American Crystal Sugar implemented IBM XIV Storage System with 27 TB capacity, enabling older storage systems to move into backup and recovery roles. Upgraded to IBM Power 770 servers featuring IBM POWER7 processor technology running IBM AIX 6.1 and IBM PowerVM. Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.

1. we know
they know
American Crystal Sugar beats out costs with
SAP and IBM
American Crystal Sugar, based in
Overview Moorhead, MN, specializes in the
production of sugar from sugar
 The Challenge has been cut to minutes with beets. Formed as a co-operative, the
American Crystal Sugar competes the additional capacity and XIV company is owned by almost 2,800
in the US sugar market, where storage provisioning. IBM XIV offers shareholders, who raise approximately
marketing volumes are set by increased total storage capacity at 420,000 acres in the Red River Valley
regulation, leaving cost-efficiency a lower absolute cost and lower per- of Minnesota and North Dakota.
as a primary route to improved gigabyte cost than previous storage In 2010, American Crystal Sugar
margins and profits. With processor systems. IBM Power 770 server has purchased approximately 9.9 million
workload and data volumes higher processing capacity at lower tons of sugar beets, producing more
growing, American Crystal Sugar costs than the systems it replaced. than 27 million hundredweight of
wanted to cut IT operations Using IBM PowerVM, American sugar.
costs while improving business Crystal Sugar can fulfill requests
throughput. At a technical level, to provide new SAP application The US market for sugar is controlled
older systems were running to landscapes within a matter of days, by regulated producer marketing
the end of their support lifecycle, reducing administrative expenses. allocations. For American Crystal
and requests to provide new SAP Sugar, the consequence is that
instances could take several  Key Solution Components the only way to improve profits and
months to fulfill. Industry: Agriculture margins for its shareholders (beet
Applications: SAP® ERP, including producers themselves), is to increase
 The Solution finance, controlling, sales and productivity by reducing operational
Implemented IBM XIV Storage distribution, costing, materials costs through efficiencies and straight
System with 27 TB capacity, management, plant maintenance, dollar savings.
enabling older storage systems production planning and quality
to move into backup and recovery management components, with The agricultural cycle of sugar beets
roles. Upgraded to IBM Power 770 SAP BusinessObjects BI Package. starts with spring planting and ends
servers featuring IBM POWER7 Hardware: IBM ® Power Systems™ with fall harvest, when extraction
processor technology running IBM 770, IBM XIV® Storage System, IBM plants start to work their way through
AIX 6.1 and IBM PowerVM. System x3950 M2 the millions of tons, brought by truck
Software: IBM AIX® 6.1, IBM from thousands of farms. Using
 The Benefits PowerVM™, VMware vMotion refrigeration techniques allowed by
Increasing storage capacity that Services: IBM Premier Business
could previously take months Partner Evolving Solutions

2. “The XIV gives the cold winters to store the beets, complete extraction in the time
the crop is processed over course available even as the beet tonnage
American Crystal Sugar
of 9 months, with a short window for rises. SAP gives us the tools to
the ability to store all maintenance and administration become more cost-efficient, which
its critical business data before the cycle starts again. is essential in our marketplace.”
in one easily managed
location. Once again, Marty Erbes, Systems Manager at Shared services, shared challenges
American Crystal Sugar, explains American Crystal Sugar was
the disk cost per
the business pressures, “Recently, using a combination of IBM Power
gigabyte for the XIV is many American food companies Systems servers and IBM System
considerably lower than have switched from corn-derived Storage, running a wide range of
the previous systems, sweeteners to sugar beet-derived SAP ERP applications for 900 users,
delivering immediate sweeteners, fueling demand. With supported by Oracle databases.
larger crop volumes, the maintenance
savings.”
window is being squeezed as our The data center also hosts SAP
Marty Erbes, Systems Manager at American factories start earlier and finish later in applications for other sugar
Crystal Sugar the season. co-operatives, for the United Sugars
Marketing Corporation and Midwest
“At the data center, our aim is to Agir-Commodities who all benefit
provide the information services that from the shared services cost
help to keep the costs down – for model.
example, by using SAP solutions to
help keep operating at maximum Demand from both American Crystal
efficiency. For example, with the SAP Sugar and the hosted companies
plant maintenance application we were leading to continuous requests
are able to improve the scheduling of for more storage capacity. The
maintenance, monitor and manage storage hardware was expensive
costs, and ensure that we can to procure and slow to deploy, a
process typically absorbing months
to implement.
As American Crystal Sugar moved
to the latest version of SAP software
and extended its own functionality,
it became clear that demand for
storage would continue to rise, and
the associated costs of procurement
and management would impact the
business.
“Having to add storage drawers to
our existing systems really slowed
us down,” says Marty Erbes.
“From start to finish, it could easily
take three months to add storage
capacity, allowing for procurement,
configuration and deployment.”

