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Boosting retail efficiency and increasing business resiliency
Migros Zürich streamlines operations with IBM Power10 and optimizes SAP application backups
The Genossenschaft Migros Zürich offers its cooperative members and customers a varied shopping experience in 165 specialist stores and supermarkets and 65 restaurant locations.
To ensure smooth retail operations, the two Genossenschaften Migros Aare and Migros Zürich jointly provide an SAP platform service for SAP Retail using the finance, controlling and human capital management modules.
In an SAP lifecycle project, IBM Business Partner Bechtle combined four new IBM® Power® E1050 servers with IBM Power10 technology in a unified IBM Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 (PEP 2.0) configuration spanning both data centers. Today, this enables the two cooperatives to use their capacities flexibly in the event of server failures and to save costs. They pool their resources wherever possible. Migros Zürich and Migros Aare have long used a data center network to cover each other’s business continuity requirements and disaster provisioning. As a hardware platform, both cooperatives rely on IBM for their business-critical applications.
The two cooperatives are supported and advised by IBM Business Partner Bechtle as a trusted IT partner with a great deal of expertise in the data center business. As data volumes continued to grow while backup time windows remained fixed, it was clear that not only did the existing backup architecture need to be replaced, but also the architecture as a whole had to be questioned. In a second phase, the SAP Retail for merchandise management solution as well as the SAP ERP finance, controlling and human capital management environments also needed to be modernized in order to improve performance and optimize the software lifecycle.
After IBM Business Partner Bechtle had designed a new data center backup architecture spanning several server locations with IBM Storage Protect software and node replication in the data centers of Migros Zürich and the Genossenschaft Migros Aare, the server infrastructure was also brought up to date.
It was clear that although IBM was the favored hardware manufacturer, choosing a different vendor was by no means ruled out.
Maximizing resource efficiency by moving from 212 cores to just 40 with IBM Power10 and PEP2.0.
Optimizing backup configuration to improve availability and recovery point objective.
Against the background of the established close data center collaboration between Migros Zürich and Migros Aare, Bechtle showed the companies various options that differed primarily in the degree of resource sharing.
Bechtle and the IT department of the Genossenschaft Migros Zürich tackled the server distribution in the data centers in order to refresh the dedicated systems for the SAP environment, including finance, controlling, human capital management and fresh produce procurement.
Migros opted for IBM Power10 systems. A detailed analysis by Bechtle showed that they could save costs thanks to the IBM PEP 2.0 offering. This technology enables usage of local server resources to be tracked to the minute and thus enables more accurate billing and optimization of resources.
Bechtle calculated the optimum price for Migros Zürich and Migros Aare with IBM on 26 cores. Through IBM virtualization, the performance of the servers of both cooperatives was combined into one large enterprise pool. This allows the cooperatives to flexibly share the performance capacity between themselves. The Hardware Management Console (HMC) enables the efficient administration, monitoring and measurement of the server landscape. It also manages additional on-demand capacity, which is made available through “capacity credits”. Migros Zürich and Migros Aare can access a total of 200 capacity credits, which enable them to call up additional services and capacity as needed.
In another project, Bechtle sized the IBM Storage Protect solutions according to the best-practice recommendations in the relevant IBM Red Books and proposed a modular solution composed of basic building blocks. After weighing up the variants presented by Bechtle, Migros Zürich and Migros Aare decided to operate three IBM Storage Protect servers per data center, two of which form an IBM PowerHA® SystemMirror® cluster and are self-sufficient. The third server runs in the other data center as a disaster recovery system. The disk pool located on the IBM Storage FlashSystem® 5100 storage solution and the storage area network are in turn shared by both cooperatives. In addition, the IBM TS4500 Tape Library systems for disaster recovery purposes are housed in the other data center. Via the IBM Storage Protect node replication configuration proposed by Bechtle, the backup servers communicate directly with each other, which ensures higher availability and redundancy of the data.
Boosting flexibility and sustainability with IBM Power10
Thanks to the modernization of the new IBM Power10 servers and the backup architecture, the two data centers are now more stable, more powerful and more flexible in terms of resource allocation.
With the optimized capacity sharing across all IBM Power10 servers, the two cooperatives maximized resource utilization and only needed to use 10 additional capacity credits to handle peak workloads over three months.
With PEP 2.0, the two cooperatives also save costs through the minute-by-minute billing of the required server performance. This means that the Genossenschaft Migros Zürich and Genossenschaft Migros Aare are working even more sustainably: lower costs, less electricity, less CO2.
Mick Purtschert, Head of Unix & Core Services at Genossenschaft Migros Zürich, concludes: “The cooperation with IBM Business Partner Bechtle and IBM is a true partnership and not just a supplier-customer relationship. Bechtle and IBM advised us honestly, competently and always in a solution-oriented manner and not just sold us. The implementation went smoothly, and any problems that arose were quickly solved by Bechtle. The new SAP platform enabled us to reduce our footprint and cut costs, power consumption and CO2 emissions. We are also very satisfied with the new IBM products such as IBM Power10 and IBM Storage Protect. The flexibility of the CPU allows optimal use at a good price-performance ratio.”
Founded in 1941, Genossenschaft Migros Zürich provides a wide range of everyday goods through retail outlets, restaurants and specialist markets to large parts of the cantons of Zurich, Glarus, St. Gallen and Schwyz in Switzerland. A major employer in the region, the cooperative employs around 7,000 people and has been awarded the “Friendly Work Space” label for health-conscious staff policies.
IBM Business Partner Bechtle is a leading IT service provider with 85 system houses across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Additionally, the company has 24 e-commerce subsidiaries in 14 European countries. With over 14,000 employees, Bechtle accelerates the digital transformation for more than 70,000 customers. The forward-looking business achieves an annual revenue of €6.03 billion.
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Produced in the United States of America, December 2023.
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