Hosting services and private-cloud provider OEDIV is building the capacity to attract more larger customers than ever before by creating the ability to scale big, mission-critical SAP HANA databases beyond previous limits. Today, using solutions from IBM®, SAP, and SUSE, based on best practices and blueprints designed by IBM, OEDIV can handle rapid data growth flexibly and cost-effectively, to support its customers’ advanced digital transformation journeys.
Martin Stratmann, CEO at OEDIV, says, “As our industry is changing rapidly, we have to constantly reinvent our business. We act as trusted advisor for our customers to find optimized, tailored solutions, able to handle availability and performance challenges even at peak times. By introducing higher levels of standardization and greater automation we can increase our business efficiency, which is hugely beneficial for our clients. At the same time, technologies from IBM, SAP, and SUSE enable us to grow beyond capacity and performance limitations, doubling our private-cloud capacity without adding more people to the team—a massive success that unlocks new business opportunities and boosts our profitability.”
OEDIV has provided hosted and private-cloud IT services to leading and growing medium-sized businesses for many years. The company’s clients are from a wide range of industries, and all of them rely on the highest levels of availability—for example, to keep checkouts running, or to ensure that supply chains always deliver, or to guarantee that production lines constantly turn.
Andreas Hingst, Executive Manager—Infrastructure & Cloud Services at OEDIV, says, “Our customers are continuing with their digital transformation projects, leading to ever-more complex business processes and larger data volumes. For many customers, every minute counts, and delays quickly accumulate, leading to high recovery costs and lost revenues. As a result, availability has become a key priority for us to ensure smooth business operations for our customers at all times.”
To provide premium-level service, OEDIV invested significant time, effort, and personnel into system maintenance and operational excellence. But as the company grew, it became clear that its existing IT infrastructure was reaching its performance, capacity, and reliability limits, making it difficult to onboard new clients.
OEDIV looked for a complete, integrated solution stack that would help the company improve operational efficiency and deliver higher availability.
“To deliver premium services, we needed a premium platform,” says Martin Stratmann. “Our goal was to implement a reliable, scalable, and easy-to-manage solution that would allow us to serve new customers and develop our private cloud business. IBM and SUSE ticked all the boxes with a comprehensive solution, and together with IBM’s outstanding HANA Total Solution Support, we have the confidence that whatever our customers ask for, we can deliver.”
OEDIV selected IBM Power Systems, IBM FlashSystem® (built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize), and IBM Spectrum Protect, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and SUSE Manager (link resides outside IBM) with automation from the Salt configuration engine to run 400 SAP S/4HANA® applications and SAP HANA databases.
The company has consolidated its infrastructure by combining 11 x86 workloads to one IBM Power Systems server. OEDIV has reduced maintenance downtime by 95 percent, supporting smooth client experiences and mission-critical 24/7 manufacturing. The integrated solution stack helped the company to streamline processes, and reduced the number of business departments involved in IT operations by 50 percent.
Building on its success, OEDIV plans to expand the solution to take on more customers—and in the second half of 2021, OEDIV will extend its server and storage capacity by 50 percent.
Martin Stratmann continues, “With the IBM and SUSE solutions in place, OEDIV benefits from scalability that just works, and with exceptionally low operating costs. We don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, which gives us more time to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys.”
Andreas Hingst adds, “Managing ongoing conversations through IBM HANA Total Solution Support greatly improves coordination. Combining IBM and SUSE solutions with the advanced automation capabilities has transformed our SAP HANA hosting business; for example, we can provision new systems in only 30 minutes. Instead of troubleshooting, we can focus on customers’ business challenges.”
Now, OEDIV wants to enable Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 with Utility Capacity. This enhanced resource-sharing offering is built on IBM Cloud®, and will unlock further cost-savings with flexible scaling options, including by-the-minute consumption and billing. OEDIV is also working with IBM to evaluate how IBM PowerAI and machine learning can help its customers mine transaction data for insights and predictive analytics.
To scale its private cloud, OEDIV and IBM joined forces in several workshops. The result was a standardized solution with eight IBM Power System E980 servers and four IBM FlashSystem storage solutions. The company uses SAP HANA system replication to mirror vital data across two locations.
Martin Stratmann continues, “By building an integrated solution with IBM FlashSystem and IBM Power Systems, we improved the performance of the technology stack by 40 percent. Built-in reliability features enable maintenance without customer impact. We have not experienced any unplanned downtime in 24 months.”
The company uses IBM PowerVM® virtualization and IBM PowerVC automation to adjust system size and performance to meet agreed service levels. To maximize system utilization and minimize costs, the team dynamically manages workloads using IBM Live Partition Mobility and relies on IBM Spectrum Protect for backup and to add quick recovery capabilities.
OEDIV runs SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. Andreas Hingst explains, “By standardizing on SUSE Linux, we benefit from our extensive knowledge. We use the integrated Salt configuration engine in SUSE Manager and IBM PowerVC to create a seamless user experience with a self-service portal for engineers.”
OEDIV (Oetker Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung KG) Managed Soljutions (link resides outside IBM) is part of the international Oetker Group, one of the largest family-owned businesses in Europe, employing more than 36,000 people and generating annual revenues of 7.33 billion euros. Oetker Group has been an early SAP customer and OEDIV is a certified SAP hosting partner and SUSE partner. Focused on leading medium-sized businesses that need the highest levels of availability for their global operations, OEDIV offers premium hosting and services closely tailored to specific customer requirements and delivered from two data centers in Germany.
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