References

Extended SAP Infrastructure Supports Planned Production Increase

SAF Holland

At SAF-HOLLAND there are strong signs for growth. The international supplier of systems and components for commercial vehicles is expanding its capacity for axle production by more than 20 % a year. So that the production increase is not hindered in the end by the systems being too slow, it is necessary to realise a
corresponding expansion of IT performance. Therefore, the plan was to replace the existing SAP R/3 productive system IBM i570 to make it more powerful and equip it with additional breakdown security.

Despite the greater load caused by the production increase and additional requests from more users, the response times of the SAP system needed to remain stable, the requested values should not be exceeded and the new procurement and expansion of the hardware including migration should be effected within the prepared budget. To realise implementation in line with the specification, FRITZ & MACZIOL proposed replacing the central unit of the productive system IBM i570 with the up-to-date POWER6 technology, equipping it with a corresponding expansion of working memory and disk capacity and upgrading the operating system to the up-to-date version i5/OS V5R4. In contrast, the back-up and development system IBM i570 continues to operate with POWER5 technology, received additional working memory and disk capacity and also an upgrade of the operating system to i5/OS V5R4. The greater availability of the systems is achieved by changing the existing optical HSL connection Switchable Tower between the two IBM i570s to Cross Site Mirroring XSM. In this way, the data from the productive SAP system can be mirrored on the back-up systems so that almost failure-free operation is possible. The solution was implemented in stages in close cooperation with SAF-HOLLAND and has been in complete productive use since June 2008. The plans also include operational support outside of business hours in the form of the FRITZ & MACZIOL 24 x 7 Remote Service for the SAP R/3 systems and the SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) system. Customer Benefits FRITZ & MACZIOL’s design offers SAF-HOLLAND the conditions to cover its intended production increase through additional performance. At the same time, the company now has the latest technology in the IBM system i environment, greater breakdown security from XSM (cross-site monitoring), an increase in performance of the back-up system – and all of this within the specified budget.