Study

Infrastructure modernisation to support
long-term growth
In tandem with ongoing improvements in the efficiency
of the broader business, and timed to coincide with
the SAP systems release change from version ECC
5.0 to ECC 6.0, RI-Solution kicked off a far-reaching
modernisation project. The project team wanted to
modernise the hardware infrastructure at the same
time as carrying out the upgrade. This put the onus of
designing an architectural solution for the hardware
configuration on those tendering for the project.
RI-Solution aimed to increase the SAP infrastructure
performance by a factor of four, while IT costs remained
the same, in particular, the expenditure for managing
the systems should not increase. Therefore one essential
objective was to standardise hardware configuration in
order to simplify the operational and service processes.
With this in mind, RI-Solution decided to procure all
server systems from a single provider.
The converged infrastructure concept
drove the decision in favour of HP
Having evaluated the tender proposals RI-Solution
opted for HP. A significant factor in this decision was
the overall concept of a converged infrastructure, which
formed the basis of HP’s bid. The project planners
hoped this would make a significant contribution to the
standardisation of their infrastructure. For example, the
SAP systems at BayWa and RWA run on Unix servers,
while the non-SAP systems run on x86 computers.
Operating different systems made it necessary to employ
multiple management tools, in turn requiring various
qualifications among IT personnel.
With a converged infrastructure, HP has created the
technical basis for integrating both mission critical
systems and industry standard servers into a single
infrastructure managed using the same tools. HP’s
concept is based on a standardised blade technology
from the ProLiant & Integrity server families, HP
Superdome servers, the use of as many common
components as possible and a complete management
strategy. This way, all hardware resources can be
monitored and controlled by a single tool, HP Systems
Insight Manager (SIM).
“HP’s innovative concept was convincing. It did not
simply maintain the status quo, but replaced the
existing systems with something completely new,”
reasons Günther Bauer, joint managing director of
RI-Solution. HP not only met the stated requirement for
the standardisation of the overall infrastructure with
its bid, it also presented a coherent concept for the
system platform on which the SAP applications would
run. At the same time, HP committed to attaining all
performance values defined by RI-Solution for the
upcoming five year period.
Prior to the start of the project, the SAPS value of the
systems maintained by RI-Solution was 160,000.
Following the modernisation, it would be possible to
increase the performance to at least 275,000 SAPS.
At the same time, the application response times for
users would decrease by 20 per cent in spite of the SAP
release change and Unicode migration.
More flexibility through scale-out
architecture
The HP concept for the SAP infrastructure meant a
departure from the status quo, because HP proposed a
scale-out architecture for those systems, which RI-
Solution had been running on a virtualised Unix hosted
architecture with several logical partitions up to that
point. The majority of SAP systems were to be migrated
to Unix Integrity blades series. Ultimately, HP beat a
competing concept with this system, which RI-Solution
had also evaluated. This concept was aimed at scaling
up and would have continued the logic of a central host
with expensive Unix machines.
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