With retail turnover of €8.37 billion and more than 4,900 associated retailers in 32 countries, INTERSPORT Group has the worldwide leading position in the sporting goods retail market. Based in Austria, INTERSPORT International Corporation (IIC) is the purchasing and management holding company for the INTERSPORT Group. INTERSPORT Deutschland eG is the German cooperative for more than 1,500 sport outfitters in Germany.

1. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail
Smarter Computing
INTERSPORT improves
fitness and business
flexibility
With super-fit computing from IBM
With retail turnover of €8.37 billion and more than 4,900 associated
Overview retailers in 32 countries, INTERSPORT Group has the worldwide
leading position in the sporting goods retail market. Based in Austria,
The need INTERSPORT International Corporation (IIC) is the purchasing
As business volumes increased, response
times for queries run on INTERSPORT’s
and management holding company for the INTERSPORT Group.
SAP® NetWeaver® Business Warehouse INTERSPORT Deutschland eG is the German cooperative for more
started to lengthen. For outfitters with than 1,500 sport outfitters in Germany.
online access to stock and delivery
information, the situation was impacting
their sales capacity. Managing business growth
IIC relied on the insight generated from its business intelligence
The solution
Working with IBM and Base-IT, the
® systems, created by analyzing transaction data captured from SAP
INTERSPORT Austria IT team created and applications using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. As business
deployed a new optimized technology volumes increased, system response started to grow worse, to the
architecture designed to support the
point where daily sales reports were delayed or unobtainable. For
business for the long term, based on full
virtualization of both servers and storage, those outfitters with online access to stock and delivery information,
and using solid state drives for the most the situation was impacting their sales capacity, and restricting
valuable high-priority data storage tasks. opportunities and potential profits.
The benefit
The average time taken to load data into The problem was particularly severe at the start of the working day,
SAP NetWeaver BW has been reduced when up to 350 users log on simultaneously. INTERSPORT realized
from 120 to 30 minutes – a 75 percent
that these performance issues were likely to become even more severe.
improvement. Time taken to build
aggregates has been reduced by 75 To create a foundation for international expansion and improve multi-
percent, and to generate reports by 66 language support, the company was planning to upgrade to SAP ERP
percent. The solid state drives consume
6.0 with Unicode support. This upgrade was likely to increase data
around 90 percent less electricity than
spinning disks, and save 75 percent in volumes and put even greater load on the company’s infrastructure.
rack space.
Leveraging virtualization technology
Working with IBM and Base-IT, the INTERSPORT Austria IT team
designed and deployed a new server architecture designed to support
the business for the long term, 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.
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 using
IBM PowerVM technology.

2. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail
Smarter Computing
By dividing the production workload for the SAP and ISIS applications
Designed for Data between the two IBM Power 550 servers, INTERSPORT Austria has
• INTERSPORT extracts, analyzes and been able to significantly enhance its disaster recovery capability.
responds to information derived from
huge quantities of transaction data
to ensure that it has the right stock in
With the previous solution, it would have taken more than two days to
the right store at the right time to meet re-configure the secondary server and recover all systems, and since the
predicted consumer demands. secondary server was less powerful than the primary server, application
Tuned to the Task performance would have been significantly degraded.
• With IBM Power Systems and IBM
Storage Systems, INTERSPORT has INTERSPORT Austria upgraded its storage architecture to eliminate
consolidated and virtualized its IT I/O bottlenecks that were affecting SAP NetWeaver Business
infrastructure. IBM DB2 compression
features allow INTERSPORT to Warehouse (BW) performance. To increase throughput, the company
keep critical business data on high- considered expanding its existing IBM System Storage DS8100 disk
performance solid state drives, moving systems with a further eight Fibre Channel disk ranks – but this would
less-needed data to less expensive
have required the introduction of an expansion unit, occupying valuable
traditional spinning disks.
rack-space and increasing power and cooling requirements.
Managed in the Cloud
• Virtualization and integrated service The IT team calculated that to achieve the required level of
management capabilities enable
INTERSPORT to create new business performance from the Fibre Channel ranks, it would not be possible to
services rapidly and cost-effectively utilize more than 60 percent of the available disk capacity. As a result,
without the need for further hardware 40 percent of the new disks would remain unused, reducing the value of
investments.
the investment. IIC worked with IBM and Base-IT to migrate to two
Driving Innovation new DS8700 systems. Each of these storage systems contains 12 ranks
• This is the first step in the longer-term of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks for SAP ERP and ISIS production
strategy of removing dependency on
physical assets and towards a cloud-like
LPARs, as well as two ranks of Solid State Drives (SSDs) for SAP
infrastructure, where technology is almost NetWeaver BW.
invisible to business management.
Optimizing resource utilization
Consolidating the SAP application landscape to IBM POWER6+
processor-based servers, DB2 and IBM DS8700 disk systems with SSDs
has resolved INTERSPORT Austria’s performance issues, while also
providing sufficient capacity to support the explosive growth in data
volumes and analysis of SAP NetWeaver BW data.
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. As a
result, INTERSPORT Austria only needs two bays of SSDs to provide
the same level of performance as eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks.
Rapid recovery from disaster
Should disaster strike one of the data centers, by sharing workload
between two identical Power servers, full recovery is possible within
two hours. Each server is already configured and has sufficient capacity
to handle production workload. This is the first step in the longer-
term strategy of removing dependency on physical assets and towards
a cloud-like infrastructure, where technology is almost invisible to
business management.

3. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail
Smarter Computing
Enjoying the benefits
The average time taken to load data into SAP NetWeaver BW has been
Solution Components
reduced from 120 minutes to 30 minutes – a 75 percent improvement.
Software The time taken to build aggregates has been reduced by approximately
• IBM® i
75 percent, and the time taken to generate reports has been improved
• IBM DB2® for i
• IBM PowerVM® by approximately 66 percent.
• SAP® ERP
• SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse The company’s 350 SAP users are able to access business intelligence
Servers data much more rapidly, even at times of peak load. This helps to
• IBM Power® 550 improve their productivity, and also encourages them to use the SAP
• IBM System Storage® DS8700 NetWeaver BW system as part of their daily routine.
• IBM System Storage DS4700
IBM Business Partner DB2 data compression technology has delivered significant
• IBM Business Partner Base-IT. performance improvements, and the compression of 110 million
datasets that was expected to take 96 hours took less than 17 hours – 83
percent faster than expected, releasing productive time to the business.
“The new IBM Choosing the more compact SSD-based storage solution has enabled
infrastructure will INTERSPORT Austria to avoid purchasing a DS8000 expansion unit
provide sufficient and eight additional Fibre Channel disk ranks, saving rack-space in
the company’s data center. Data is contained within a single physical
capacity to support all infrastructure, controlled and managed by DB2, simplifying the IT
our current projects, landscape and improving ease of management.
and we are confident
The combination of the SSD solution with the new Power 550 servers
that the combination of has also reduced energy and cooling requirements. The POWER6+
IBM Power servers and processors are highly energy-efficient, and two ranks of SSDs consume
DS8700 SSD storage around 90 percent less electricity than eight ranks of Fibre Channel
disks, directly reducing energy costs and saving 75 percent in rack
will be flexible and space.
scalable enough to meet
our future needs as well.” By equipping more employees with the latest business information,
INTERSPORT Austria improves their ability to make rapid and
— Johann Reisinger, CIO, INTERSPORT Austria
well-informed business decisions, which should ultimately result in
GmbH improved efficiency and increased sales. The company has experienced
significant sales growth since the solution went live, supported by rapid
business analysis of data enabled by the new IT landscape.
For more information
To learn more about smarter computing from IBM and how we can
help you integrate, automate, protect and transform your IT, contact
your IBM sales representative or IBM business partner, or visit:
ibm.com/smartercomputing

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Produced in Austria
July 2011
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