Achieving the highest possible performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Power

Founded in 1977, Printus GmbH is a mail-order services company in Germany that provides a wide range of office supplies, including media and communication items, as well as consumer electronics. With Printus, customers can conveniently order their office supplies online around the clock, with expedited shipping and handling guaranteed. Over four million customers appreciate the reliable service and product quality Printus offers at attractive prices. Running its operations on IBM® Power® servers for many years, Printus has maintained its commitment to its customers. With customer satisfaction a top priority, Printus sought to advance its services, implementing new and innovative technology. Additionally, Printus looked to upgrade its technological infrastructure, as it previously operated its SAP core applications on two IBM Power E870 servers with IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM FlashSystem® 5000 and V9000.

Printus engaged IBM Business Partner SVA to consult on the infrastructure renewal, expressing the desire to achieve the highest possible performance, maintain scalability and increase the availability of its business-critical operations.

To maintain its standard of customer service and satisfaction, Printus upgraded its IT infrastructure from the IBM Power8® microprocesser to the latest Power10 processor-based systems. In doing so, it implemented two IBM Power E1080 servers with 96 cores and 6 TB of memory. Along with the new hardware, Printus will also adopt the IBM PowerVC solution. The PowerVC provides simplified virtualization management and cloud deployments for its IBM AIX® and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® environments running business-critical SAP software. It’s especially critical for running SAP’s warehouse management system on the IBM Db2® database and IBM WebSphere Application Server, and data warehouse running on Oracle. With PowerVC, teams can see all these environments and systems from a single dashboard across on prem and in the cloud, and control resources and balance workloads as needed.

Printus also upgraded its storage, implementing IBM Storage FlashSystem 7300 and a tape library refresh with 10 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape drives, further accelerating performance of the new environment by lowering data latency and increasing scalability. With support for its Power8 processor-based environment coming to an end, Printus avoided expensive maintenance extension costs by collaborating closely with IBM and SVA to conduct a quick and seamless migration to Power10. Preparation sessions were held to perform sizing and performance measuring, helping to ensure the environment was right-sized for not only current operations and workloads, but also able to scale to support future growth of the business. Printus welcomed new technologies and innovations, such as N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) for Fibre Channel connections, virtual network interface cards (vNICs) to deliver better network performance and IBM Power Enterprise Pools 1.0 for flexibility to move mobile activations to alternative servers within the pool. Most critically, Printus is now equipped with a platform and IT infrastructure built to support its future migration to SAP S/4HANA.

Printus upheld its intent to evolve and continue improving everyday office life with its products and services. The company was able to continue extending its capacity and migration toward SAP S/4HANA, saving in capital investment and energy costs. Printus was able to get started on the project quickly with fast startup times on Power and easy migration to the new Power10 processor-based servers using Live Partition Mobility. With Live Partition Mobility, teams were able to upgrade the environment while still maintaining availability and avoiding any planned downtime, keeping business and operations going during the transition. Additionally, Printus was able to maintain its competitive positioning with increased security features, helping to ensure safe and secure shipping methods so their customers can receive orders on time and accurately no matter what. Teams at Printus will benefit from easier administration of the environment by implementing PowerVC. In addition, the Utility Capacity on Demand (CoD) function supports Printus with unpredictable, short workload increases that need an automated and affordable way to help assure that adequate server resources are available on demand. Printus has also shown increased availability and reliability to maintain their high standard of customer service all while embracing sustainability and green IT by reducing energy consumption and its carbon footprint from the IT infrastructure.

Printus GmbH (link resides outside of ibm.com) was established in 1977 and has since become a leading online retail service provider in Germany, offering a diverse range of over 100,000 products, including office supplies, media and communication items, furniture, and even tools. Printus successfully focuses on delivering high-quality, innovative and durable products to its over 4 million customers.