Anyone looking to boost energy efficiency for SAP environments, while increasing hardware performance and environment expansion should take a look at a case study on BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. The Germany-based domestic appliance supplier migrated its SAP software onto a platform consisting of Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, Solaris 10, Sun Blade servers and Sun StorageTek systems. Analysis has shown that the SAP environment is consuming 59% less energy per year as a result of the new hardware and server efficiency has increased by 108%. For BSH, this means a reduced output in carbon dioxide of 792 tons a year.

The Sun solution, which runs on Solaris 10, covers three of BSH's SAP-related platforms.

• The first handles the databases and consists of mainframe-class Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers. This model delivers scalability of up to 64 processors and 256 cores. To make the infrastructure highly redundant, BSH installed another Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server at a secondary site 25 km from the main datacenter, creating a MetroCluster, which was connected to the main datacenter with fibre optic cables. The company also installed Sun Management Center software to help IT personnel administer the servers and maintain performance and throughput speeds. This platform is completed by two Sun StorageTek 9990V Systems, which deliver Petabyte scalability, storage virtualization, thin provisioning and logical partitioning.

• The second platform is for SAP applications and consists of the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System with the Sun Blade X6220 server featuring AMD processors.

• The third platform is a test and development environment, which includes less critical SAP applications. It comprises five Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers configured in a grid and distributed between the main datacenter and a secondary site.

Receiving mainframe-class computing along with advanced virtualization technologies from these new servers, BSH took advantage of the functionality and the Solaris Containers in the Solaris 10 OS to establish 70 virtual machines across the platform. This means that if a virtual server fails, the system boots up another virtual server automatically to take its place. Wolfgang Kopp, IT & infrastructure manager for BSH, said, “I can free up a server for maintenance purposes by temporarily shifting the virtual servers between physical servers.”

With the environment running on Solaris 10, BSH also received improvements in virtualization performance, throughput, security and availability. Kopp and his team also use the Sun N1 Advanced Architecture, which enables them to deploy applications across the environment faster.

BSH needed almost a year to completely move over to the new Sun hardware since the SAP software was so crucial to its operations. “We had to gradually decommission and replace old systems in our production environment,” says Kopp. It was a team effort involving Sun and BSH IT personnel, who worked nonstop on the project, doing much of the work on weekends. “Everything went well thanks to everybody’s commitment,” Kopp said. "By the end, we had switched over a total of 50 SAP applications without a single end user being affected."

More Information

Worldwide Manufacturing Group Uses Sun Server and Storage Solution to Cut Annual Power Consumption for SAP Environment by 59%

Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server

Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server

Sun Blade 6000 Modular System

Sun StorageTek 9990V System

Solaris 10 Operating System

Sun N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP

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