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. Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.

1. IBM SAP International Competence Center
INTERSPORT boosts SAP
application performance
with IBM i on IBM Power
Systems and solid-state
drive storage technologies

2. “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
INTERSPORT Austria GmbH

3. INTERSPORT boosts SAP® application performance with
IBM® i on IBM Power Systems™ and solid-state drive storage
technologies
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.
Customer Objectives •• Introduced two IBM System Storage DS8700 storage
•• Enable business expansion by providing headroom for systems, one at each data center. Each has:
growth in SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business ◦◦ Two ranks (800GB) of solid-state drives (SSDs) for SAP
Warehouse environments NetWeaver BW workload
•• Support peak workload of up to 350 concurrent SAP ◦◦ 12 ranks (8TB) of Fibre-Channel (FC) disks for SAP ERP
NetWeaver Business Warehouse users and other ERP applications
•• Encourage user adoption of business intelligence by •• Mirrored the DS8700s via SAN fabric
improving SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse •• Installed IBM System Storage DS4700 storage systems for
performance SAP test and development data.
•• Improve international capabilities by introducing Unicode for
SAP ERP Customer Benefits
•• Provide faster, more scalable storage for business-critical •• Accelerated average SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
data report generation speed by more than 66 percent
•• Build a resilient architecture capable of meeting a recovery •• Reduced data loading and data aggregation time by 75
time objective (RTO) of less than two hours. percent
•• Achieved compression of 110 million data sets within 17
IBM solution hours – a task predicted to take 96 hours
•• Worked with IBM and Base-IT (an IBM Business Partner) to •• Improved storage utilization from 60 percent to around 90
design, build, test and deploy a new infrastructure for SAP percent and avoided the need to purchase expansion
and other critical applications within 15 months frames to house extra disks
•• Upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0 with Unicode for financial •• Eliminated the need to purchase additional database
accounting and controlling licenses, as IBM i operating system includes built-in IBM
•• Implemented two IBM Power 550 servers running IBM i, the DB2 database
first with eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 256 GB •• Reduced rack-space, power and cooling requirements by
of memory, and the second with six cores and 160 GB of implementing two SSD ranks at each data center, instead of
memory investing in eight additional Fibre Channel ranks
•• Installed the servers at separate locations and divided SAP •• Enabled full recovery of core business systems within two
production and development/test workload between them, hours in the event of a disaster at either data center.
enabling rapid production failover in case of problems at
either data center
3

4. Background, starting point and objectives Initial IT environment
Before INTERSPORT Austria began the infrastructure update
About INTERSPORT project that forms the subject of this paper, the technical
INTERSPORT is one of the world’s largest sporting goods architecture for its SAP and ISIS landscape was based on a
retailers. Operating via a network of more than 5,300 stores in 39 combination of IBM server and storage technologies as shown in
countries, the company generated 2009 revenues of 9.3 billion Figure 1 on page 6.
Euros.
The production instances of the SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW
INTERSPORT Austria is one of the group’s most important and ISIS applications were running on an IBM Power Systems
national organizations in Central and Eastern Europe. The i570 server with eight IBM POWER5 processor cores and 160
Austrian organization employs 5,700 people at 353 GB of memory, located at the company’s main data center.
INTERSPORT stores in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia Storage for the production environment was provided by an IBM
and Hungary. The organization achieved sales of 667.7 million System Storage DS8100 with eight Fibre Channel disk ranks
Euros in 2009/10. running at 15k RPM.
The IT team at INTERSPORT Austria provides support for each Test, development and backup instances of these applications
of the Austrian stores, as well as the shops in Czech Republic, ran on another Power Systems server – a smaller i550 with 4
Slovakia and Hungary. Besides the usual Microsoft business processor cores and 64GB of memory – located at a second
applications, the main systems that the team supports are: data center. Storage for these was provided by a second
DS8100 with the same specifications as the first.
• 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.
4

