"Enterprise applications support the daily operations of a business, which means that
they are vital to its ability to generate revenue and profit growth — and to account for
it. Whether those applications support a supply chain, general accounting, personnel
management, or customer relationship management, they must be available to end
users and must be accessible enough to create ""snapshots"" of the business on a
daily, hourly, or, in some cases, near-real-time basis."
Consolidating sap applications for improved operational costs looking at sap and linux running on ibm power systems
1. WHITE P APER
Consolidating SAP Applications for Improved Operational
Costs: Looking at S AP and Linux Running on IBM Pow er
Systems
Sponsored by: IBM
Randy Perry Jean S. Bozman
Aimee Bartlett Scott Guinn
December 2010
www.idc.com
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Enterprise applications support the daily operations of a business, which means that
they are vital to its ability to generate revenue and profit growth — and to account for
F.508.935.4015
it. Whether those applications support a supply chain, general accounting, personnel
management, or customer relationship management, they must be available to end
users and must be accessible enough to create "snapshots" of the business on a
daily, hourly, or, in some cases, near-real-time basis.
P.508.872.8200
IT customers have a choice of platforms on which to deploy these applications;
indeed, the applications may run on a mix of platforms throughout a datacenter or
across an organization. For organizations that rely on data to make business
decisions, the platform choices must include consideration of the operational
requirements and what it will take to deliver on the expected, and agreed-upon, levels
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of service for those applications.
IDC studied a group of enterprises that had done just that: They had deployed SAP
applications on IBM Power Systems servers running Linux server operating
environments and had been working with those systems for several years. The study
was conducted with the aim of finding out the results of initial investments in those
platforms and how those investments had impacted operational costs over time. Key
findings from the study include:
Annual benefits totaled $25,000 per 100 users. For a large organization with
10,000 users, this would amount to more than $2 million in benefits.
Hardware savings amounted to $11,500 per 100 users or more than $1.1 million
per 10,000 users.
The utilization rate for servers more than doubled, from 34% to 70%.
Over a three-year period, companies saw discounted benefits of $59,967 per 100
users and an average investment of $13,625 per 100 users, resulting in a return
on investment (ROI) of 340% and a payback period of 6.7 months.
The results from the IDC study would be expected to be amplified if the study
were repeated with POWER7 based systems because of the enhancements in
POWER design that improve efficiency compared with POWER6 based systems.