INTERSPORT boosts SAP application performance

INTERSPORT boosts SAP application performance with IBM i on IBM Power Systems and solid-state drive storage technologies

IBM SAP International Competence Center

“Since the beginning, we have used IBM i on IBM Power Systems to support our SAP applications, and it is still the most powerful, cost-effective and reliable platform for our needs. The integrated DB2 database provides a significant advantage for easy management of the SAP environment.”

Johann Reisinger

CIO

INTERSPORT Austria GmbH

“By using SSD technology instead of a traditional Fibre Channel setup, we have delivered a considerable performance improvement to our SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse environment, while also creating a more compact and cost-effective infrastructure.”

Johann Reisinger

CIO


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INTERSPORT boosts SAP® application performance with IBM® i on IBM Power Systems™ and solid-state drive storage technologies

Customer Objectives

Enable business expansion by providing headroom for •

growth in SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business

Warehouse environments

Support peak workload of up to 350 concurrent SAP •

NetWeaver Business Warehouse users

Encourage user adoption of business intelligence by •

improving SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

performance

Improve international capabilities by introducing Unicode for •

SAP ERP

Provide faster, more scalable storage for business-critical •

data

Build a resilient architecture capable of meeting a recovery •

time objective (RTO) of less than two hours.

IBM solution

Worked with IBM and Base-IT (an IBM Business Partner) to •

design, build, test and deploy a new infrastructure for SAP

and other critical applications within 15 months

Upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0 with Unicode for financial •

accounting and controlling

Implemented two IBM Power 550 servers running IBM i, the •

first with eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 256 GB

of memory, and the second with six cores and 160 GB of

memory

Installed the servers at separate locations and divided SAP •

production and development/test workload between them,

enabling rapid production failover in case of problems at

either data center

Introduced two IBM System Storage DS8700 storage •

systems, one at each data center. Each has:

Two ranks (800GB) of solid-state drives (SSDs) for SAP ◦

NetWeaver BW workload

12 ranks (8TB) of Fibre-Channel (FC) disks for SAP ERP ◦

and other ERP applications

Mirrored the DS8700s via SAN fabric •

Installed IBM System Storage DS4700 storage systems for •

SAP test and development data.

Customer Benefits

Accelerated average SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse •

report generation speed by more than 66 percent

Reduced data loading and data aggregation time by 75 •

percent

Achieved compression of 110 million data sets within 17 •

hours – a task predicted to take 96 hours

Improved storage utilization from 60 percent to around 90 •

percent and avoided the need to purchase expansion

frames to house extra disks

Eliminated the need to purchase additional database •

licenses, as IBM i operating system includes built-in IBM

DB2 database

Reduced rack-space, power and cooling requirements by •

implementing two SSD ranks at each data center, instead of

investing in eight additional Fibre Channel ranks

Enabled full recovery of core business systems within two •

hours in the event of a disaster at either data center.

About this paper

This technical paper explores how INTERSPORT dramatically improved SAP application performance by upgrading to IBM i 6.1

running on an IBM POWER6+ processor-based server architecture, and implementing a new tiered storage environment. The new

IBM System Storage® DS8700 system utilizes a combination of storage media, including solid-state drives (SSDs) for high-

performance applications such as SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse.

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Initial IT environment

Before INTERSPORT Austria began the infrastructure update

project that forms the subject of this paper, the technical

architecture for its SAP and ISIS landscape was based on a

combination of IBM server and storage technologies as shown in

Figure 1 on page 6.

The production instances of the SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW

and ISIS applications were running on an IBM Power Systems

i570 server with eight IBM POWER5 processor cores and 160

GB of memory, located at the company’s main data center.

Storage for the production environment was provided by an IBM

System Storage DS8100 with eight Fibre Channel disk ranks

running at 15k RPM.

Test, development and backup instances of these applications

ran on another Power Systems server – a smaller i550 with 4

processor cores and 64GB of memory – located at a second

data center. Storage for these was provided by a second

DS8100 with the same specifications as the first.

Background, starting point and objectives

About INTERSPORT

INTERSPORT is one of the world’s largest sporting goods

retailers. Operating via a network of more than 5,300 stores in 39

countries, the company generated 2009 revenues of 9.3 billion

Euros.

