IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator

Executive summary

The goal - Extend your business insight

Growing amounts of data in every business area. More users needing access to this data. Your business environment requires fast and targeted information insight delivered to all levels of management within the enterprise. IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator greatly extends the reach of your existing SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse environment with out-of-the-box speed and flexibility.

The advantage - Building on a foundation for reporting and analytics

Timely access to relevant information has always been critical to business success. With new data sources and increased access, managing, processing and making sense of huge data volumes is even more important. SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) leads the way in providing a complete picture of your business from diverse data sources.

As a component of the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP NetWeaver BW combines powerful business warehouse infrastructure and data warehousing functionality, plus a comprehensive set of tools, planning and simulation capabilities. The new SAP BW accelerator extends the reach of traditional SAP NetWeaver BW environments to near real-time by improving the speed of query processing—up to 200 times.

The benefits - Near real-time analytics for better and faster business decisions

Giving people access to management information enables them to make better day-to-day tactical and strategic business decisions and maximizes the efficiency of business processes. The IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator is designed to extend the traditional SAP NetWeaver BW solution by delivering:

  • Query processing up to 200 times faster than traditional approaches.
  • Reduced administration costs.
  • Greater flexibility in the types and depths of queries.
  • Improved user creativity in analyzing business problems.
  • Scalable architecture that grows with increasing requirements over time.
  • Ability to perform flexible, event-driven, virtual real-time analysis.
  • New demand-responsive usage paradigms that safely replace inflexible reporting regimes.

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Business view

The goal - Focus on business processes, not infrastructure

Timely access to relevant information has always been critical to business success. You want to base your decisions on the full range of information available, but your business has amassed huge amounts of data. As the volume of available information grows and analytical tools become more sophisticated, the task of maintaining real-time performance becomes more challenging. The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator can address the challenges.

The advantage - An open, integrated portfolio of products and services

For 40 years, IBM and SAP have helped enterprises like yours synchronize their business and technology strategies, streamline their company's processes, and design, construct and operate a cohesive business framework.

  • IBM and SAP solutions address virtually every area and every stage of business development—from business warehouse and enterprise resource planning to supply chain management, human resources and financials.
  • Worldwide product support centers help assure high business application availability.
  • IBM and SAP share more than 10,000 joint customers overall, combining our joint capabilities in many successful implementations, including at IBM, where 40,000+ IBM employees use SAP applications.
The benefits - Unprecedented flexibility for queries and report requests

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) paints a complete picture of your business, integrating data from across the enterprise and beyond, and then transforming it into practical, timely business information. Adding the IBM Systems solution for SAP BW Accelerator turbo-charges your business warehouse computing environment. Our solution can help:

  • Greatly speed user queries, while providing full access to historical data.
  • Provide greater flexibility in the types and depths of user queries, encouraging creativity in analyzing business problems.
  • Support an increase in users with a stable, improved query response.
  • Support a growing number of business warehouse applications such as composite applications.
  • Leverage a scalable architecture that grows as requirements increase over time.
  • Enable users to perform flexible, event-driven, virtual real-time analysis, so that they can answer any queries they like and generate reports in seconds.
  • Safely replace inflexible reporting regimes with new demand-responsive usage paradigms.
The approach - Bayer MaterialScience speeds business warehouse

Bayer MaterialScience (BMS) needed a solution that could cope with the rapid growth in data volume generated within its SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (BW) data warehouse.

If it could collate data and produce meaningful information more rapidly, the company would be well positioned to respond to a fast-changing marketplace. Bayer implemented a high-performance information analysis system solution, based on SAP NetWeaver with BW accelerator on IBM BladeCenter® technology.

The solution enables advanced dashboarding and analytics, which take data from the underlying applications and provide reporting on all aspects of business performance, including production, sales and supply chain operations. The benefits include remarkably faster business query results, meaning Bayer can answer ad hoc and "what-if?" questions more quickly, producing meaningful information that helps the company to innovate and stay ahead of its competitors.

The financial advantage - See faster response times to query environments

Particularly for large organizations managing high volumes of data, the ability to extend and maximize existing IT investments can translate to millions of dollars in annual savings in hardware and other database-related costs. In addition, improved productivity and process agility can translate to millions of dollars in annual revenue growth. The IBM Systems solution for BW accelerator from SAP is designed to:

  • Speed query processing up to two hundred times faster than traditional approaches.
  • Maximize performance and scalability while lowering operating costs.
  • Reduce administration overhead for data maintenance and hardware support by automating configuration, operation, maintenance and updates, diagnostic and repair tasks.
  • Enhance the productivity of increasingly scarce skilled IT labor resources so they can be assigned to higher value projects.

