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Founded in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949, the Otto Group is a globally operating trading and services corporation with 123 companies and more than 52,000 employees on three continents. In its core business segment, mail-order distribution, the Otto Group has been the world market leader for many years. The organization operates such well-known German brands as OTTO, Hermes Logistik, EOS, the Hanseatic Bank, and SportScheck.

As the company has grown, its IT infrastructure has become larger and more complex. Currently, the central IT environment is based in two datacenters at the Otto Group’s headquarters in Hamburg. A system of dedicated servers there has developed into a heterogeneous infrastructure that uses different versions of the Windows and Linux operating systems. With this expansion of IT infrastructure, a growing number of small-scale standalone servers have developed.

In the past year, the Otto Group was faced with the challenge of modernizing the infrastructure while slowing uncontrolled growth. Also, the requirements of the company’s individual specialist departments had been on the rise. “More and more applications require application servers and databases, and those applications are becoming more closely interlinked,” says Dirk Möller, project manager for the Otto Group. “The demand for real-time access has now very much superseded the need for batch processing.”

To address these challenges, the organization decided to virtualize more than 80 production servers as well as simultaneously increase the availability of servers and applications and reduce the overall number of systems. In addition, the company sought to standardize the infrastructure and simplify IT administration.

A team led by Möller analyzed what types of servers and applications would be right for virtualization and decided that, for migration purposes, the servers should have no more than 2 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 80 GB of disk storage. The team then committed to VMware as the virtualization platform. “VMware offers a type of pseudo-clustering that provides the opportunity for a marked increase in availability, and that was crucial for our needs,” says Möller.

The team then decided that AMD Opteron–based systems from Sun Microsystems, including the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and Sun Fire X4100 M2 server, would be the best hardware platform for the VMware ESX servers. “We opted for Sun because our intention was to adopt a multivendor strategy, and also for the simple reason that the solution was the right one for us,” explains Möller.

With the capacity to upgrade to 8 AMD dual-core processors, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server delivers up to 16 paths and contains high levels of redundancy. The product also offers system component changing capabilities. At the beginning of the project, the Otto Group team opted for four semi-configured systems that offered ample space for future expansion. The Sun Fire X4100 M2 servers, operating with two AMD dual-core processors, were to be deployed as management servers for the VMware virtual servers.

The Otto Group chose technology company T-Systems, which it had worked with previously, to oversee the implementation. Christoph Dyballa, Otto Group director of IT operations and infrastructure, was impressed with both T-Systems and Sun. “As the main point of contact, T-Systems has always acted promptly and reliably,” he says. “In the few cases in which the hardware had to be adapted, Sun proved to be a reliable and cooperative partner. Solutions were always found and implemented quickly and without hassle.”

Once deployment was complete, it quickly became apparent that the Otto Group would be able to substantially reduce the time and effort required to set up new servers. The organization also quickly realized its goals of increasing availability and simplifying administration of the virtual servers.

The project team also took advantage of the expansion capacity of the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server. As a result, the team decided to virtualize more servers than originally planned. Instead of the anticipated 80 servers, 160 servers were migrated to the VMware platform. Over the course of the implementation, the number of Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers grew from four to eight.

“The ability to upgrade our virtualization platform quickly and easily is exactly what we need, in response to the demand for real-time application access,” says Möller. Additionally, because virtualization has made the provision of new services faster, the expectations of Otto Group departments and users have risen. “Internal customers quickly get used to this new level of service quality,” Möller states.

Careful project preparation and the right choice of partners paid off, Möller adds. “We have been able to stick to our schedule, thanks in no small part to the hardware. Our decision to virtualize and reduce the level of complexity in the datacenters has been the right one and has had a positive impact — particularly on our users in the various departments. We have been able to achieve all of the goals that we set.”

 
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