movado Group, and Border States Electric. They date from 2008 to 2010.
"We have [SAP on i] customers that are running on two cores with
only a handful of users and customers with thousands of users and running on 795
machines." Schmerbauch says.
One of the topics that came up in the discussion was the
introduction about one year ago of SAP's real-time, in-memory, data analytics
appliance called HANA. SAP is marketing HANA (pronounced like Honda without the
"d") for business intelligence workloads, but says it will eventually replace
any underlying relational database.
In the original announcement of SAP HANA, it is described as "an
integrated database and calculation layer that allows the processing of
massive quantities of real-time data in main memory to provide
immediate results from analyses and transactions." I added the italics to
emphasize the marketing language that tends to over-promise all new product
announcements.
"HANA is used as an appliance to ERP in certain situations,"
Schmerbauch says. "It can connect to any SAP platform as an accelerator
appliance and it can be used as a business warehousing database. But there still
needs to be an application server on top of HANA, and that application server
can be IBM i."
I got the impression IBM is not worried HANA is destined to replace
the DB2 relational database in SAP on i implementations. In its present form as
a business intelligence/data warehousing appliance, it certainly has a long ways
to go. IBM has time on its side in this regard, but I suspect there are watchful
Big Blue eyes on the progress of HANA. And the fact that Oracle has a similar device, called
Exalytics, has not gone unnoticed.
Working with existing SAP on i customers to move forward with
operating system upgrades is where much of the IBM interaction with SAP is these
days. With the end of support for V5R4 established as September 2013, companies
are reacting.
"We see a lot of activity and it is increasing," Butterill says in
regard to IBM i upgrades to 6.1, and much more frequently to 7.1. "Features and
functions in the operating system get people to upgrade and so does end of
support. Some newly added ISV functionality, particularly in the area of
compliance, sparks end users to upgrade. Companies are very careful when it
comes to compliance and industry standards."
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Windows Replaced By IBM i, Hosted Software, And Web Portal
ublished: August 13, 2012
by Dan Burger
Getting something for free sounds good until you discover that it's worth pretty much what you paid for it. In this case, Windows-based Web applications are delivered as a free hosted service. Some of the users would pay to have a better alternative. And that's where Nathan Andelin steps in. Andelin writes applications in RPG and hosts them on an IBM Power Systems 720 running IBM i. And he's found customers who will give up their free option for something better.
Even though the hosted service Andelin offers has a fee, that is not a deterrent. It's a matter of being more responsive to the individual needs of the users, Andelin says.
The users Andelin hopes to appeal to are school systems. Internet resources and vendor-hosted applications are an important part of the core business processes in many school systems these days. Some of those processes are identical from one school to another and some processes are unique, just like we find in most organizations. Financial processes are likely very similar, while administrative policies and curriculum may be more diverse. It's not a one-size-fits-all universe. Applications cover such things as student information systems; online assessments for students, faculty, and administrators; and instructional portals. If applications don't function adequately or integrate properly, someone is going to be wearing the dunce cap.
In Andelin's home state of Utah, his primary target is the charter schools. Operational activities tend to vary more from the public schools and attention to those differences--receiving and implementing input from the schools--has paid off for Andelin's company Relational Database Corp (RDC). Creating a user interface that is efficient and highly functional certainly helps as well.
The free hosted system provided by the state was a mish-mash of applications partially written in Visual FoxPro, with a desktop interface partially written in Microsoft .NET, and a Web interface partially written in Adobe ColdFusion. Like one of those school cafeteria mystery meals you were served as a kid, the integration was less than appetizing.
For one thing, Visual FoxPro doesn't allow the schools to access Microsoft's SQL Server database. There is no ODBC-like connection. The system is constructed through remote terminal services so that only screens are translated back to workstations.
The resources to manage that are extensive. It takes a lot of processing cores and memory to provide efficient interfaces and that means a lot of software licenses, and therefore higher costs. The taxpayers of Utah foot that bill.
"That system is like having an instance of Microsoft Windows running for every user," Andelin says. "You get something like 50 users on a 16-core server."
