References

IBM concept from FRITZ & MACZIOL as precursor for a top performing SAP environment

iii-investments, Munich

Pioneers distinguish themselves by their active, innovative and anticipatory action. Values to which iii-investments has always been committed. The company is founder of the open real estate investment fund in Germany and partner of the HVB group. With its ever present pioneering spirit, the company has been successfully managing open real estate investment funds since 1959. Supplementing this is the acquisition and administration of quality commercial real estate with capital on a trust basis from which the Munich team generates rental income.

The FRITZ & MACZIOL team also needed to prove its pioneering spirit when iii-investments commissioned the Ulm-based company with the restructuring of SAP infrastructure based on SunSolaris servers and SunSolaris storage. The catalogue of requirements included the mirroring of the completely redundantly laid-out hardware across two geographically separate computer centres as well as the crossroad migration of SAP installation from the Informix database on IBM AIX with a DB2-database and a subsequent SAP environment upgrade on ECC 2005/2006. All in all, the superiority of the IBM solution in terms of economy and technology were to be achieved – a task confidently carried out by the IBM business partner.

A concept for an IBM configuration was developed consisting of 2 p550 systems, each with 1 Quad Core CPU, 4 FC 16 Port SAN-Switches, 2 DS4800 disc systems, 2 TFT-/HMC racks and 2 x 336. In addition, the proposal included relevant services for SAP migration which included, among other things, joint planning on the basis of SAP requirements, SAP migration check, source system analysis, infrastructure requirement check, SAP and Oracle basis installation. With this solution, FRITZ & MACZIOL successfully edged out its competitors. However, the unbeatable advantage provided by opportunities for virtualisation in an AIX environment and the free-of-charge switch of Informix on DB/2 licenses were not the only criteria taken into consideration. The conceptual course of action for the project developed by the experts in Ulm, along with the excellent value for money, were judged by iii-investments as equally convincing.

Since autumn 2006, the investment company has been focusing on the top performing and highly available new SAP environment - to everyone’s satisfaction as the total utility is clearly noticeable. Through the improved performance, internal operations could be optimised. At the same time, the LPAR virtualisation technology used increases flexibility and reduces costs as further hardware purchases are not necessary for the time being.