Voith increases performance and saves license and maintenance costs by introducing IBM DB2 for SAP applications
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Voith, a German manufacturing company, migrated its SAP applications from Oracle databases to IBM DB2 databases to reduce costs and improve performance. With support from IBM, Voith used IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture to migrate 80 SAP instances from Oracle to DB2 on IBM Power servers in 11 months with minimal downtime. Voith realized significant cost savings through lower licensing fees and reduced data storage needs due to database compression. System performance was also improved with faster response times and higher cache hit rates for SAP users.
Voith increases performance and saves license and maintenance costs by introducing IBM DB2 for SAP applications
- 1. IBM SAP International Competence Center Voith increases performance and saves license and maintenance costs by introducing IBM DB2 for SAP applications
- 2. “ IBM Business Partner SVA and the IBM team provided the resources in depth Voith needed to ensure excellent transition services that met and exceeded our business objectives.” Christoph Krane Head of Data Center Operations Voith “ The migration to DB2 proved to be highly successful, achieved within tight timescales and assisted by a knowledgeable IBM team that understood SAP applications, IBM Power servers and Voith’s business requirements.” Bernd Nagel Team Leader, UNIX, Storage and DB2 Voith
- 3. Voith increases performance and saves license and maintenance costs by introducing IBM DB2 for SAP applications About this paper This technical paper explores how Voith IT Solutions has cut costs and improved system performance by migrating its SAP applications to IBM DB2 on the IBM Power platform. With support from SAP, IBM and IBM Premier Business Partner SVA, Voith has reduced total system administration effort, cut total data storage volumes through the use of IBM DB2 Deep Compression, and introduced Unicode for international working. Customer Objectives • Update IBM AIX from 5.3 to 6.1 TL3 to take advantage of • Introduce a stable, reliable solution with high resilience advanced virtualization technologies and full disaster recovery • Update IBM PowerHA from 5.5 to 6.1, spanning the twin • Control costs, reduce license fees and cut operational data centers in Heidenheim, to improve resilience expenses • IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Tivoli FlashCopy • Increase efficiency, by reducing database administration Manager will be implemented in Q1 2011 to provide an workload integrated data management solution. • Drive return on investment with improved services from within reduced IT budgets Customer Benefits • Improve system performance with faster response times • Using IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture, migration for 7,000 SAP users time for a 1.2TB system was less than 11 hours • Simplify the IT landscape for more than 80 SAP instances • With IBM DB2 Deep Compression, database • Cut data storage volumes and reduce data management performance has improved without requiring additional costs. investment • Total I/O activity is reduced on a proportionate basis to IBM Solution database compression, and application response times • Extend the existing POWER5 server landscape with have improved (biggest DB size reduction 62 percent) POWER6 processor based servers • Simplified database administration through the DB2 • Migrate to IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows version Cockpit for SAP with an intuitive user interface 9.5 to support all SAP instances by the end of June 2010, • DB2 cache hit rate has increased to more than 99 offering lower maintenance and licensing costs percent. 3
- 4. Background, starting point and objectives About Voith Business challenges and project objectives Voith sets standards in the markets energy, oil & gas, paper, raw Voith was faced with the need to operate its SAP systems more materials and transportation & automotive. Founded in 1867, cost-efficiently. The Voith team’s evaluation was that migrating Voith employs almost 40,000 people, generates €5.2 billion in database systems to DB2 would realize significant cost savings. sales, operates in about 50 countries around the world and is The key business challenges were to: today one of the biggest family-owned companies in Europe. • Maintain a stable, reliable solution with high resilience and full disaster recovery • Control costs, reduce license fees and cut operational expenses • Increase efficiency by reducing database administration workload Initial IT environment • Drive return on investment