5. Business challenges and project objectives Technical solution
Rapid domestic and international business growth, combined (See Figure 2 on page 7.)
with an increasing need for real-time business intelligence within
the organization, meant that INTERSPORT Austria’s SAP ERP Server architecture
and SAP NetWeaver BW environments were reaching the limits Working with IBM and Base-IT, the INTERSPORT Austria IT team
of the existing hardware platform. designed and deployed a new server architecture based on two
IBM Power 550 servers running the IBM i 6.1 operating system.
As a result, performance was suffering, particularly in the The primary server has eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores
business intelligence environment. Business users often had to and 256 GB of memory, while the secondary server has six cores
wait several minutes for reports to be generated. The problem and 160 GB of memory.
was particularly severe at the start of the working day, when up to
350 users log on simultaneously to access daily sales reports. The IBM i operating system includes an integrated version of
Slow response times were creating dissatisfaction and reducing IBM DB2, which is used as the database platform for the SAP
users’ willingness to access the system as part of their daily and ISIS applications. DB2 for i is a strictly object-orientated,
routine. self-managing database that automatically distributes data
across different drives according to an integrated algorithm.
Looking to the future, INTERSPORT Austria realized that these These features help to optimize performance for the SAP
performance issues were likely to become even more severe. To environment.
create a foundation for international expansion and improve
multi-language support, the company was planning to upgrade Business resilience
to SAP ERP 6.0 with Unicode support. This upgrade was likely to Unlike the previous landscape, where one main server
increase data volumes and put even greater load on the supported the production workload while a second smaller
company’s infrastructure. server handled non-production workload, the new architecture
distributes the logical partitions (LPARs) for production between
To resolve these performance issues and create a more scalable the two machines.
platform for future growth, the company wanted to upgrade its
servers and storage. As part of this project, the IT team also The main advantage of this approach is its resilience: if a disaster
decided to redesign the server landscape in order to enable occurs at one of the company’s data centers, business-critical
faster recovery in the event of a disaster at one of the company’s production workload can be transferred to the other machine
data centers. rapidly. In addition, it is simpler to increase system utilization
when production and non-production workloads are running on
the same physical server.
5

6. Initial server and storage landscape at INTERSPORT Austria Key
Server partition Server
(N.B. - this diagram has been simplified to focus only on the SAP and ISIS environments) Storage partition Fibre Channel storage
Data Center 1 Data Center 2
IBM System Storage DS8100 IBM System Storage DS8100
with 8 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre with 8 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre
Channel disks Channel disks
IBM Power Systems i570
with 8 IBM POWER5 processor
cores and 160 GB of memory
System i5
System Storage System Storage
IBM Power Systems i550
with 4 IBM POWER5 processor
cores and 64 GB of memory
System i5
SAP R/3 Production SAP R/3 Production
1 2
293 GB 1 2
293 GB
SAP R/3 Production
0.8 processor cores,
SAP NetWeaver BW 6 GB memory SAP NetWeaver BW
Production Production SAP R/3 Test
1190 GB 1190 GB 0.2 cores, 5 GB memory
SAN fabric SAP NetWeaver BW Test
SAP R/3 Test SAP NetWeaver BW ISIS Production 1.5 cores, 22 GB memory
224 GB Production 1170 GB
2.5 cores, ISIS Development
54 GB memory 0.3 cores, 7 GB memory
SAP NetWeaver BW Test
430 GB ISIS Development ISIS Test
350 GB 0.6 cores, 15 GB memory
ISIS Production
ISIS Production 3.0 cores, ISIS Backup
1170 GB 40 GB memory ISIS Test No permanent resources
384 GB assigned
Figure 1: Initial server and storage landscape

7. Final server and storage landscape at INTERSPORT Austria Key
Server partition Server SSD storage
(N.B. - this diagram has been simplified to focus only on the SAP and ISIS environments) Storage partition Fibre Channel storage
IBM System Storage DS8700 Data Center 1 IBM System Storage DS8700 Data Center 2
with 2 ranks of Solid State Drive with 2 ranks of Solid State Drive
disks and 12 ranks of 15k RPM IBM Power 550 disks and 12 ranks of 15k RPM
Fibre Channel disks with 8 IBM POWER6+ processor Fibre Channel disks IBM Power 550
cores and 256 GB of memory with 6 IBM POWER6+ processor
cores and 160 GB of memory
550
System Storage System Storage
550
SAP ERP 6.0 Production
1 core, 30 GB memory
1 2
ISIS Production IBM System Storage DS4700 1 2
ISIS Production SAP NetWeaver BW
2461 GB With Fibre Channel disks SAP ERP 6.0 Test 2461 GB Production
System Storage DS 4700
0.3 cores, 20 GB memory 3 cores, 144 GB memory
SAP NetWeaver BW Test
4G B/s 2G B/s
0.8 cores 40 GB memory
SAP ERP 6.0 Production SAP ERP 6.0 Production
2109 GB ISIS Production SAN fabric 2109 GB
SAP ERP 6.0 Test 3.0 cores, 76 GB memory
1430 GB
ISIS Development
SAP NetWeaver BW SAP NetWeaver BW Test 0.2 cores, 20 GB memory SAP NetWeaver BW
Production 1400 GB Production SAP ERP 6.0 Backup
1898 GB ISIS Test 1898 GB No permanent resources
ISIS Test 0.4 cores, 20 GB memory allocated
950 GB
SAP NetWeaver BW ISIS Backup
SAP NetWeaver BW ISIS Development Backup - No permanent SAP NetWeaver BW No permanent resources
Production - 770 GB 950 GB resources allocated Production - 770 GB allocated
Figure 2: Final server and storage landscape

