BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH

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Enter any home in Germany, and there’s a good chance that you’ll find a domestic appliance such as a washing machine or a dishwasher manufactured by BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. The company, headquartered in Munich, Germany, has been one of the leaders in its domestic market for many years, and it has developed a significant presence across Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and Asia. Among its brands, Bosch and Siemens are the most internationally recognized. In the minds of many consumers, they represent both innovation and high quality, and today they are becoming just as well known for their efficient use of energy.

BSH’s core IT infrastructure is located at the main datacenter in Munich. At its heart is an SAP environment whose databases each contain between 5 TBs and several hundred GBs of data. To understand the value of the SAP system, imagine the company as a giant machine where SAP software is the lubricant keeping the individual parts moving and in sync. If the system is down for even a few hours, production can come to a halt and orders can be delayed. So when the company looked to replace the environment’s underlying hardware systems, the selection criteria were thorough. Leading the list were increased performance and energy efficiency. The latter was particularly important because of BSH’s stance on manufacturing more environmentally friendly products. In addition, the organization wanted to see a scalable solution that was easy to manage and reliable. Wolfgang Kopp, infrastructure manager at BSH adds, “We only had a very brief window of time to replace the platform.”

Sun was at an advantage because its server hardware and storage were already supporting the SAP environment. The technology was stable and reliable, but less compact, high performing, and energy efficient than the latest products on the market. Despite the good relationship with Sun, BSH approached other leading IT solution providers for proposals to make sure it gained a platform that best suited its business requirements. After the review process, BSH chose a Sun-based solution over those of the competition. Kopp says, “We selected Sun because its proposal completely satisfied our stability requirements. In addition, a Sun/SAP environment was a proven concept, so the risk of breakdown or fault was the lowest.”

The Sun solution, which runs on the Solaris 10 Operating System, covers three SAP-related platforms. The first handles the databases and consists of mainframe-class Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers. This model is Sun’s highest-performing and largest multiprocessor enterprise machine, delivering enormous scalability — 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 final 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. These servers also deliver mainframe-class computing along with advanced virtualization technologies. BSH took advantage of this 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. Kopp adds, “I can free up a server for maintenance purposes by temporarily shifting the virtual servers between physical servers.” Kopp and his team also have the benefit of the Sun N1 Advanced Architecture, which enables them to deploy applications across the environment faster.

Such a crucial system as the SAP environment was not going to be migrated in a matter of weeks. In fact, BSH needed almost a year to completely move the software over to the new Sun hardware. “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. By the end, we had switched over a total of 50 SAP applications without a single end user being affected,” says Kopp.

The performance of the new Sun solution has been impressive. Plus, by working with Sun Preventive Services, the IT team can take a more proactive approach to managing the technology. As before, BSH works with just one hardware provider for its SAP environment, making it easier to manage the supplier relationship, and, as before, the new solution has a single operating system across the three platforms. The advantage this time is that the environment runs on the latest version of the Solaris OS — Solaris 10 —which comes with improvements in virtualization performance, throughput, security, and availability. 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 that means a reduced output in carbon dioxide of 792 tons a year. Says Kopp, “For an environmentally aware group — voted Germany’s most sustainable company in 2008 — that’s the ultimate accomplishment.”