Learn about Apple Vacations taking a holiday from complexity with IBM XIV and SAP ERP. Consolidating, cutting operational costs by up to 80 percent, and improving SAP storage performance. For more information, visit http://ibm.co/PNJ7kr.
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Apple Vacations takes a holiday from complexity with IBM XIV and SAP ERP
1. IBM Systems and Technology
Case Study
Travel and Transportation
Apple Vacations takes a
holiday from complexity
with IBM XIV and SAP ERP
Consolidating, cutting operational costs by up to
80 percent, and improving SAP storage performance
Overview
The need
Apple Vacations, reaching the capacity
and performance limits of its existing
storage infrastructure, was seeking
simple and cost-effective ways to
flexibly handle long-term growth.
The solution
Deployed a virtualized multiworkload
storage environment based on
IBM XIV Storage System for all
applications, including SAP ERP,
running on IBM Power Systems™
and IBM System x servers.
The benefit
Reduced administrative workload by
80 percent; reduced data management
and storage costs by more than 80 per-
cent; increased performance while cut-
ting the footprint and energy costs in half.
Apple Vacations specializes in vacations to Cancun, Punta Cana, the
Bahamas, Costa Rica, Panama, Hawaii, and other destinations in the
Caribbean and Mexico. Founded in 1969 and an innovator from the start,
it was one of the first holiday companies to bring all-inclusive vacations to
the U.S. market, and one of the first to offer three- and four-night vaca-
tions to meet consumer demand for shorter, more frequent breaks.
Most Apple Vacations customers still book their vacations through a
travel agent, but the company was experiencing a dramatic rise in transac-
tions on its consumer website. This, and the fact that the company’s web
channel also provides a booking service for its travel agents, was putting
significant strain on its storage infrastructure.
John Venezia, Chief Information Officer, explains, “Apple Vacations
wants to be the go-to company for vacations in the Caribbean, which
means increasing our share of the market, and making our vacations more
attractive and easier to book. Our largest storage array had reached the
limits of its capacity and performance. By adopting the IBM XIV Storage
System as our strategic platform for all data storage, we dramatically
improved performance and gained practically unlimited headroom for
growth. We also cut administration and storage costs by more than
80 percent, and reduced the physical footprint and energy costs for data
storage by 50 percent.”
Key objectives met
Apple Vacations deployed the IBM XIV Storage System to consolidate its
multiworkload landscape on a single storage solution. The diverse appli-
cations using the XIV system include SAP ERP software for core business
management, and a range of travel-specific applications alongside
2. 2
Case Study
Travel and Transportation
IBM Systems and Technology
“The migration to XIV
was incredibly easy.
If a new volume was
needed, we set it up on
the XIV, pressed ‘refresh’
and it was immediately
available to the system”,
—John Venezia, Chief Information Officer,
Apple Vacations
Lotus® Notes®, Lotus Domino® and Oracle database solutions. The
company uses IBM Power Systems servers running IBM AIX® for the
SAP applications, including SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse, and
IBM System x® and other vendor servers running Microsoft Windows
Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
IBM DB2® provides reliable, high-performance information manage-
ment for the SAP landscape.
Apple Vacations chose IBM WebSphere products to build its web experi-
ence. The solution includes WebSphere Application Server to support
applications and processing, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise for system
automation and monitoring, and WebSphere eXtreme Scale for sheer
performance and scalability.
Apple Vacations has used SAP ERP software to run its core business
processes since 1998, during which time its SAP landscape has grown by
a factor of six in terms of data and transaction workload. The current
SAP solution generates around 5 TB of production data, including fast
changing information on aircraft and hotel bookings that must also be
shared at high speed with external partners such as airlines, hotel chains
and car rental firms.
John Venezia, Chief Information Officer, comments, “XIV is an ideal
platform for our mission-critical SAP ERP landscape, meeting all our key
objectives around performance, availability, low costs of operation, ease of
management, and long-term scalability. Its proven ability to work seam-
lessly across multiple operating systems was also an important decision
factor.”
He adds, “SAP software gives us the ability to automate the financial
and logistics processing at the heart of our business. By running the
SAP components as virtual servers on IBM AIX with IBM PowerVM®
virtualization, we have an extremely compact, efficient and flexible plat-
form for business management. The PowerVM virtualization is perfectly
complemented by the virtualized storage on the XIV.”
Sirius Computer Services, an IBM Business Partner, deployed the
XIV solution, and helped Apple Vacations migrate existing data to the
new XIV system in little more than a week. “The migration to XIV was
incredibly easy using the built-in tool,” says Venezia. “If a new volume
was needed, we set it up on the XIV system, pressed ‘refresh’, and it was
immediately available to the connected servers.”
3. 3
Case Study
Travel and Transportation
IBM Systems and Technology
IBM solution components
Hardware
●●
IBM XIV® Storage System
●●
IBM Power® 770
Software
●●
IBM AIX®
●●
IBM DB2® 9.0
●●
IBM PowerVM™
●●
IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager
●●
IBM WebSphere®
IBM Business Partner
●●
Sirius Computer Services
“The XIV Storage
System met all of our
key objectives around
performance, lower
costs of operation, ease
of management, and
long-term scalability.”
—John Venezia, Chief Information Officer,
Apple Vacations
IT Environment
Operating systems
●
●
Microsoft Windows Server
●
●
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
●
●
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Applications
●
●
mySAP Business Suite 2005
●
●
Microsoft Exchange Server
Shrinking costs, growing capacity
The XIV system has enabled Apple Vacations to replace a complex net-
work of disparate SAN devices with a single, self-managing enterprise
storage solution.
Says Venezia, “With the XIV storage system, everything is virtualized,
and we no longer need to know or care where the data is actually stored
on the array. We can simply manage the storage volumes, and the XIV
system ensures both that access performance is optimized and that we are
protected against data loss without requiring us to manage RAID levels.
Implementing the XIV Storage System has enabled us to cut our data
management workload by at least 80 percent: from 20 hours a week to
less than four.”
Bringing innovation to market faster
For its operating system and application upgrades, Apple Vacations uses
the XIV snapshot functionality to create a near-instant copy of the system
before applying the changes. “The XIV snapshots are phenomenal—
they’ve transformed our quality assurance processes,” says Venezia. “We
can create a new quality assurance environment in just a few moments,
ready for testing, which helps us bring new products and services to mar-
ket more rapidly and at lower cost.”
Since implementing XIV storage, Apple Vacations has experienced con-
tinuous uptime, even when linking new servers to the system or creating
large new volumes. The massively parallelized XIV grid architecture
offers consistent high performance at all times, even during peak business
hours when multiple servers are reading and writing large amounts of
data.
“We now rely entirely on XIV storage,” says John Venezia. “The XIV
system really simplifies the management overhead, with a powerful user
interface that we can use to easily reassign, increase or decrease volumes
on the fly. In combination with IBM PowerVM virtualization on our
Power Systems servers, this gives us the flexibility we need to provide
optimal support for our business-critical SAP ERP landscape.”
For more information
To learn more about the IBM XIV Storage System, please contact your
IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following
website: ibm.com/storage/disk/xiv/