Customer Solution Case study
/ / Choose Windows Server to operate 7 TB of
SAP ERP and BW systems expanded by M&A
Overview
Country: Seoul/Korea
Industry: Retail
Customer Profile
E.Land Group includes fashion, distribution and other business area like food, hotel, interior, construction, furniture and e-business. It posted sales of 1700 billion won in fiscal 2005 and has regional offices in America, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and China.
Business Situation
In the mid 2000s, the distribution of E.Land Group extended its systems by acquiring Newcore, Haitai Stores and Carrefour Korea. E.Land Group integrated their businesses based on UNIX and Oracle into its Windows and SQL Server based SAP ERP and BW infrastructure. / “There was an increasing need for comparison of Windows to UNIX in performance and scalability. We could not find a reference in the country. However, the largest chicken producing, processing and distributing company in America, Pilgrim’s Pride's case provided a proof that there would be no problem in performance issue due to increased DB size in the combination of SAP ERP and Windows and SQL Server."
Hun Shin / Team Manager of ElandSystems Basis team
E.Land Group is active in fashion, distribution and other business division including construction, e-business, etc. E.Land Group has 95 stores nationwide in distribution area, as of 2006: 9 2001OUTLETs, 15 NEWCORE OUTLETs, 32 KIM’s CLUBs, 39 HOMEVERs (formerly Carrefour Korea).The Distribution division of E.Land Group performed three M&A in the mid 2000s and has faced the challenge of integrating IT infrastructures. In particular, as they acquired Carrefour Korea, they needed to expand the infrastructure to operate 7 TB of SAP ERP, which is 3-4 times lager than the existing capacity. To solve this problem, the Distribution division of E.Land Group has innovated again using Windows Server and SQL Server 2005.
Situation
The backbone system based on ERP in the Distribution division of E.Land Group dates back to the early 2000s. 2001OUTLET was the first to deploy ERP system in the division. Since then, the SAP ERP system in 2001OUTLET has increasingly expanded its area as the core backbone system in the Distribution division. “SAP ERP system in 2001OUTLET has evolved to the cornerstone of information initiatives in the Distribution division of E.Land Group,” said Gilbert, Han SM Team DBA of ElandSystems dedicated to operate and manage IT infrastructure and services in E.Land Group.
There was the first change, when the system migration emerged as the challenge due to acquisition of Newcore department store (now, NEWCORE OUTLET) in 2004. In the early 2000s, they must have responded to the demand for system extension by combining 64 bit environment with the existing 32 bit infrastructure to bring Newcore businesses operated in the combination of IBM UNIX and Oracle DB to SAP ERP and BW deployed using Windows Server and SQL Server. To do this, ElandSystems (formerly, e-business team of 2001OUTLET) introduced Unisys ES7000 430 server to migrate SAP ERP and BW systems into the 64 bit environment. And Windows Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000 were deployed in the centre of 64 bit environment.
In 2006, when it was decided to acquire Carrefour Korea (now, HOMEVER), there was another major change in ERP systems in the Distribution division. ElandSystems SM team estimated at that time that they would need 3-4 times larger system extension than 2001OUTLET and Newcore systems combined to accommodate the business of Carrefour Korea. This need for 3-4 times capacity extension was attributed to the nature of distribution business. Gilbert said, “As the number of sales offices is increased, the incremental data volume is significantly increased.”
“Carrefour Korea had 35 stores and Haitai Stores had 32 stores. Combining our systems with those of companies acquired between 2005 and 2006 is almost like having a larger part combined into a smaller part." As Carrefour Korea's computing systems were operated by German System integrator, Wincor Nixdorf, its primary systems were located in Europe. Haitai Stores operated Oracle on UNIX system. For SAP ERP and BW operation, 3-4 times larger processing power than that of existing infrastructure was required, which makes ElandSystems SM team face into the problem of platform selection. In operating over 7 TB ERP, the team compared the combination of Windows and SQL Server to the combination of UNIX and other DB.
“Our team has had expert base in operating Windows and SQL server, and SAP regarding distribution business," said Hun Shin, Team Manager of ElandSystems Basis team. “There was an increasing need for comparison of Windows to UNIX in performance and scalability.” Operating SAP ERP based on Windows platform have been around for a number of years and they feel very good about the scalability, stability and performance of Windows. However, to operate over 7 TB massive systems, they have to check it through the reference.
“We could not find a reference in the country," said Hun Shin. “However, the largest chicken producing, processing and distributing company in America, Pilgrim’s Pride's case provided a proof that there would be no problem in performance issue due to increased DB size in the combination of SAP ERP and Windows and SQL Server."
