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Achieving business benefits This root-and-branch review and restructuring of the Mannheimer IT landscape has more than met the business objectives, and has also delivered lower operational costs with improved technical performance. Norbert Koch comments, “The HP and Oracle solution was incurring high maintenance costs and significant annual license fees. The migration to IBM Power Systems and DB2 has saved around 30 percent a year, and the solution is priced as a complete hardware, maintenance and license package for five years, offering budget predictability for Mannheimer. “Previously, users complained about performance, especially concerning the 20 minutes or so it took to generate complex accounting and statistical reports. With the Power Systems server and DB2, the same queries now take around three minutes to complete, and many other standard reports are delivered in just seconds. Similarly, SAP application dialog step response times and batch run times have decreased by a factor of five, eliminating user complaints
consulting companies painted what we might call ‘anxiety scenarios’ concerning the migration, and they have been proved wrong. The project ran smoothly, on time and slightly below budget.”
and greatly improving total productivity.”
At the operational level, Mannheimer has replaced seven HP servers with two energy-efficient IBM Power Systems servers. With lower energy consumption and reduced heat output, the company saves on air- conditioning costs and has been able to reduce server room floor space. Norbert Koch concludes, “We are extraordinarily satisfied with the business, technical and operational benefits of the IBM Power Systems and DB2 combination. Some
IBM provided a SAP certified Migration Consultant to support the transformation, working as a joint team with Mannheimer and LIS.TEC. Rainer Böhm adds, “Migration to DB2 fully meets our expectations, and we are 100 percent confident in the solution. IBM recommended the combined landscape and migration process, and it was excellent. “For Mannheimer, the twin IBM Power Systems and DS4800 solution provides easily sufficient capacity, and the flexibility offered by virtualization enables us to look at adding functionality, such as portal solutions, with no immediate need to invest in additional hardware. We always assess which platform best meets our needs, and SAP applications with DB2 on Power Systems provide a cost-effective, future-proof solution for Mannheimer.”
Founded in 1879 in Mannheim, Germany, insurance group Mannheimer offers life, sickness and general insurance. The group companies employ 842 people in total, and generate an annual insurance premium income of around €376 million (2009).
Business need Insurance group Mannheimer relied on SAP applications to run its core business operations. Older HP servers were unable to support new SAP applications, and migration to the Unicode standard would require investment in additional physical servers. Poor dialog response performance and slow report generation caused user complaints, while maintenance and license costs continued to rise.
Solution Migrated from HP servers running SAP applications and Oracle databases in the Microsoft Windows Server environment to IBM infrastructure. SAP ERP applications, DB2 and other in-house and business
intelligence applications run in multiple virtual servers on IBM Power 570 servers running AIX and the Unicode standard. Deployed IBM System Storage DS4800 systems to rationalize and consolidate the data storage landscape.
Benefits
Migration to IBM Power Systems and DB2 has reduced operational costs by around 30 percent a year. Business reports that took 20 minutes to generate are now produced in three minutes. SAP application dialog step response times and batch run times have decreased by a factor of five. IBM DB2 Deep Compression for data and indexes has reduced total data storage needs by an average of from 40 to over 60 percent.
18 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS |
www.datacentresols.com
Winter 2010
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