with improved services and Voith IT Solutions operates six data centers, in Germany (two in reduced IT budgets. Heidenheim), Austria (St Pölten), China (Shanghai), Brazil (São Paulo) and USA (Wilson, NC). In parallel with the business objectives, the Voith IT Solutions division wished to address technical challenges too: The company had been running a wide range of SAP • Improve system performance with faster response times for applications on servers running the HP-UX operating system, 7,000 SAP users supported by Oracle databases. Voith was using almost every • Simplify the IT landscape and reduce complexity for more component of the SAP ERP suite, alongside SAP ERP Human than 80 SAP instances Capital Management, SAP Customer Relationship Management, • Cut data storage volumes and reduce data management costs. SAP Global Trade Services, SAP NetWeaver Process Integration, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, SAP Voith set out its project objectives, with cost-savings as the first NetWeaver Portal, and the SAP Solution Manager. priority, and drew up a list of the enabling technologies: • Extend the existing Power server landscape with POWER6 Early in 2006, Voith chose to migrate to the IBM Power platform, processor-based servers starting with IBM Power Systems 570 servers equipped with • Migrate to IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows version 9.5 POWER5 processors. A total of 60 LPARs ran a wide range of to support all SAP instances by the end of June 2010, SAP applications, using a high degree of virtualization such as offering lower maintenance and licensing costs Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS) and micropartitioning, as well as • Update IBM AIX from 5.3 to 6.1 TL3 to take advantage of storage virtualization using IBM System Storage SAN Volume advanced virtualization technologies Controller. • Update IBM PowerHA from 5.5 to 6.1, spanning the twin data centers in Heidenheim, to improve resilience This configuration ran Oracle 10.2 databases on the IBM AIX 5.3 • Currently implementing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and, in operating system, with IBM PowerHA (formerly called HACMP) the near future, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager for providing clustering services for resilience, IBM VIOS 1.5 and, integrated data management and performing near-instant for backup and recovery services, HP DataProtector. application-aware snapshot backups with minimal performance impact for SAP. 4
- 5. Technical solution Migrating the databases presented the largest single challenge, The existing IBM Power architecture was used to support the preserving integrity while minimizing the workload, and ensuring migration, by using Logical Partitions (LPARs) to provide that the process would involve the least possible total downtime. independent servers for each process. Voith selected IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture (CDC) for one of its systems, which enables real-time data replication to IBM InfoSphere CDC captures only changed data and transfers support migrations, greatly accelerating the migration process it from publisher to subscriber systems. This improves by eliminating redundant data transfer. operational efficiency and saves time and resources by eliminating redundant data transfer and saving network bandwidth. Java-based GUI Target Source(s) Unified Admin Point With Monitoring TCP/IP DB2 Asynchron DB - Logs Publisher Engine Subscriber Engine and Metadata and Metadata IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture Scrape Push Apply Confirm Figure 1: Schematic illustration of the ChangeDataCapture migration method 5
- 6. IBM InfoSphere CDC includes data transformation and filtering, The principal migration steps were: such as translation of values, derivation of new calculated fields, • Install the SAP migration tools and joining of tables at the source or target. Custom data • Export structural data from the source systems transformations can be created, stored and retrieved within • Unload source system data in a database-independent InfoSphere CDC as macros, and row and column selection format makes it possible for users to limit access to sensitive • Transfer the structures and the data to the central instance of information, or to flow user-specific data to particular sites. the target system Additionally, data stored in various character sets and languages • Load the structural data in the target system and create the can be seamlessly replicated to disparate platforms. table definitions • Load data into the newly created tables on the target system Voith selected IBM DB2 as the target database because