To address its immediate challenges around performance and capacity, CenturyLink proposed to upgrade the server hardware running its SAP environment. At the same time, the company was looking with interest at SAP’s in-memory solution: SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.
“We were wary about making any new investment before we had made a decision about our future direction, because of the risk of potentially having to go down a different route on the hardware front,” recalls Connie Walden. “IBM showed us that the latest Power Systems servers could handle both our traditional relational databases for SAP and future SAP HANA databases—even simultaneously on the same physical machine—enabling us to invest with confidence.”
CenturyLink deployed an IBM Power System E880 running both IBM AIX® and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as a migration target for its existing SAP ECC landscape, initially as a test environment with 20 cores and 8 TB of memory, and later expanded to 192 cores and 32 TB.
During the deployment of the Power E880, CenturyLink reached a firm decision on its future direction around SAP software. The verdict was to immediately migrate its existing SAP applications from relational databases to the SAP HANA in-memory technology. This migration of the database layer would be the first step on CenturyLink’s future roadmap to adopt SAP S/4HANA®.
To support the initial migration of the database layer to SAP HANA, the company added a second Power E880 server with 192 cores, and several months later deployed a Power E880C with 192 cores and 32 TB of main memory to provide both additional capacity and a disaster-recovery option. To minimize potential bottlenecks in feeding this higher-performance SAP environment with data, CenturyLink upgraded from conventional disk storage to IBM FlashSystem® V9000 enterprise flash storage, working with IBM Systems Lab Services throughout the deployment.
“The immediate benefit of choosing IBM Power was that it enabled us to move to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA without changing the hardware,” says Connie Walden. “We also found that the pricing of the IBM solution was competitive with SAP HANA-capable solutions from other major vendors, and our past experience of the exceptional stability of SAP solutions on the platform clinched the deal. The stability of IBM Power is a major point of differentiation against distributed systems, and we have 15 years of experience internally to back that up.”
CenturyLink has migrated almost all of the functionality within its SAP Business Suite environment—including financials, supply chain, project systems and assets, HR and payroll—to the SAP HANA database on IBM Power Systems. The company is also deploying revenue accounting and recognition functionality on its own SAP HANA instance. There is also a third native SAP HANA instance for data staging—and this ability to run multiple production SAP HANA environments on the same physical hardware is a significant commercial and operational benefit of the IBM Power platform.
CenturyLink’s move to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems has also achieved its second objective: enabling faster and lower-cost integration projects, boosting its ability to drive value out of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
At the time of writing, CenturyLink is undergoing a major merger with Level 3 Communications Inc., one of Colorado’s largest technology companies, and the incoming business is being integrated into CenturyLink’s SAP software environment.
“Level 3 is focused on wholesale and enterprise business, with no regulated consumer component, and represents an excellent opportunity for CenturyLink to gain scale in a growing area of the market,” says Connie Walden. “Of course, synergies are the major reason you undertake M&A: as a combined company you are stronger, and you can reduce your cost base by merging back-office activities. This means that successful growth becomes strongly linked to your ability to on-board acquisitions quickly and efficiently.”
The move to IBM POWER8® processors and the adoption of SAP HANA technology is proving a major benefit to the Level 3 acquisition process. Above and beyond its performance advantages over x86—including higher per-core performance, larger memory caches and eight-way simultaneous multithreading—the IBM Power platform enables businesses to deploy up to eight production SAP HANA virtual machines on a single physical server. This enables exceptional efficiency in workload consolidation, lowers total cost of ownership and offers incredible flexibility by comparison with commodity x86 servers. With 32 TB of memory on each of its Power E880 servers, CenturyLink has ample capacity to securely combine both production and non-production environments for SAP HANA on the same system. This gives the company the flexibility to run QA environments alongside production systems, and then bring those QA environments into production without needing to procure and install additional hardware.
“The unique advantages of Power Systems in terms of the virtualization of SAP HANA environments gives us the ability to spin up new environments as we need them,” says Connie Walden. “This means we can accelerate IT projects, cutting costs and risk. As we have built out our revenue recognition solution and executed the Level 3 integration, all we have needed to do is buy some additional storage capacity. If we had chosen a distributed-server solution based on x86 servers rather than IBM Power Systems, we would have lost weeks of project time in the procurement and installation of hardware— there’s no way we would have been able to hit the go-live targets. With IBM Power, we can quickly and easily adapt to major changes in projects without needing to make substantial hardware investments.”
She adds: “Our ongoing strategic transformation is all about achieving greater speed to market and greater process efficiency, and running SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on Power Systems definitely supports those outcomes. The business is seeing how quickly we can integrate this major acquisition of Level 3, and I think this gives confidence that the transformation program will continue to deliver the expected financial benefits.”
As a further example of the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Power platform, CenturyLink is now also using the same hardware to deploy SAP Hybris® Billing for Level 3, to fill a functional gap as it migrates away from another vendor’s suite of enterprise software. At a later stage, the solution will also be used to replace some legacy Qwest A/R systems that are reaching end-of-life.