Solution
For ElandSystems, the case of Pilgrim’s Pride was the perfect reference. The company which is in distribution area has operated SAP ERP on Windows and SQL Server even earlier than E.Land Group and has had a environment more than 7 TB DB for ERP. Gilbert learned one fact through the case of Pilgrim’s Pride.
“Business people who visited us to refer to our case often asked if it is possible to operate large-scale system using SQL Server, when they are operating the combination of Oracle and UNIX," said Gilbert. “ This means that consultants and engineers less experienced on SQL Server have such a prejudice based on what they have heard from others, not based on facts.” There is an anecdote with regard to performance. When Newcore had migrated its business operated on UNIX and Oracle into 32 bit Windows and SQL environment, the folks at Newcore saw significantly increased performance compared to that of existing environment.
In addition, ElandSystems SM team has gotten hands-on-experience several times with the performance and scalability that the combination of Windows and SQL Server provided. The team processed the combinations of UNIX and Oracle in four times of M&A and related system integrations occurred in the mid 2000s.
ElandSystems took steps to expand for integrating systems of Carrefour Korea and Haitai Stores in 2006. This project was divided into migrating the key data and services in the systems which Carrefour Korea and Haitai Stores had used and redesigning the enterprise-wide IT infrastructure.
First, the migration of systems in two companies was seamlessly processed. They used the existing UNIX and Oracle based systems for lookup of old data and integrated businesses of them into newly extended backbone systems such as SAP ERP and BW, not having to migrate entire systems. The best of IT integration initiative with regard to acquiring Carrefour Korea and Haitai Stores was the IT infrastructure redefining performed with the system integration. Introduction of new server and disk and deployment of the divided server operating environment of Disaster Recovery Center concept were key challenges in building IT infrastructure for operating 7 TB-scale SAP ERP and BW.
For introduction of new server and disk, they introduced 2 Unisys ES7000Ones, the latest 64 bit machines based on Intel Itanium II dual core depending on volume estimation by 2008 and the HDS NCS55 as a storage for these systems. Unisys ESS7000 and EMC disk introduced in 2004 were changed for DW server. Out of two ES7000Ones, one was deployed in primary centre located in Hostway Korea's IDC in Bundang and the other in backup centre located in office in Gasan-dong.
Both systems have 3 partitions allocated to SAP application server and a partition to DB for ERP. And 64 bit Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 have been used for operating SAP ERP. In addition, they have to respond the volume and performance issues in software domains to operate ERP. To do this, they established an operating guide insuring that the minimum possible old data should be accumulated in ERP system. To follow this guide, they operated ERP as light as possible by allowing old data to be directed to BW system using SAP Archive feature which can archive the data stored in SAP system itself.
Benefit
By choosing Windows and SQL Server once again for operating SAP ERP and BW, ElandSystems SM team expects to gain big results in performance, cost and management.
The dialog response time has been reduced from existing 1 second to 0.5 second in SAP ERP
“Through the new system opened in January, 2007 after integrating systems of Carrefour Korea and Haitai Stores, now we support 3 times more users compared to those when we introduced 64 bit system for the first time two years ago,” said Gilbert, Han. “On the other hand, the dialog response time of SAP ERP has been reduced from existing 1 second to 0.5 second."
Gilbert, Han is seeing that such a perceived performance difference is attributed in the synergy of the SQL Server 2005 and Intel Itanium II based machine.
Cost-effective transition from 32 bit to 64 bit
ElandSystems is active in driving cost-effective 64 bit transition strategy through the general purpose of Windows platforms and Intel architecture based machine. “All systems do not have to go to 64 bit,” said Gilbert, Han. “It's best to selectively move only businesses which its performance optimization is needed.” In fact, ElandSystems plans to migrate IT services for its Distribution division into 64 bit in 2007.
They migrate incrementally the systems such as SAP ERP, BW and CRM which have heavy load and need the system performance assurance into 64 bit environment.In addition, ElandSystems plans to migrate the systems, especially application servers, to 64 bit environment and have the compatibility with 32 bit and 64 bit by adopting Windows Server 200 3 R3 and x64 architecture based machines.
Streamline the management of enterprise-wide IT infrastructure
As the Distribution division of E.Land Group grows and has an incredible impact on the market, all its IT related services have been important. Ensuring the quality, stability and availability of all services becomes more critical requirement.
So ElandSystems SM team decides to leverage MOM 2005 server and plans to complete the project by February, 2007. “MOM server has been deployed, but it was not actively worked with,” said Gilbert, Han. “However, we have more than 200 servers and 20~30 SQL Server operating devices which will need to be intensively managed, which makes us redeploy the MOM due to the requirement of enterprise-wide server management."
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For more information about Microsoft SQL Server 2005
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.mspx