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Technical details

The issues - Crunch through terabytes of data in seconds

Increasing data volumes. Growing numbers of end users. Long load times. Shorter decision cycles requiring more flexibility. Increasing refresh rates for data warehouses. It's not enough to deliver information faster to decision makers. You need a way to support rapid prototyping and more flexible ad hoc queries. The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator can help you analyze large amounts of critical information up to 200-times faster than alternative tools.

The benchmark - Quantum leap performance

Why IBM with SAP?

  • IBM technology is the chosen development platform at SAP.
  • IBM has the leading scalable solution for SAP Netweaver BW Accelerator.
  • We work together to help ensure that the business warehouse accelerator runs with the desired speed and stability, and customers simply enjoy the benefits.

Why BW accelerator with IBM BladeCenter® and IBM System x3850 X5?

  • Boosts business warehouse query performance up to 200 times—response times for some customers have gone down from 700 to 2.5 seconds.
  • Easy to install, run and manage with an "Turn-Key solution" approach of preconfigured, pre-installed and preloaded IBM BladeCenter and storage technology or a System x3850 X5 server.
  • Highly Scalable architecture supporting small footprints, little noise and low power consumption.
  • Can be implemented quickly into existing SAP Business Warehouse environments and is flexible enough to be plugged-into IBM and non-IBM SAP BW server environments.
The components - Near real-time analytics

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is provided as a "Turn-Key" solution using a pre-configured highly scalable architecture. The IBM standard sizing matrix contains configurations for as little as 2 Blades and offers seamless growth to support the largest possible configurations, which makes choosing the right configuration easy and fast.

If you have smaller data requirements, you can use the IBM System x3850 X5 for memory capacity requirements between 64GB and 128GB. The x3850 X5 configuration can also serve as a transition platform to SAP HANA™ if you plan to implement SAP HANA in the near future.

Components for the standard offering based on IBM BladeCenter include:

  • SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator software (Purchased separately from SAP
  • SUSE® Linux®
  • IBM BladeCenter H Chassis (with redundant HW layout)
    • Choice of industry leading Ethernet switches
    • Choice of industry leading fiber channel switches
  • IBM BladeCenter HS23 blade server
    • 2 x 8 core Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2670
    • 32/64/96 GB RAM
    • 10Gb Ethernet
    • 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN
  • IBM System Storage DS3500 series
    • 8Gb FiberChannel SAN
    • Scalable to support the largest BW Accelerator workloads requirements
    • RAID setup for performance and high availability
    • Optional OS boot from SAN simplifies maintenance and management of your BW Accelerator environment
  • IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS)
    • Performance optimized shared file system for Linux Clusters used in many large supercomputing applications
    • Out of the box functionality for additional High Availability and disaster recovery to minimize downtime of the overall solution
    • Performance optimized shared file system for Linux Clusters used in many large supercomputing applications

Components for the offering based on IBM System x3850 X5 include:

  • Accelerator software provided by SAP based on SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7
  • Accelerator software provided by SAP based on SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7
  • IBM System x3850 X5
    • 64 or 128GB RAM
    • 8 x 600GB hard disk
    • 2 x 10Gb ethernet

IBM collaborated with SAP and Intel® in the development of the solution by using advanced software and hardware technology optimizations to maximize performance and scalability. Intel has worked intensively with SAP to optimize the solution for the Intel Xeon processors used in IBM's BladeCenter and eX5 servers.

The implementation - A tremendous performance boost

The process of gathering and analyzing data across Bayer MaterialScience's (BMS) large enterprise led to rapid growth in the volume of data in their existing systems. A data volume of 2TB had already been exceeded and the forecast for growth was more than 1TB per annum, reaching 20TB by 2012. This led to a slowdown in system response time. BMS needed to structure its SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse to be faster and future-viable.

The company selected the IBM Systems solution for BW accelerator from SAP to speed management reporting and analysis. The solution uses storage and server infrastructure with redundant components, offering very high availability and reliability, with point-in-time and volume copying for disaster recovery as well as synchronous and asynchronous mirroring options. The result is remarkably faster business query results—a 40 percent performance improvement for selected queries.

SCHWENK Zement found that deploying IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has delivered business intelligence query response performance up to 100 times faster on an integrated solution that reduces impact on production systems and is also capable of near-linear expansion as needs grow.

The cost of ownership - Significant TCO reduction

The IBM Systems solution for BW accelerator from SAP delivers the best combination of price and performance while accelerating the functional use of your existing SAP business warehouse environment. The solution can help:

  • Reduce the cost of acquisition and administration compared to conventional BW systems.
  • Increase the ROI on your existing business warehouse computing environment.
  • Help reduce operational overhead and keep implementation costs low with a simple, appliance-like installation.

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