it met (data import) the key business criteria of lower operational costs and • Rework with the relevant SAP updates on the target systems enhanced business resilience. The close integration provided by • Post Migration Activities (such as installing new license keys, the SAP DBA Cockpit for DB2 significantly reduces the database maintaining new SAP profiles etc) administration workload, and simplifies management of the SAP • Test and documentation. application databases. Further, SAP’s own use of DB2 as its core database choice offered great confidence to Voith that DB2 was a long-term strategic partner for mission-critical applications. Production System continues / Logs are produced Source Ensure large enough undo tablespaces DB Ensure archive logs are accessible by CDC on Disk Change Data Capture -Stores simple transformation rules -Replicates data from Logfiles -Transforms data if required 4 SAPINST 2 - Install target database and SAP 3 CDC 1 - Create tables on target system Change Data Capture 5 - Initial Refresh of largest tables Target R3load - Final migration of small tables DB2 Figure 2: Technical steps of a CDC migration 6
- 7. The figures below show the data volumes, downtime and typical The figures below show the data volumes, downtime and typical compression rate achieved using DB2 Deep Compression for a compression rate for the largest table in the system, achieved using typical Oracle to DB2 migration of a larger database in March DB2 Deep Compression for an AIX/Oracle migration to a POWER5 2010. Also in this migration, Voith changed the server server and DB2. This migration was completed in November 2009, infrastructure from POWER5 to POWER6 processors: and this heterogeneous database migration included a transition to Unicode and from POWER5 to POWER6 processors: Source DB size: 1.7 TB Source DB size: 1.9 TB Largest Table: 93 GB Largest Table: 114 GB Downtime for migration: 8:50 hours Downtime for migration: 15:00 hours RUNSTATS: 3:00 hours RUNSTATS: 4:00 hours Target DB size: 680 GB Target DB size: 800 GB Largest table: 27 GB Largest table: 33 GB Database compression rate: 62 percent Database compression rate: 58 percent The largest tables were moved to two new tablespaces, to Compressing only the largest 10 to 100 tables already can shrink achieve smaller tablespaces that would allow improved backup the overall database size close to the optimum. The largest tables runtime (instance HP1). were moved to three new tablespaces to minimize the backup runtime (instance PP2). Instance DB Oracle in GB DB DB2 in GB Reduction in % Comment PK2 1428 796 44.26 COMPRESS_ALL PP2 1568 872 44.39 FULL_COMPRESS, additionally Unicode migration HP1 1300 651.4 49.89 COMPRESS_ALL AP1 2316 1535 33.72 COMPRESS_ALL Table 1: Achieved compression rate with DB2 Deep Compression 7
- 8. Server architecture To support the SAP applications and run the DB2 databases, The PowerHA cluster supported the critical applications on the IBM Business Partner SVA worked with Voith to deploy the new two machines, allowing production to continue even if one server AIX LPARs on the four 16-way POWER5 processor-based IBM suffered an unplanned outage. Power 570 servers, with 256 GB memory, with two servers installed in each data center. Using IBM System Storage SAN The LPAR technology allows Voith to over-commit its CPU Volume Controller (SVC), the servers were connected to two IBM resources by setting maximum allocations that exceed the System Storage DS8000 disk systems and several third-party physical CPU total. As the workload in each LPAR varies, storage devices. resources are made available as required from the physical processor and memory, allowing each LPAR to maximize In each data center, each server was divided into multiple throughput. Logical Partitions (LPARs), and also acted as its twin’s failover server using PowerHA. For example, Server 1 was divided into 19 LPARs, with allocations ranging from 4CPU to 0.1CPU, and Server 2 supported 20 LPARs with a similar allocation range. SAP Growth Program, Technical Sales IBM Germany Non IBM Storage IBM Storage: IBM DS8000 p570 #2, 16way@1,9GHZ p570 #4, 16way@1,9GHZ 384 GB Memory 384 GB Memory 8 * FC, 8 * ET 8 * FC, 8 * ET #2 #4 IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) #1 #3 p570 #1, 16way@1,9GHZ p570 #3, 16way@1,9GHZ 384 GB Memory 384 GB Memory 8 * FC, 8 * ET Intel Server (MS Windows) 8 * FC, 8 * ET Non SAP Figure 3: Part of the consolidated hardware topology at Voith 8 © 2010 IBM Corporation
