STIHL Group, SVA, and IBM
As a leading manufacturer of chainsaws and power tools for professionals and domestic users, STIHL Group relies on 24/7 global availability of highly complex business processes. The transition to battery-powered, cordless equipment supported by cutting-edge digital services adds new challenges and offers innovative business opportunities. STIHL Group wanted to centralize, standardize and consolidate critical business applications to maximize service quality and cost efficiency. These applications underpin manufacturing operations and financial management across Germany, Romania, the US, Brazil, Switzerland, Austria, China, and the Philippines.
Patrick Trueb, Director of IT Basis Technology & Operations at STIHL Group, says: “Digitization continues to transform our processes and products. As a pioneer in our field, we wanted to be more flexible and scalable to reshape the future of power tools for home gardeners and professional users. Our goal was to simplify and modernize our fragmented global IT landscape, consolidating key applications and the IT infrastructure powering the entire business.”
Working closely with IBM Platinum Partner SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH, STIHL Group expanded its existing IBM Power environment and IBM Storage solution. SVA is a leading IT system integrator in Germany, with 3,500 employees across 28 offices and a long-time partner of STIHL Group. Peter Kohlrausch, System Administrator at STIHL Group, adds: “Our IBM partner SVA has a deep understanding of our business, our IT environment and our processes. Our collaboration is open and honest. They give us outstanding guidance and always provide solid and attractive offers when we need to grow or adapt our IT to changing business needs.”
Together, STIHL Group, SVA and IBM implemented a highly scalable SAP HANA® on IBM Power solution based on IBM® Power® E1080 enterprise servers. Running IBM PowerVM® and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, these servers deliver the flexibility, scalability, resiliency and performance that STIHL Group needs to grow and drive its digital transformation. The IBM Power servers host a wide range of SAP solutions including SAP S/4HANA®, SAP HANA, SAP BW/4HANA®, SAP Extended Warehouse Management, and SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. They also run SAP Global Trade Services for import and export processes and SAP Product Lifecycle Costing to fine-tune pricing and maximize revenues for new offerings.
STIHL Group runs the SAP Cloud Connector to integrate its on-premises SAP HANA on IBM Power solution with its SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) applications running in the cloud. Supporting seamless hybrid cloud operations enables fast and efficient data exchange with SAP Commerce Cloud, the company’s e-commerce platform, and analytics, planning and forecasting applications.
To provide fast and reliable data storage for STIHL Group’s critical systems, SVA deployed IBM SAN Volume Controller built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize and six IBM Storage FlashSystem 7300 enterprise-grade solutions. Johannes Hohmann, Service Manager at STIHL Group, explains: “The consolidated IBM storage solution designed by SVA gives us a standardized, easy-to-use management interface across all systems, helping us to work more productively with a streamlined operations concept. SVA also supported us throughout the storage modernization by planning every step, from the performance analysis to the sizing, installation and data migration.”
Consolidating its server and storage environment, STIHL Group can now more easily scale its SAP business applications to meet dynamically changing business needs. Moving from a scale-out to a scale-up architecture has simplified systems management and provided additional flexibility.
STIHL Group selected IBM Power for its SAP landscape because it offered higher cost-efficiency than other options and allowed for large SAP HANA systems, which was and still is an essential requirement for the company. Today, the largest mission-critical SAP HANA database at STIHL Group is 7 TB. With IBM Power enterprise servers, the company still has plenty of capacity to handle future growth.
All manufacturing operations at STIHL Group rely on SAP solutions running on IBM Power and IBM Storage. In total, STIHL Group runs 216 logical partitions (LPARS) with Linux and IBM AIX® across all its IBM Power servers. Using IBM PowerVM Live Partition Mobility, STIHL Group can easily balance its workload across all servers and quickly migrate systems to the latest IBM Power infrastructure. “The IBM Power platform is highly reliable and perfectly suited for our 24/7 availability needs,” confirms Peter Kohlrausch. “Over three system generations, we have never experienced any hardware issues that required unplanned downtime. And with the new enterprise-class IBM Power E1080 servers, we have virtually unlimited scalability for our system requirements.”
Looking ahead, STIHL Group is also considering building on the hybrid cloud opportunities offered by IBM Power Virtual Servers (PowerVS) to further enhance its scalability and efficiency.
Taking advantage of the fast, low-latency IBM FlashCore® Modules and NVMe technology, STIHL Group achieves a higher storage density, saves valuable data center space and improves overall IT sustainability. “With IBM FlashSystem 7300, we’re delivering 6 PB of data storage with 50% fewer storage systems,” says Johannes Hohmann. “The self-optimizing storage solution with built-in compression and AI-powered predictive analytics is very easy to manage.” STIHL Group has substantially reduced overall system maintenance by moving from up to 96 spinning disks per system to 24 IBM FlashCore Modules.
Patrick Trueb concludes: “With our partners SVA and IBM, we can run mission-critical SAP business applications reliably to drive innovation and growth. SVA gives us new ideas and helps us optimize our IT and data center architecture, making sure we benefit from the latest features and capabilities of our IBM solutions. We are very happy that we can fully trust SVA with important operational tasks. We also value the close collaboration with IBM. It’s great to see the continued commitment and investment in the IBM Power platform to further improve application availability and support on this leading, highly efficient technology.”
STIHL Group is a leading developer, manufacturer, and distributor of outdoor power equipment for forestry, agriculture, landscaping, construction, and discerning consumers. Headquartered in Germany, STIHL Group employs almost 20,000 people around the world and generatesannual revenue of €5.3 billion.
IBM Platinum Partner SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH is a leading IT system integrator in Germany, with 3.800 employees across 28 offices. SVA specializes in high-quality IT infrastructure and comprehensive IT services. The company’s technical experts provide tailored guidance and support to enable businesses maximize the value of their IT investments through optimization and intelligent software solutions.
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