As a company with years of experience using SAP solutions, ARYZTA was eager to upgrade to the latest version of SAP® Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. However, the company found that the available SAP HANA appliance was simply too large for its needs, meaning that ARYZTA would incur a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and pay for capacity it did not require.
ARYZTA engaged Freudenberg IT (FIT), an IBM Business Partner and global managed IT services provider, which recommended deploying the SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA application on IBM Power Systems running the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (link resides outside of ibm.com) operating system in a private cloud. FIT assessed the current data warehouse size at 12 TB and designed a solution capable of scaling to 16 TB without incurring additional licensing costs. FIT takes on responsibility for every aspect of the infrastructure, which is delivered as a service to ARYZTA and includes managed services for the SAP HANA application.
FIT’s infrastructure environment comprises IBM Power System E880, IBM Power System E850C and IBM Power System S824L servers. The servers are virtualized using IBM PowerVM® technology, enabling ARYZTA to run multiple virtual machines within a single server. The virtual machines are configured to provide processor, memory, network and storage resources to deliver maximal system response in the most cost-efficient manner, while optimizing SAP HANA licensing. The solution also offers Live Partition Mobility, which allows virtual machines to be moved from one system to another with no service interruption. As such, FIT can provide continuous uptime for ARYZTA even during infrastructure maintenance windows.
ARYZTA is considering implementing SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, hosted on IBM Power Systems, to further enhance its analytics capabilities. The SAP HANA database design enables very fast response to standard and ad-hoc queries without the need to pre-configure data InfoCubes, offering considerable savings in technical workload and accelerating reporting capabilities.
Anoop Mohan comments, “Having worked with FIT for over six years, we were confident that they understood our business in detail and had both the expertise and experience to help us build a data warehouse tailored to our analytics needs. By opting for a managed infrastructure as a service solution with FIT, we knew we could keep our total cost of ownership low, while also gaining the benefits of increased scalability and faster reporting.
“Thanks to the professionalism and expertise of the FIT team, we achieved an incredibly smooth upgrade to SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. The entire project ran on time—it was one of the smoothest implementations that I have ever been personally responsible for. FIT assigned dedicated consultants to the project, who brought deep technical knowledge to the table, and FIT proved once again to be a very reliable partner to us. What’s more, the post go-live support has been excellent, with FIT always available to help us find a quick resolution to any issues as soon as they arise.
“By moving to a private cloud solution for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, we open the door to many more opportunities. We can enhance and extend the core applications by integrating other SAP solutions onto a single SAP HANA instance. Because SAP HANA is hosted on the IBM Power Systems platform, we can extend the capacity of the SAP solutions without big jumps to new appliances in fixed sizes.”