By upgrading its vital SAP® ERP applications to the SAP HANA® database running on powerful IBM® Power® System E870 servers, Boydak Holding enables business users to generate reports up to 120 times faster than before—lifting productivity. Meanwhile, shrinking the database by 74 percent helps save on storage infrastructure and accelerate backups.
To keep its mission-critical SAP ERP systems on the vendor’s standard support path and to improve performance for business users, Boydak Holding decided to upgrade to the SAP HANA database.
Boydak Holding upgraded its core SAP ERP systems to the SAP HANA platform running on state-of-the-art IBM Power System E870 servers, dramatically accelerating response times for business users.
Turkish conglomerate Boydak Holding incorporates diverse businesses operating in several markets—including furniture, textiles, chemicals, marketing, logistics and more. To maintain its leading position in multiple sectors, the company must operate efficiently and understand emerging challenges.
To meet these aims, Boydak Holding relies on a core set of SAP ERP (link resides outside of ibm.com) applications that support more than 3,000 employees in their daily work. Since the SAP solutions support so many personnel, it is vital to keep the software up-to-date and running optimally.
Ramazan Yildirim, IT Manager & SAP Basis Manager at Boydak Holding, begins: “Technology changes extremely quickly; if you don’t stay current, it’s hard to catch up again. SAP is our core strategic platform, and we eventually plan to migrate to next-generation SAP S/4HANA® (link resides outside of ibm.com) applications, for which the SAP HANA database is a prerequisite. As such, we knew that sooner or later we would need to migrate our mission-critical SAP ERP systems to SAP HANA, and we decided to do so in a controlled, low-risk way, rather than waiting until shortly before the deadline.
“Of course, we were also eager to give business users the higher performance that comes from in-memory technology, so that they could generate reports faster and ultimately work more productively. We set out to determine the best way to migrate our core systems to the SAP HANA platform.”
When Boydak Holding decided to adopt SAP HANA, its largest SAP systems were running on IBM AIX® on IBM Power System E870 servers with Oracle databases, and the group also had smaller instances on x86 servers running Solaris and Microsoft Windows.
The company decided to deploy the SAP HANA database on its existing IBM Power System E870 servers. In doing so, Boydak Holding took advantage of the Tailored Datacenter Integration architecture, which allows customers to leverage existing hardware and infrastructure components for their SAP HANA environment, rather than buying new appliances for each instance of SAP HANA.
“We chose to run SAP HANA on the IBM Power Systems platform, because the servers’ logical partitioning technology offers flexibility to help us efficiently manage dynamic operations,” explains Ramazan Yildirim. “In addition, by completing a Tailored Datacenter Integration deployment of SAP HANA using our own skilled internal resources, we were able to take advantage of our existing IBM Power Systems servers to support the new SAP HANA deployment, maximizing the value of our hardware investment.”
One Power System E870 server is located in each of the company’s two data centers. The servers are virtualized using IBM PowerVM® technology and host guest instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (link resides outside of ibm.com). For added resilience, Boydak Holding uses synchronous in-memory SAP HANA System Replication together with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension to mirror SAP HANA between its two sites.
To date, Boydak Holding has migrated the databases for three large SAP systems to SAP HANA, with two more to follow in the near future. In parallel, the company has upgraded its SAP ERP applications from SAP ECC 6 EHP 5 to SAP ECC 6 EHP 7 – an enhancement package that offers greater functionality.
Moving from a disk-based database to in-memory technology has produced remarkable performance gains for Boydak Holding. A sample of three reports shows speed increases of 1.68 times, 64 times and 126.5 times.
“At first, we couldn’t believe how much faster some SAP reports ran with SAP HANA,” remarks Ramazan Yildirim. “With very minimal modification, some reports that previously took ten minutes now complete in five seconds. For the business—and in particular the finance team, which generates many such reports—this means faster decisions and more analysis within the same timescales, helping to boost employee productivity and sharpen our competitive edge.”
The migration also cut the database size by 74 percent—from 1.78 TB in Oracle Database to 0.46 TB in SAP HANA—contributing to the performance increase and freeing up valuable disk space. As a result, Boydak Holding will be able to replicate, backup and recover its mission-critical SAP ERP data faster. Furthermore, the company can reduce its long-term investment in storage devices, saving money.
Furthermore, the migration to SAP HANA paves the way for Boydak Holding to implement SAP S/4HANA in future. The company anticipates that SAP S/4HANA will bring further benefits by enabling the consolidation of many business reports, speeding time-to-insight.
Ramazan Yildirim concludes: “SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems provides a robust, high-performance platform for our mission-critical SAP ERP applications. We are delighted with the results of the upgrade.”
Boydak Holding is a group of 29 companies active in seven different industries as diverse as finance and aviation. Best known for its prestigious home furniture brands Istikbal, Bellona and Mondi, Boydak Holding employs 11,500 people directly and supports a further 35,000 jobs in the Turkish economy.
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