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The Oracle RAC cluster solution is an excellent way of increasing scalability and system stability while reducing administrative workload. The whole system scales extremely well and peak loads are now a rare occurrence. We also saved a lot of money on hardware and third-party licenses. I warmly recommend Oracle RAC for SAP.

Bauerfeind AG + Projekt www.bauerfeind.com

ALEXANDER KFERLEIN, Data Centre/SAP Basis Manager, Bauerfeind AG

Industry:
Manufacturer of medical aids (compression stockings supports, orthoses, orthopedic insoles and shoes,prosthetic components)

R E D U C E D A D M I N I S T R AT I V E W O R K L O A D AND COSTS

Workforce:
1650 worldwide

Profile: Bauerfeind AG

In IT, good design is everything

Oracle Products:
Oracle Database 10g (10.2.04), Oracle RAC Real Application Clusters, 4 nodes

Benefits:
Excellent scalability Assurance of constant availability, better than with HACMP technology Reduced administrative workload and costs Lower hardware and license costs (HACMP / TSM) Straightforward implementation

Bauerfeind AG is a leading manufacturer of medical aids such as compression stockings, supports, orthoses, orthopedic insoles and shoes, prosthetic components and measuring technology. The midsize family business, founded in Zeulenroda, Germany in 1929, employs around 1650 people at two sites in Germany (Zeulenroda and Remscheid) and at 15 subsidiaries in Europe, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates. Its products are marketed around the world by over 70 distributors. Since 2005 there has also been an online ordering system for German-speaking trade partners.

Bauerfeind, now in its 80th year, is a highly innovative company with no less than five awards to its credit for product innovation and design. The JT20 prosthetic knee joint won the iF gold award, the iF product design award and the red dot design award. The SofTec Coxa hip orthosis was also honored with the iF product design award and the red dot design award. As well as assessing the overall design the jury was also interested in the degree of innovation, functionality, and durability of the product. Bauerfeind utilizes powerful IT systems across all business areas, and the IT team is continually evaluating key factors such as constant availability, speed, flexibility, agility, low costs, and minimal maintenance. It was for this reason that Bauerfeind became an early adopter of leading SAP and Oracle solutions, and in fact we previously reported on the companys successful use of the Oracle Database index compression option.

SAP:
40 central systems, ERP ECC6.0, Internet Sales 5.0, CRM 4.0 with Mobile Sales, NetWeaver 2004s, (BI 7.0, XI 7.0, EP 7.0), Solution Manager, GTS 7.1

Infrastructure:
IBM: 2x Power 570 (16 CPUs, 196GB RAM), 2x Power6 570 (8 CPUs, 92GB), 2x Power 520 GPFS tiebreaker nodes, 8x JS22 Blade Power6 (4 CPUs, 32GB), 2 mirrored SVC clusters in SAN. Operating system AIX 5.3 TL8 / 6.1 TL2 SP2, LPARs uncapped

SAP on RAC at Bauerfeind

24 x 7 x 365

The dynamically evolving markets created by globalization are confronting businesses with new challenges in relation to their IT landscapes. The company simply cannot afford a system failure or excessive response times for its web portal (used 24 hours a day, 365 days a year) and all other critical software applications. The computing resources of the 40 central SAP systems need to respond quickly to changing load requirements. This presents Bauerfeinds IT team with an ongoing challenge. Added to this are the roundthe- clock availability requirements and ever smaller maintenance windows for updates, backups and troubleshooting. The workload this placed on the SAP Basis administration team, who often had to cram a lot of work into one weekend, coupled with the companys dissatisfaction with the existing HACMP cluster solution, meant that a new, powerful, easy-to-use cluster solution was needed. The aim was to achieve better scalability (allowing the system to be expanded by simply adding new hardware instead of costly replacements), greater system stability, a reduction in administrative workload, and a reduction in the costs of licenses and IT infrastructure.
Fast migration, excellent scalability

Encouraged by the promising first results, and the excellent support from Oracle SAP experts, the team successfully converted the BI development and QA system to Oracle RAC in October/November 2008. To validate the planned next steps it was decided to perform more availability and flexibility tests. The results were so successful that the first two RAC cluster nodes with SAP BW/BI went into productive operation on IBM Power6 570 in December 2008. Impressed by the smoothness of the conversion process and the resulting benefits, from December to January the team began to port the SAP ERP development and QA system. There were a few teething problems with performance, but these were quickly resolved by increasing the shared_pool_size to 3GB, adding new database patches (including blocking at database level), additional tuning in the GPFS, and updating various database parameters. Since the end of January 2009, SAP BI and the ERP QA / development system have been in smooth, powerful productive operation on two nodes. Remarkably, this was after a testing and conversion phase of just four months.
There have even been cases where neither we nor our users have noticed a cluster node failure because with Oracle RAC the system balances itself so well on the remaining servers! Alexander Kferlein, Data Centre / SAP Basis Manager at Bauerfeind AG.

Impressed with the Oracle Database as the standard database for SAP, in April 2008 the company began evaluating the Oracle RAC technology and ways of implementing it for SAP. After attending a workshop at the Oracle Database for SAP Global Technology Center in Walldorf, Germany and quickly obtaining SAP approval, it was decided in June 2008 to introduce the new cluster solution. The team headed up by Alexander Kferlein opted for SAP BW/BI as a suitable entry-level system. Once the system had been converted to Unicode and the GPFS was up and running, the Oracle RAC tests got underway in September 2008.

Great scalability, but what about the costs?

Benefits gained- Excellent scalability

Taking full advantage of the scalability of the Oracle RAC cluster solution, in March 2009 Bauerfeind replaced the existing IBM Power6 570 servers with low-cost IBM JS22 blades. This added two smaller database instances the existing two RAC nodes to make a total of four nodes. As a result the company was able to eliminate the TSM license fees while benefiting from the excellent scalability of the overall system. Peak loads are now a rare occurrence. Alexander Kferlein comments: There have even been cases where neither we nor our users have noticed a cluster node failure because with Oracle RAC the system balances itself so well on the remaining servers! And as he points out, it is obviously essential to have enough application servers.

Assurance of constant availability, better than with HACMP technology Reduced administrative workload and costs Lower hardware and license costs (no HACMP/no TSM) Straightforward implementation Users do not notice any failures that do occur Goal achieved
Moving on

As a result of the consistently good results achieved, and in particular the excellent support from the Oracle Database SAP technology team in Walldorf, SAP ERP with Oracle RAC went into productive operation in June 2009. Bauerfeinds other systems with high availability requirements are to follow suit by the end of 2009. Once that is complete, Alexander Kferlein is sure to be reporting back on the process at SAP and Oracle events and sharing some invaluable tips.