INTERSPORT Austria is one of the group’s most important

national organizations in Central and Eastern Europe. The

Austrian organization employs 5,700 people at 353

INTERSPORT stores in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia

and Hungary. The organization achieved sales of 667.7 million

Euros in 2009/10.

The IT team at INTERSPORT Austria provides support for each

of the Austrian stores, as well as the shops in Czech Republic,

Slovakia and Hungary. Besides the usual Microsoft business

applications, the main systems that the team supports are:

A custom-built stock management system called ISIS•

An SAP ERP system for financial accounting and controlling•

An SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) system that •

produces reports based on data extracted from the other

two systems

For many years, the company has run these three solutions on

the IBM i operating system and IBM Power Systems servers.

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Business challenges and project objectives

Rapid domestic and international business growth, combined

with an increasing need for real-time business intelligence within

the organization, meant that INTERSPORT Austria’s SAP ERP

and SAP NetWeaver BW environments were reaching the limits

of the existing hardware platform.

As a result, performance was suffering, particularly in the

business intelligence environment. Business users often had to

wait several minutes for reports to be generated. The problem

was particularly severe at the start of the working day, when up to

350 users log on simultaneously to access daily sales reports.

Slow response times were creating dissatisfaction and reducing

users’ willingness to access the system as part of their daily

routine.

Looking to the future, INTERSPORT Austria realized that these

performance issues were likely to become even more severe. To

create a foundation for international expansion and improve

multi-language support, the company was planning to upgrade

to SAP ERP 6.0 with Unicode support. This upgrade was likely to

increase data volumes and put even greater load on the

company’s infrastructure.

To resolve these performance issues and create a more scalable

platform for future growth, the company wanted to upgrade its

servers and storage. As part of this project, the IT team also

decided to redesign the server landscape in order to enable

faster recovery in the event of a disaster at one of the company’s

data centers.

Technical solution

(See Figure 2 on page 7.)

Server architecture

Working with IBM and Base-IT, the INTERSPORT Austria IT team

designed and deployed a new server architecture based on two

IBM Power 550 servers running the IBM i 6.1 operating system.

The primary server has eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores

and 256 GB of memory, while the secondary server has six cores

and 160 GB of memory.

The IBM i operating system includes an integrated version of

IBM DB2, which is used as the database platform for the SAP

and ISIS applications. DB2 for i is a strictly object-orientated,

self-managing database that automatically distributes data

across different drives according to an integrated algorithm.

These features help to optimize performance for the SAP

environment.

Business resilience

Unlike the previous landscape, where one main server

supported the production workload while a second smaller

server handled non-production workload, the new architecture

distributes the logical partitions (LPARs) for production between

the two machines.

The main advantage of this approach is its resilience: if a disaster

occurs at one of the company’s data centers, business-critical

production workload can be transferred to the other machine

rapidly. In addition, it is simpler to increase system utilization

when production and non-production workloads are running on

the same physical server.

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System Storage

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System Storage

SAP R/3 Test224 GB

SAP NetWeaver BW Test430 GB

SAP R/3 Production293 GB

SAP NetWeaver BW Production1190 GB

ISIS Production1170 GB


SAP R/3 Production0.8 processor cores, 6 GB memory

SAP NetWeaver BW Production 2.5 cores, 54 GB memory

ISIS Production3.0 cores,40 GB memory

SAP R/3 Production293 GB


ISIS Test384 GB

ISIS Development350 GB

SAP R/3 Test0.2 cores, 5 GB memory

SAP NetWeaver BW Test1.5 cores, 22 GB memory

ISIS Test0.6 cores, 15 GB memory

ISIS Development0.3 cores, 7 GB memory

ISIS BackupNo permanent resources assigned

IBM System Storage DS8100 with 8 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks

IBM Power Systems i570with 8 IBM POWER5 processor cores and 160 GB of memory

IBM System Storage DS8100 with 8 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks

IBM Power Systems i550with 4 IBM POWER5 processor cores and 64 GB of memory

SAN fabric

Data Center 1 Data Center 2

Initial server and storage landscape at INTERSPORT Austria(N.B. - this diagram has been simplified to focus only on the SAP and ISIS environments)