RDC is still in the early stages of building a customer base among the Utah schools, but its system is hosting 1,500 users on its Power Systems 720 server with two of the four processors activated and 32 GB of main memory. It has eight disk drives installed. And that system has a lot of room to grow.
The Power 720 is one of the Gen2 boxes, also known as a Power7 or Power7 Prime machine within IBM, which is a 4U rack-mounted machine with a single processor card that has one four-core Power7 chip running at 3 GHz. Main memory peaks at 128 GB in the machine, which has eight drive bays plus five PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral slots and an optional four low-profile PCI-Express 2.0 slots that can be added through a riser card. (You need to buy the six-core or eight-core Power 720 to get the one GX++ bus slot to implement 12X remote I/O drawers for external peripherals.)
On the application development side, Andelin's approach involves a single user interface, so all the screens look and behave similarly, whether the apps are for financials or for activates relating to students, teachers, or administrators activities. "We just expose our apps through the HTTP server," he points out. "It's more efficient and requires fewer resources."
Relational Database has written more than 400 RPG applications that include development frameworks, application generators, and a Web portal. Very few of the apps require customization from one school to another. Andelin is one of two programmers doing the programming work.
His choice of development tools is maybe not what you would expect. Andelin prefers the old school PDM and SEU contraptions. (I use the word "contraptions" lovingly, knowing there are people who believe those tools should be in museums and modern development tools will increase productivity.)
"I recognize the productivity gains in some areas of the Rational tooling," Andelin admits, "but there are some areas that are not as productive." His viewpoint is that if you are really skilled with a tool and you balance the gains and loses when using another tool, there may not be reason to change. The other factor in this, he says, is that RDC developers don't spend a lot of time coding. "We spend more time in the design and the user interface development using Dreamweaver."
The work on the RPG code is handled by a home-grown application generator that does model-based generation of RPG code. The application generation technology relies on a CL-based scripting language and a tool that dynamically reads and runs the CL rather than traditionally compiling it into a program and running it.
"I promote native RPG solutions," Andelin says. "There are good tools and frameworks out there. People should look into them. We are not using them (he prefers to build his own software), but I am supportive of them."
Subsystems Not Partitions
As this hosted services model is laid out, each school system customer will have its own instance of the IBM i HTTP server. The architecture is devised with separate customer subsystems for the applications rather than using logical partitioning, which is an architectural decision others may choose. Andelin chose to divide customer workloads into customer subsystems. His thinking takes into account the one of the IBM i's greatest assets: it manages workloads really well.
"When you partition and use a hypervisor to switch between partitions, the hypervisor doesn't have a lot of knowledge of the precise work that is going on in a partition," Andelin says. "It just knows when resources are needed and it provides what is necessary. We can use IBM's performance management tools. The IBM i itself can manage workloads by knowing the job priorities. I think the utilization will be more efficient compared to partitioning."
For the time being and until RDC's customer base grows significantly, the attributes of subsystems are the same from one school to another. Subsystems provide the option of configuring the maximum number of jobs, the memory associated with the subsystems, the priorities, and other performance criteria. Memory allocation is based on the application interfaces exposed to the users who have access to a sign-on screen, a menu system, and the RDC applications. The amount of memory the app consumes is controlled by its design. There's no exposing of SQL commands, ODBC or OLE DB interfaces, or any database interface, for instance.
The IBM i operating system, Andelin points out, is capable of managing thousands and maybe tens of thousands of jobs. With the machine configured as it is now, he believes it will handle 2,000 concurrent users. Proving that this small-footprint system has the capability to run Web applications for thousands of concurrent users gives Andelin a great amount of satisfaction. He relishes the opportunity to compare this to other technologies. In coming years, he anticipates replacing dozens of Windows systems.
"Over the past 20 years, a lot of organizations have tried to integrate various Windows applications with the IBM i (and its predecessors) applications and databases," he says. "That has led to arguably the most difficult and costly challenge facing IT today. It's just plain hard to create, manage, maintain, and support disparate technologies. It takes inordinate manpower and computing resources."
The constraints of the 5250 interface is being erased by Web technologies that allow almost any number and any type of application servers deployed under an IBM i Web portal. It's good to see people like Nathan Andelin being successful with this.
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