3. At the same time, United Sugars Technical Team, maintaining a “The SAP applications,
Corporation was planning to make single physical machine for the SAP
such as plant
greater use of SAP NetWeaver landscapes.
Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver
maintenance, are
BW) and SAP NetWeaver Portal for More storage, reduced costs critical to our success,
marketing purposes, which had an As part of its ongoing cost- and the combination
immediate impact on both processor performance review, American of the IBM Power 770
capacity and storage needs. The Crystal Sugar reconsidered its
server and IBM XIV
existing servers did not have the storage strategy in the light of new
processing capacity to support the technologies. The company chose
storage delivers high-
simultaneous workloads. to implement an IBM XIV Storage efficiency, low-cost
System to replace its mix of storage operations, exactly in
More power, reduced costs servers and direct attached disk line with American
The first step was to ensure that systems. The XIV offers 27 TB of
Crystal Sugar’s business
the total processing capacity was storage, expandable to a total of 79
increased. American Crystal Sugar TB. At present, the SAP landscape is
objectives.”
replaced its previous system, which approximately 12 TB, with another 10
Marty Erbes, Systems Manager at American
contained 16 processors and 192 GB TB for other applications and data. Crystal Sugar
memory, and implemented an IBM
Power 770 server featuring 32 active “The XIV gives American Crystal
POWER7 processors and 512 GB Sugar the ability to store all its critical
memory. business data in one easily managed
location. Once again, the disk cost per
“The Power 770 server, though it is gigabyte for the XIV is considerably
enormously more powerful and has lower than the previous systems,
more memory, actually cost less than delivering immediate savings,” says
the previous server,” says Marty Erbes. Marty Erbes.
“This is a perfect example of how we
can take advantage of new technology The company is consolidating all its
to reduce our costs.” data to the XIV, taking advantage of
the lower operational costs and the
American Crystal Sugar uses IBM ease of management. Existing storage
PowerVM to divide the Power 770 systems are planned to be moved
server into separate logical partitions to a secondary data center to act as TECHNICAL LANDSCAPE
(LPARs). The company runs its own backup devices for the production Servers: IBM Power Systems 770, IBM
SAP applications in separate LPARs site. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager XIV Storage System, IBM System
for production, test, development and handles backup, archive and restore x3950 M2
non-SAP applications, and a further processes for POWER and Intel Software: IBM AIX, IBM PowerVM,
LPAR for Tivoli Storage Manager. systems. VMware vMotion, SAP ERP, including
finance, controlling, sales and
PowerVM allows American Crystal In addition to its SAP applications, distribution, costing, materials
Sugar to define the total processing American Crystal Sugar runs Microsoft management, plant maintenance,
capacity for each LPAR, sharing operating systems and applications production planning and quality
CPUs, bandwidth, memory and such as SAP Business Objects in management components, with SAP
storage. This offers considerable VMware virtual machines on IBM Business Objects BI Package
cost saving, as multiple organizations System x3950 M2 Intel processor- Users: 900 users across all systems
are supported by just one SAP IT based systems. The company is

4. migrating the systems and data from “The XIV appealed to
older SAN systems to the XIV, using
us because it is so easy
VMware vMotion. Some legacy and
to manage. We are
in-house applications designed for the
agricultural sector are also due to be able to assign, create
migrated to the XIV, saving costs on and delete volumes
proprietary disk storage. quickly and easily, and
IBM Deutschland GmbH
it takes so little time D-70548 Stuttgart
“In the past, providing additional ibm.com/solutions/sap
to understand the user
storage capacity could take up to IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks
three months, from the start of the interface that we were of International Business Machines Corporation,
registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. A
procurement process to deployment. in production within a current list of other IBM trademarks is available
on the Web at “Copyright and trademark
With XIV, we have cut this to one week,” couple of days.” information” at http://www.ibm.com/legal/
says Marty Erbes. “Our business copytrade.shtml
strategy is to be a low-cost producer, Marty Erbes, Systems Manager at American Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Xeon and the Intel Xeon
Crystal Sugar logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of
and savings on IT operations and
Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United
time to delivery are a major benefit for States and other countries. UNIX is a registered
trademark of The Open Group in the United
American Crystal Sugar.”
States and other countries. Linux is a trademark
of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other
countries, or both. Microsoft, Windows, Windows
Meeting business objectives “The SAP applications, such as
NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of
American Crystal Sugar employs plant maintenance, are critical to our Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other
countries, or both.
Erbes, Kevin Miller, Senior Technical success, and the combination of the
Other company, product or service names may
Analyst, Dale Anderson, Senior IBM Power 770 server and IBM XIV
be trademarks, or service marks of others.
SAP Technical Analyst who share storage delivers high-efficiency, low-
This case study illustrates how one IBM
responsibilities for SAP Basis, cost operations, exactly in line with customer uses IBM and/or IBM Business Partner
technologies/services. Many factors have
Oracle database administration, AIX American Crystal Sugar’s business
contributed to the results and benefits
administration, procurement and data objectives.” described. IBM does not guarantee comparable
results. All information contained herein was
storage.
provided by the featured customer and/or IBM
Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its
accuracy. All customer examples cited represent
American Crystal Sugar relies on
how some customers have used IBM products
Evolving Solutions in Hamel Minnesota and the results they may have achieved. Actual
environmental costs and performance
as their premier IBM Business Partner
characteristics will vary depending on individual
solution. customer configurations and conditions.
This publication is for general guidance only.
Photographs may show design models.
“The XIV appealed to us because it
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2010. All rights reserved.
is so easy to manage,” says Marty
Erbes. “We are able to assign, create
and delete volumes quickly and easily,
and it takes so little time to understand
the user interface that we were in
production within a couple of days.
© Copyright 2010 SAP AG
SAP AG
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SAP, the SAP logo, SAP and all other SAP
products and services mentioned herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in
Germany and several other countries.
SPC03304-WWEN-00 (December 2010)