- 9. Project achievements Storage architecture Performance improvements By implementing IBM SAN Volume Controller, Voith has been Following the successful introduction of the Power servers, Voith able to unify storage systems from multiple vendors, including installed two additional POWER6 processor-based systems HP and IBM. prior to the migration to DB2. As the SAP application landscape has expanded, the number of servers and LPARs has also SAN Volume Controller software is delivered pre-installed on grown. The original four POWER5 servers and the two additional SVC Storage Engines, ready for implementation once the POWER6 servers now support between 80 to 100 LPARs, which engines are attached to the SAN. SVC Storage Engines are is easily possible with the enhanced performance of the POWER based on proven IBM System x® server technology and are processors and PowerVM capabilities such as Virtual I/O deployed in redundant pairs, designed to deliver very high Servers and micropartitioning. availability. The migration of nearly 80 SAP systems from Oracle to DB2 was SVC takes control of existing storage, presenting the data delivered by IBM service representatives, and was completed in volumes to servers as a single storage pool. Only a single 11 months. storage driver type is needed for all servers or virtual server images, which simplifies administration by reducing complexity. Alongside the technical effects of data compression achieved in SVC eases replacing storage or moving data from one storage the migration to DB2, the database itself also consumes less type to another because these changes do not require changes main memory. Even though the amount of physical main memory to storage drivers. has remained unchanged, more main memory can be used per transaction. This allows DB2 to improve performance without requiring additional investment in memory or bandwidth. The results include: • Better CPU utilization, and CPU workload reductions for some systems – exploiting current processor investments to the maximum • Average SAP response time up to 20 percent faster – offering increased productivity for all SAP users • Better RAM utilization – avoiding the need for additional investments in memory capacity • Data on disk storage and in RAM is compressed – reducing the need to add storage and memory • Physical database RAM virtually typically 40 percent larger – more data can be put in memory, offering a better hit ratio and therefore better SAP application response time • I/O traffic reduced by up to 40 percent – fewer I/O operations mean improved performance. 9
- 10. With data storage savings, total I/O activity is reduced on a Figures 4, 5 and 6 show how response times have improved over proportionate basis. Although the CPU load is similar or slightly time. The x-axis shows the elapsed project months, the y-axis higher, the application response times have improved, in part the average response time in milliseconds. because more data can be put into the cache and memory cache hits are higher. By comparison, the Oracle databases consumed more database cache with a hit rate of about 97 percent. With DB2 the cache hit rate is more than 99 percent. For databases with up to 100 billion accesses per week, this incremental improvement has produced significant performance gains. 1000 900 800 800 700 700 600 600 500 500 400 400 300 300 200 200 100 100 0 0 Aug-09 Oct-09 Dec-09 Feb-10 Apr-10 Jun-10 Aug-09 Oct-09 Dec-09 Feb-10 Apr-10 Jun-10 response time DB time CPU time response time DB time CPU time 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 Aug-09 Oct-09 Dec-09 Feb-10 Apr-10 Jun-10 response time DB time CPU time Figure 4, 5 and 6: Response times before and after DB2 migration, illustrated with different examples with different database sizes 10
- 11. Next steps Voith is considering migrating to DB2 9.7, which includes index “ With DB2 Deep Compression we have compression as well as the current row compression technology reduced storage requirements by at (DB2 Deep Compression). This will further reduce data volumes, least 30 percent, and we are delivering which will help cut database backup times. It will also offer enhanced system and SAP application additional performance improvements. performance at lower operational costs.” Voith is planning to implement IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Bernd Nagel Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager in Q1 2011. This innovative Team Leader, UNIX, Storage and DB2 solution for backup, recovery and cloning in virtualized Voith environments includes special extensions for SAP data management. The highly automated Tivoli Storage Management solution provides flexibility, delivers detailed information on cloning, backup and performance status, and will eliminate major repetitive administrative workload efforts. 11
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