Server partitionStorage partition

KeyServerFibre Channel storage

System i5

System i5

Figure 1: Initial server and storage landscape

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System Storage

21

System Storage

SAP NetWeaver BW Production - 770 GB

SAP ERP 6.0 Production2109 GB


SAP ERP 6.0 Production1 core, 30 GB memory

SAP NetWeaver BW Production3 cores, 144 GB memory

ISIS Production3.0 cores, 76 GB memory

SAP ERP 6.0 Test0.3 cores, 20 GB memory

SAP NetWeaver BW Test0.8 cores 40 GB memory

ISIS Test0.4 cores, 20 GB memory

ISIS Development0.2 cores, 20 GB memory

ISIS BackupNo permanent resources allocated

IBM System Storage DS8700 with 2 ranks of Solid State Drive disks and 12 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks

IBM Power 550with 8 IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 256 GB of memory

IBM System Storage DS8700 with 2 ranks of Solid State Drive disks and 12 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks IBM Power 550

with 6 IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 160 GB of memory

SAN fabric

Data Center 1 Data Center 2

Final server and storage landscape at INTERSPORT Austria(N.B. - this diagram has been simplified to focus only on the SAP and ISIS environments)

Server partitionStorage partition

Key

SAP NetWeaver BW Backup - No permanent resources allocated

SAP ERP 6.0 BackupNo permanent resources allocated

ServerFibre Channel storage

SSD storage

SAP NetWeaver BW Production - 770 GB

SAP NetWeaver BW Test 1400 GB

SAP ERP 6.0 Test1430 GB

ISIS Development950 GB

IBM System Storage DS4700 With Fibre Channel disks

ISIS Test950 GB


SAP ERP 6.0 Production2109 GB



System Storage DS4700

4GB/s 2GB/s

550

550

Figure 2: Final server and storage landscape

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Storage architecture

INTERSPORT Austria upgraded its storage architecture to

eliminate I/O bottlenecks that were affecting SAP NetWeaver BW

performance. To increase throughput, the company considered

expanding its existing IBM System Storage DS8100 disk

systems with a further eight Fibre Channel disk ranks – but this

would have required the introduction of a bulky expansion unit,

occupying valuable rack-space and increasing power and

cooling requirements.

Moreover, the IT team calculated that to achieve the required

level of performance from the Fibre Channel ranks, it would not

be possible to utilize more than 60 percent of the available disk

capacity. As a result, 40 percent of the new disks would remain

unused, reducing the value of the investment.

Instead, the company worked with IBM and Base-IT to migrate to

two new DS8700 systems. Each of these storage systems

contains 12 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks for SAP ERP

and ISIS production LPARs, as well as two ranks of Solid State

Drives (SSDs) for SAP NetWeaver BW.

The company can utilize up to 98 percent of the available

capacity of the SSDs, and provide far higher performance in

terms of throughput and response times in the SAP NetWeaver

BW environment (see Figures 3 and 4). As a result, INTERSPORT

Austria only needs two ranks of SSDs to provide the same level

of performance as eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks.

For non-production storage (SAP development and test

systems), the company uses an IBM System Storage DS4700

disk system located at the primary data center, which provides a

lower-cost storage tier for systems that do not require the same

level of I/O performance as the production environments. The

DS4700 is connected to the Power 550 servers using IBM Virtual

I/O Server (VIOS).

I/O throughput DS8100 with 15k RPM Fibre

Channel disks

DS8700 with a mixture of 15k

RPM Fibre Channel disks and

SSDs

Performance improvement (%)

Average throughput (I/O per

second)

3.0 7.0 133

Peak throughput (I/O per

second)

7.0 13.0 80

Figure 3: Improvements in I/O throughput with the new storage infrastructure

Response times DS8100 with 15k RPM Fibre

Channel disks

DS8700 with a mixture of 15k

RPM Fibre Channel disks and

SSDs

Performance improvement (%)

Average response time

(ms per I/O)

3.0 0.5 to 1.0 66 to 85

Peak response time

(ms per I/O)

14.0 7.5 47

Figure 4: Improvements in response times with the new storage infrastructure

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Project achievements

Performance improvements

The upgrade to IBM POWER6+ processor-based servers and

IBM DS8700 disk systems with SSDs has resolved

INTERSPORT Austria’s existing SAP NetWeaver BW

performance issues, while also providing sufficient capacity to

support future growth in data volumes and user numbers.

