System iNetwork

November 18, 2009

New Power System Fits For SAP-Focused Manufacturer

I want to point you to a great case study published by IBM about a German manufacturer that underwent a big upgrade and ultimately choose to stick with IBM i--in this case, running on a new Power 570. One of the interesting things about companies running on SAP is that they have several viable hardware/OS/database options, and IBM i on Power remains compelling.

The manufacturer in question is Karl E. Brinkmann GmbH (KEB), which specializes in motion control devices contained in almost all kinds of appliances and machines, from cars, dishwashers and pumps to cranes, lifts and huge wind turbines. The company has an international customer base with regional offices around the world, employs 1,200+ people, and generates €170 million annually.

Here's some interesting snips:

Although KEB had been using IBM servers for many years with very satisfactory results, the radically changed requirements dictated a thorough review of all major vendors' offerings. The analysis included performance, total capacity, scalability and reliability data.

"We determined that staying with IBM Power Systems servers was the best option, as we could guarantee good performance from the SAP applications and valuable in-house know-how could be maintained," says Bernhard Peuser. "Not least, a move to any other system would have meant a much more complicated migration process. IBM has a clear roadmap for its Power Systems platform as well as for the IBM i operating system, and stepping towards POWER6 processor-based systems was completely logical."

KEB implemented its new SAP ERP applications on two IBM Power Systems servers running the IBM i operating system, with a Power 570 server with four POWER6 processors for production, and an i525 server with two POWER5+ processors for backup in the second data centre.

IBM makes a great point--any organization looking at this large of an upgrade has to do some diligence by reviewing all the major vendors' offerings.

To support the worldwide SAP applications, KEB selected IBM DB2. The production database, on the first partition of the System i server, is around 650GB; the test and development database is around 900GB; and the SAP Solution Manager dataset is 150GB. An additional Lotus Domino server database is 450GB.

Bernhard Peuser comments, "It was only logical to go for DB2, as this is integrated within the IBM i operating system. We are very pleased with the ease of administration. There is no need to employ dedicated database administrators, and our IT staff can manage the database as part of their day-to-day business."

No DBAs? Of course not. Again, this is a key cost-analysis point that still gets lost after all these years.

There's also a nugget on the beefed up abilities of POWER6--previously, KEB dedicated three processors to its SAP application workload, but with the new Power System, KEB requires only two, and yet, performance is better.

There's a lot more detail on IBM's site, of course, including a handy .pdf version you can download. Check it out!

Posted by cmaxcer at November 18, 2009 10:01 AM