8. Storage architecture
INTERSPORT Austria upgraded its storage architecture to and ISIS production LPARs, as well as two ranks of Solid State
eliminate I/O bottlenecks that were affecting SAP NetWeaver BW Drives (SSDs) for SAP NetWeaver BW.
performance. To increase throughput, the company considered
expanding its existing IBM System Storage DS8100 disk The company can utilize up to 98 percent of the available
systems with a further eight Fibre Channel disk ranks – but this capacity of the SSDs, and provide far higher performance in
would have required the introduction of a bulky expansion unit, terms of throughput and response times in the SAP NetWeaver
occupying valuable rack-space and increasing power and BW environment (see Figures 3 and 4). As a result, INTERSPORT
cooling requirements. Austria only needs two ranks of SSDs to provide the same level
of performance as eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks.
Moreover, the IT team calculated that to achieve the required
level of performance from the Fibre Channel ranks, it would not For non-production storage (SAP development and test
be possible to utilize more than 60 percent of the available disk systems), the company uses an IBM System Storage DS4700
capacity. As a result, 40 percent of the new disks would remain disk system located at the primary data center, which provides a
unused, reducing the value of the investment. lower-cost storage tier for systems that do not require the same
level of I/O performance as the production environments. The
Instead, the company worked with IBM and Base-IT to migrate to DS4700 is connected to the Power 550 servers using IBM Virtual
two new DS8700 systems. Each of these storage systems I/O Server (VIOS).
contains 12 ranks of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks for SAP ERP
I/O throughput DS8100 with 15k RPM Fibre DS8700 with a mixture of 15k Performance improvement (%)
Channel disks RPM Fibre Channel disks and
SSDs
Average throughput (I/O per 3.0 7.0 133
second)
Peak throughput (I/O per 7.0 13.0 80
second)
Figure 3: Improvements in I/O throughput with the new storage infrastructure
Response times DS8100 with 15k RPM Fibre DS8700 with a mixture of 15k Performance improvement (%)
Channel disks RPM Fibre Channel disks and
SSDs
Average response time 3.0 0.5 to 1.0 66 to 85
(ms per I/O)
Peak response time 14.0 7.5 47
(ms per I/O)
Figure 4: Improvements in response times with the new storage infrastructure
8

9. Project achievements Faster recovery
By dividing the production workload for the SAP and ISIS
Performance improvements applications between the two IBM Power 550 servers,
The upgrade to IBM POWER6+ processor-based servers and INTERSPORT Austria has been able to significantly enhance its
IBM DS8700 disk systems with SSDs has resolved disaster recovery capability.
INTERSPORT Austria’s existing SAP NetWeaver BW
performance issues, while also providing sufficient capacity to With the previous solution, it would have taken more than two
support future growth in data volumes and user numbers. days to re-configure the secondary server and recover all
systems. Moreover, since the secondary server was less
As a result, the average time taken to load data into SAP powerful than the primary server, the performance of the SAP
NetWeaver BW has been reduced from 120 minutes to just 30 and ISIS applications would have been significantly degraded.
minutes – a 75 percent improvement. The time taken to build
aggregates has been reduced by approximately 75 percent, and With the new solution, a full recovery is possible within two hours,
the time taken to generate reports has been improved by since both servers have identical specifications and are already
approximately 66 percent. configured to handle production workload.
Data compression speed in the DB2 environment also saw Energy efficiency and environmental benefits
significant improvements. According to the SAP guidelines, the Choosing the more compact SSD-based storage solution has
compression of 110 million datasets should take approximately enabled INTERSPORT Austria to avoid purchasing a DS8000
96 hours, but INTERSPORT Austria achieved it within 17 hours – expansion unit and eight additional Fibre Channel disk ranks,
83 percent faster than expected. saving rack-space in the company’s data center.
User satisfaction The combination of the SSD solution with the new Power 550
As a result of the performance improvement, the company’s 350 servers has also reduced power and cooling requirements. The
SAP users are able to access business intelligence data much POWER6+ processors are considerably more energy-efficient
more rapidly, even at times of peak load. This helps to improve than the older POWER5 processors, and two ranks of SSDs
their productivity, and also encourages them to use the SAP consume much less electricity than eight ranks of Fibre Channel
NetWeaver BW system as part of their daily routine. disks. Overall, INTERSPORT Austria reports that the new
solution has significantly reduced its electricity costs.
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.
9

10. 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.
10

11. “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
INTERSPORT Austria GmbH
“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
INTERSPORT Austria GmbH

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