As a result, the average time taken to load data into SAP

NetWeaver BW has been reduced from 120 minutes to just 30

minutes – a 75 percent improvement. The time taken to build

aggregates has been reduced by approximately 75 percent, and

the time taken to generate reports has been improved by

approximately 66 percent.

Data compression speed in the DB2 environment also saw

significant improvements. According to the SAP guidelines, the

compression of 110 million datasets should take approximately

96 hours, but INTERSPORT Austria achieved it within 17 hours –

83 percent faster than expected.

User satisfaction

As a result of the performance improvement, the company’s 350

SAP users are able to access business intelligence data much

more rapidly, even at times of peak load. This helps to improve

their productivity, and also encourages them to use the SAP

NetWeaver BW system as part of their daily routine.

By equipping more employees with the latest business

information, INTERSPORT Austria improves their ability to make

rapid and well-informed business decisions, which should

ultimately result in improved efficiency and increased sales. The

company has in fact experienced significant sales growth since

the solution went live – although it is difficult to quantify the

contribution of the new IT landscape to this achievement.

Faster recovery

By dividing the production workload for the SAP and ISIS

applications between the two IBM Power 550 servers,

INTERSPORT Austria has been able to significantly enhance its

disaster recovery capability.

With the previous solution, it would have taken more than two

days to re-configure the secondary server and recover all

systems. Moreover, since the secondary server was less

powerful than the primary server, the performance of the SAP

and ISIS applications would have been significantly degraded.

With the new solution, a full recovery is possible within two hours,

since both servers have identical specifications and are already

configured to handle production workload.

Energy efficiency and environmental benefits

Choosing the more compact SSD-based storage solution has

enabled INTERSPORT Austria to avoid purchasing a DS8000

expansion unit and eight additional Fibre Channel disk ranks,

saving rack-space in the company’s data center.

The combination of the SSD solution with the new Power 550

servers has also reduced power and cooling requirements. The

POWER6+ processors are considerably more energy-efficient

than the older POWER5 processors, and two ranks of SSDs

consume much less electricity than eight ranks of Fibre Channel

disks. Overall, INTERSPORT Austria reports that the new

solution has significantly reduced its electricity costs.

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Future plans

INTERSPORT Austria foresees considerable growth in its SAP

NetWeaver Business Warehouse environment as it becomes

more widely adopted by users across the business. The

company is already working with SAP to investigate the

possibilities of extending its business intelligence environment,

and is considering introducing SAP BusinessObjects software.

The new IBM infrastructure will provide sufficient capacity to

support all the projects that INTERSPORT Austria is currently

planning. In the future, if new projects require additional

resources, the INTERSPORT IT team is confident that the

combination of IBM Power servers and DS8700 SSD storage will

provide the flexibility and scalability required to meet these

needs.

“The collaboration with IBM and Base-IT went perfectly – I can’t think of a single occasion during the project when the service they provided was less than excellent. Even today, if we encounter a problem that we cannot solve on our own, we can trust IBM and Base-IT to find a solution quickly.”

Johann Reisinger

CIO


“The new IBM infrastructure will provide sufficient capacity to support all our current projects, and we are confident that the combination of IBM Power servers and DS8700 SSD storage will be flexible and scalable enough to meet our future needs as well.”

Johann Reisinger

CIO


For more information:

To learn more about solutions from IBM and SAP, visit:

ibm-sap.com

For more information about SAP products and services,

contact an SAP representative or visit: sap.com

For more information about IBM products and services,

contact an IBM representative or visit: ibm.com

Contacts:

IBM

Karl-Heinz Prisching ([email protected])

Walter Lang ([email protected])

For further questions please contact the IBM SAP

International Competency Center via

[email protected]

SPC03292-ATEN-01 (December 2010)

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2010 All Rights Reserved.

IBM Deutschland GmbH D-70548 Stuttgart ibm.com

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INTERSPORT boosts SAP application performance

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