INTERSPORT improves fitness and business flexibility
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Intersport, a leading sporting goods retailer, improved its business operations by working with IBM to enhance its IT infrastructure, reducing data loading times and increasing system efficiency. By implementing a new server architecture and utilizing solid-state drives, the company cut report generation time significantly and improved disaster recovery capabilities. These upgrades supported Intersport's international expansion plans while allowing for better data management and energy efficiency.
INTERSPORT improves fitness and business flexibility
- 1. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail Smarter Computing INTERSPORT improves fitness and business flexibility With super-fit computing from IBM With retail turnover of €8.37 billion and more than 4,900 associated Overview retailers in 32 countries, INTERSPORT Group has the worldwide leading position in the sporting goods retail market. Based in Austria, The need INTERSPORT International Corporation (IIC) is the purchasing As business volumes increased, response times for queries run on INTERSPORT’s and management holding company for the INTERSPORT Group. SAP® NetWeaver® Business Warehouse INTERSPORT Deutschland eG is the German cooperative for more started to lengthen. For outfitters with than 1,500 sport outfitters in Germany. online access to stock and delivery information, the situation was impacting their sales capacity. Managing business growth IIC relied on the insight generated from its business intelligence The solution Working with IBM and Base-IT, the ® systems, created by analyzing transaction data captured from SAP INTERSPORT Austria IT team created and applications using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. As business deployed a new optimized technology volumes increased, system response started to grow worse, to the architecture designed to support the point where daily sales reports were delayed or unobtainable. For business for the long term, based on full virtualization of both servers and storage, those outfitters with online access to stock and delivery information, and using solid state drives for the most the situation was impacting their sales capacity, and restricting valuable high-priority data storage tasks. opportunities and potential profits. The benefit The average time taken to load data into The problem was particularly severe at the start of the working day, SAP NetWeaver BW has been reduced when up to 350 users log on simultaneously. INTERSPORT realized from 120 to 30 minutes – a 75 percent that these performance issues were likely to become even more severe. improvement. Time taken to build aggregates has been reduced by 75 To create a foundation for international expansion and improve multi- percent, and to generate reports by 66 language support, the company was planning to upgrade to SAP ERP percent. The solid state drives consume 6.0 with Unicode support. This upgrade was likely to increase data around 90 percent less electricity than spinning disks, and save 75 percent in volumes and put even greater load on the company’s infrastructure. rack space. Leveraging virtualization technology Working with IBM and Base-IT, the INTERSPORT Austria IT team designed and deployed a new server architecture designed to support the business for the long term, based on two IBM Power 550 servers running the IBM i 6.1 operating system. The primary server has eight IBM POWER6+ processor cores and 256 GB of memory, while the secondary server has six cores and 160 GB of memory. Unlike the previous landscape, where one main server supported the production workload while a second smaller server handled non- production workload, the new architecture distributes the logical partitions (LPARs) for production between the two machines using IBM PowerVM technology.
