References

Changeover to SAP ECC 6.0 with System p

Marquardt GmbH, Rietheim – Weilheim, Germany

Switches are involved whenever man meets machine. Many times, the bridging element between user and device originates from Rietheim-Weilheim in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. That’s where the headquarters of the Marquardt group, long-standing developers and producers of the most innovative switches and switching systems, are located. Virtually all of the German premium car manufacturers incorporate control panels and access control systems made by Marquardt. As in any other company, the IT area is one of the key centres which, through their performance, support optimal company processes as well as smooth operating cycles.

Core applications such as SAP/R3 and Agile PLM are thus centrally hosted in Rietheim and are placed at the disposal of sites around the world via an MPLS network. For the change-over from SAP 4.6C to SAP ECC 6.0 with Unicode, scheduled for the end of the year, and for further SAP projects, planning requirements of adjusted server infrastructure began early. On the one hand, the objective was the creation of larger performance reserves so as to be able to implement the planned SAP projects without any problems over the next two years. On the other, the list of requests included more flexibility to bridge planned short-term downtimes, e.g. in the case of system maintenance or entering updates as well as the systems’ scalability in light of predictable further growth.

The solution proposed by the team at the Stuttgart branch not only fulfilled all requirements but also proved clearly the benefits of longstanding experience in the planning and implementation of “Any Server on any System” concepts. If there had been a need for additional decision-making criteria, the support in system monitoring equally on offer might have tipped the scales. After implementation, FRITZ & MACZIOL then integrated an additional IBM System p5-590 with POWER5+ Architecture in the existing p5-570-system pool. Migration of all LPARs and the planting of new LPARs took place simultaneously. Experts produced a manual high availability concept for all A-systems (high priority). Adjustments in the back-up infrastructure regarding storage infrastructure and to secure new volumes of data in order to trap the migration-based increased volume of data, were also necessary.

As expected, the new configuration offers the traditional, family-owned business concrete operational improvements. The changeover of all services to any machine thus works smoothly and makes bridging a planned or unplanned downtime possible. At the same time, hardware updates may be planned and implemented at shorter notice. Satisfied with the results of cooperating with FRITZ & MACZIOL has meant that subsequent activities are in the pipeline: a joint project in the area of archival storage of files and emails is to be shortly implemented using Common Store.