to another even during continuous production. Combined with the established reliability, security and availability advantages, the IBM Power Systems platform offers a very high degree of business flexibility to Mannheimer.
Taking advantage of IBM Power Systems
environment with reduced license costs on flexible, scalable technology. The first project phase covered the migration from Windows and Oracle to IBM AIX and DB2 9.5. This migration, including DB2 row compression, resulted in compression rates of between 40 percent and over 60 percent for the SAP Financial Services Collections and Disbursements, SAP Financial Services Re-Insurance, and SAP ERP Human Capital Management landscapes. The second project phase comprised SAP application upgrades for SAP FSRI from SAP 4.6 C via SAP 4.71 and SAP 4.72 to ECC 6.0, and was completed during a single weekend. The concluding phase was the conversion to Unicode for the SAP Financial Services Collections and Disbursements, SAP Financial Services Re-Insurance, and SAP ERP Human Capital Management landscapes. This process included the upgrade from DB2 9.5 to DB2 9.7 and the implementation of new features such as “Reclaimable Storage” and Index Compression, and despite the conversion to the Unicode character set, data volumes decreased slightly.
Selecting a DB2 strategy Mannheimer implemented two IBM Power 570 servers with POWER6 processors, two IBM System Storage
devices from the DS4800 family, and an IBM TS3310 tape library. To manage the data, Mannheimer enabled the DB2 Storage Optimization Feature and implemented IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to provide backup, archive and recovery services. IBM Global Technology Services provided service and support to migrate Oracle databases from 32-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2000 on HP servers to the 64-bit AIX environment on the IBM Power Systems platform.
“The strategic database system within the whole Mannheimer group is DB2, and we wanted to pursue our standardization strategy to help us reduce costs, consolidate our skill sets and increase system performance. DB2 provides a scalable, highly robust foundation for SAP applications, and ensures that we are well-placed to manage the predicted business growth,” says Norbert Koch. “Enhanced application performance available from POWER- processor based systems also boosts user productivity, a valuable gain across the entire company.” Additional POWER-processor features include Live Partition Mobility, a unique IBM technology for POWER processor-based systems that allows LPARs to be moved from one system
16 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS |
www.datacentresols.com
With database migration in place, Mannheimer migrated its SAP applications to the new platform, with an intermediate upgrade and conversion to Unicode, followed by final deployment of SAP ERP applications in the production environment. The Power 570 systems were divided into virtual servers called logical partitions (LPARs), used as staging servers for the upgrade and then sized according to the predicted workload of the SAP application. Norbert Koch continues, “We evaluated other vendors’ 64-bit solutions for the SAP application landscape. Because the HP hardware had reached the end of life, it became important that the new solution would be able to handle this workload and scale to meet future demands. We chose the Power Systems and AIX platform because it offers better scalability, IBM provides a long-term strategy, the pricing was very competitive and it included superior virtualization technology.”
Rainer Böhm, Head of SAP Systems, adds, “Virtualization capabilities were the deciding factor. IBM logical partitioning (LPAR) on Power Systems servers permits dynamic allocation of processor capacity between LPARs, allowing Mannheimer to ensure that each application meets its expected performance levels.
“The ability to allocate CPUs is an outstanding business advantage, particularly the ability to use more resources for busy application areas when they are not needed by other
Winter 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44