- 2. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail Smarter Computing By dividing the production workload for the SAP and ISIS applications Designed for Data between the two IBM Power 550 servers, INTERSPORT Austria has • INTERSPORT extracts, analyzes and been able to significantly enhance its disaster recovery capability. responds to information derived from huge quantities of transaction data to ensure that it has the right stock in With the previous solution, it would have taken more than two days to the right store at the right time to meet re-configure the secondary server and recover all systems, and since the predicted consumer demands. secondary server was less powerful than the primary server, application Tuned to the Task performance would have been significantly degraded. • With IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage Systems, INTERSPORT has INTERSPORT Austria upgraded its storage architecture to eliminate consolidated and virtualized its IT I/O bottlenecks that were affecting SAP NetWeaver Business infrastructure. IBM DB2 compression features allow INTERSPORT to Warehouse (BW) performance. To increase throughput, the company keep critical business data on high- considered expanding its existing IBM System Storage DS8100 disk performance solid state drives, moving systems with a further eight Fibre Channel disk ranks – but this would less-needed data to less expensive have required the introduction of an expansion unit, occupying valuable traditional spinning disks. rack-space and increasing power and cooling requirements. Managed in the Cloud • Virtualization and integrated service The IT team calculated that to achieve the required level of management capabilities enable INTERSPORT to create new business performance from the Fibre Channel ranks, it would not be possible to services rapidly and cost-effectively utilize more than 60 percent of the available disk capacity. As a result, without the need for further hardware 40 percent of the new disks would remain unused, reducing the value of investments. the investment. IIC worked with IBM and Base-IT to migrate to two Driving Innovation new DS8700 systems. Each of these storage systems contains 12 ranks • This is the first step in the longer-term of 15k RPM Fibre Channel disks for SAP ERP and ISIS production strategy of removing dependency on physical assets and towards a cloud-like LPARs, as well as two ranks of Solid State Drives (SSDs) for SAP infrastructure, where technology is almost NetWeaver BW. invisible to business management. Optimizing resource utilization Consolidating the SAP application landscape to IBM POWER6+ processor-based servers, DB2 and IBM DS8700 disk systems with SSDs has resolved INTERSPORT Austria’s performance issues, while also providing sufficient capacity to support the explosive growth in data volumes and analysis of SAP NetWeaver BW data. The company can utilize up to 98 percent of the available capacity of the SSDs, and provide far higher performance in terms of throughput and response times in the SAP NetWeaver BW environment. As a result, INTERSPORT Austria only needs two bays of SSDs to provide the same level of performance as eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks. Rapid recovery from disaster Should disaster strike one of the data centers, by sharing workload between two identical Power servers, full recovery is possible within two hours. Each server is already configured and has sufficient capacity to handle production workload. This is the first step in the longer- term strategy of removing dependency on physical assets and towards a cloud-like infrastructure, where technology is almost invisible to business management.
- 3. IBM Systems & Technology Group Retail Smarter Computing Enjoying the benefits The average time taken to load data into SAP NetWeaver BW has been Solution Components reduced from 120 minutes to 30 minutes – a 75 percent improvement. Software The time taken to build aggregates has been reduced by approximately • IBM® i 75 percent, and the time taken to generate reports has been improved • IBM DB2® for i • IBM PowerVM® by approximately 66 percent. • SAP® ERP • SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse The company’s 350 SAP users are able to access business intelligence Servers data much more rapidly, even at times of peak load. This helps to • IBM Power® 550 improve their productivity, and also encourages them to use the SAP • IBM System Storage® DS8700 NetWeaver BW system as part of their daily routine. • IBM System Storage DS4700 IBM Business Partner DB2 data compression technology has delivered significant • IBM Business Partner Base-IT. performance improvements, and the compression of 110 million datasets that was expected to take 96 hours took less than 17 hours – 83 percent faster than expected, releasing productive time to the business. “The new IBM Choosing the more compact SSD-based storage solution has enabled infrastructure will INTERSPORT Austria to avoid purchasing a DS8000 expansion unit provide sufficient and eight additional Fibre Channel disk ranks, saving rack-space in the company’s data center. Data is contained within a single physical capacity to support all infrastructure, controlled and managed by DB2, simplifying the IT our current projects, landscape and improving ease of management. and we are confident The combination of the SSD solution with the new Power 550 servers that the combination of has also reduced energy and cooling requirements. The POWER6+ IBM Power servers and processors are highly energy-efficient, and two ranks of SSDs consume DS8700 SSD storage around 90 percent less electricity than eight ranks of Fibre Channel disks, directly reducing energy costs and saving 75 percent in rack will be flexible and space. scalable enough to meet our future needs as well.” By equipping more employees with the latest business information, INTERSPORT Austria improves their ability to make rapid and — Johann Reisinger, CIO, INTERSPORT Austria well-informed business decisions, which should ultimately result in GmbH improved efficiency and increased sales. The company has experienced significant sales growth since the solution went live, supported by rapid business analysis of data enabled by the new IT landscape. For more information To learn more about smarter computing from IBM and how we can help you integrate, automate, protect and transform your IT, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM business partner, or visit: ibm.com/smartercomputing
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