TODAY'S CHALLENGE – A NEED FOR NEAR REAL-TIME ANALYTICS
Timely access to relevant information has always been critical to business success. Thousands and thousands of companies and institutions use SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse as the cornerstone for business intelligence in their SAP application landscapes. Query performance however has often been a challenge. The traditional approach was to build and maintain aggregates and to tune the queries. In many situations the use of SAP NetWeaver BW is limited to a relative low number of power users as well as predefined reports. Today however, companies need instant insight to run their business and spread the use of BW to many more users. They need a solution that delivers insight at orbit speed along with universal scalability. Near real-time analytics have become a "must have" and Centiq along with IBM and SAP have the right solution at hand.
THE SOLUTION: IBM SYSTEMS SOLUTION FOR SAP NETWEAVER BW ACCELERATOR
Centiq partner with IBM® and SAP® to offer an integrated solution that enables customers to deploy SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator in an easy, cost-effective way as a snap-in solution to an existing SAP NetWeaver BW landscape. Approved, tested and SAP certified appliance gives you the speed and flexibility needed to extend the reach of analytics based on SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse.
ASK THE EXPERTS:
COLLABORATION FOR YOUR SUCCESS
The SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) Appliance runs on a solution jointly provided by Centiq, IBM and SAP.
Shipped with Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor based Blade servers provide near real-time analytics for YOUR SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. The BWA Appliance crunches through terabytes of SAP NetWeaver BW data in a matter of seconds, without the need for dedicated database administrators building and maintaining pre-defined aggregates or spending valuable time on query performance tuning. IBM’s automated High Availability solution for BW Accelerator allows customers to implement BW Accelerator as mission critical system, at minimal effort using standard functionality.
SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator clearly extends traditional SAP NetWeaver BW software by delivering:
- Query processing up to 150 times faster than traditional approaches
- Smart data compression combined with in-memory processing and search engine-based parallel processing delivered with unmatched scalability, delivers increased speed, flexibility and business insight
- Empowers SAP NetWeaver BW users with turbo-charged insights and decision support
IBM BladeCenter® Technology is the perfect fit for the infrastructure requirements of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator:
- Offers fundamental design advantages that have made IBM a leader in Blade technology
- Ensures business continuity with built-in redundancy
- Offers unrivalled performance at low cost of operation by the broadest and deepest choice of available BW Accelerator configurations with the best of IBM’s green IT benefits applied and based on proven scalability
IBM System Storage™ products complement the solution with:
- Fast and reliable access to large volumes of data, unleashing your compressed data and information assets
- Dedicated fibre channel attachment, ensuring fast index updating and reducing general network I/O traffic for greater performance
- Robust systems with very high data integrity and fail-over capabilities for continuous operations
Centiq, IBM and SAP team extensively on the development and go-to-market aspects of this great solution. Over the last three years since the solution became available on the market, the majority of customers have selected and deployed this solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, as they recognise the tailored benefits of the solution as the best and most scalable in the industry. We continuously extend the solution to address new options for customers, where we are often first and unique. Examples include the use of the proven scalable and widely used IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), the validated and available option of 48 GB memory per Quad-core Blade, High-availability as standard feature of IBM GPFS, etc. Customers like Arcelor, Bayer, Bundeswehr, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, Endress+Hauser, Kyocera Mita, Lionsgate, Rabobank, T-Mobile, Volkswagen Financial Services and Wacker, already reported substantial achieved business benefits by the IBM based solution. In 2009 SAP was offered the IBM Beacon Award for the most outstanding Enterprise application solution by an ISV.
Example – Small Bladecentre S Appliance (24GB Online Memory)
This is the smallest supported IBM BWA solution and is ideal for smaller BI installations where the acceleration of a single or a small number of cubes is required. The BladeCenter S BWA solution is a single unit that can be deployed very quickly. SAS RAID controllers and disks are fully integrated in the BladeCenter S chassis along with the network switches.
This solution has two blades, they can both be configured as active in the BWA configuration or one blade can be configured as backup to provide high availability of the BWA software.
Solution Cost (inc. Support and Services) - £74,858.68
Example – Medium Bladecentre H Appliance (168GB Online Memory)
This typical size BWA solution. 6 blades are used actively in the BWA config and 1 blade is configured as a backup blade for high availability. This solution would provide adequate memory space to accelerate multiple cubes in an average size BI system or all cubes in a small system.
This solution uses the BladeCenter H which offers more redundancy than the BladeCenter S used in the smaller configurations. The blades do not have internal disks but instead boot directly from the attached DS4700 storage product which also houses the GPFS volumes.
Solution Cost (inc. Support and Services) - £187,911.98
Example – Large Bladecentre H Appliance (1,344GB Online Memory)
This final example is a large system. In most cases even large BI environments would be able to accelerate all cubes. When BWA is spread across multiple BladeCenters Centiq recommend using one backup blade per chassis.
As two BladeCenters are present in this solution it is necessary to use the Cisco 3110g GbE switches. These switches link together to form a single virtual switch with a 64Gb backbone. This eliminates external switching for inter-node communication.
Solution Cost (inc. Support and Services) - £578,520.24
Solution Benefits
- Dramatic enhancements in query response times, empowering information workers to become more effective and productive
- SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator enables organizations to run endless variations of ad-hoc queries and resolve performance constraints for database intensive queries
- Significant reduction in administrative effort (no need to build and maintain SAP aggregates anymore)
- Scalable architecture that can grow with increasing requirements means investment protection and flexibility to react to changing business needs
- Pre-tested, optimized and validated solution to ensure seamless integration, easy and quick implementation
BWA Real World Results
TAKING BW ACCELERATOR SCALABILITY TO THE NEXT LEVEL – Project “Jupiter”
By leveraging the pre-defined standard configurations from IBM, customers quickly realize the benefits from their initial BW Accelerator installations. Since many large SAP NetWeaver customers show a tremendous growth in the number of BW users and business data volumes in the tens to hundreds of Terabytes, the capability of a solution to scale economically becomes a critical proofpoint. In response to this challenge, IBM and SAP ran a Proof of Concept codenamed “Jupiter” at the IBM Poughkeepsie industry solutions stresstest center in Q4 2007 to address this issue. The project Jupiter results, independently audited and validated by WinterCorp, delivered the proof points for the solutions ability to smoothly scale from smaller installations to high-end configurations for more than 25 TB SAP BW Infocube data, whilst achieving remarkably consistent fast response times and excellent throughput figures (see graphic below). The lessons learned from this unique scalability test have been applied to our most current configurations, as of 2008. IBM & SAP deliver the necessary scalability for customers that need it. Today and tomorrow, still only available from IBM & SAP. Centiq are the only IBM and SAP partner for BW Accelerator that can offer this flexibility, scalability and stability with one and the same world-class file-system across all its configurations.
TAKING THE NEXT STEP:
You can take immediate advantage of the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. A first step is to determine an outline configuration for your respective SAP NetWeaver BW landscape. Centiq's fully flexible approach however starts with four categories (S, M, L and XL), with predefined server and storage configurations, validated by both IBM & SAP. Sizing tools from IBM and SAP (eg. SAP Notes and SAP Quicksizer) make the selection of the right BW Accelerator configuration(s) fast and easy. If needed, our solution experts are available to support you in this process.
BW ACCELERATOR SERVICE OFFERINGS
Centiq provides specific BW Accelerator service offerings to perform rapid implementation, deployment, maintenance and support services to keep the BW Accelerator solution up-to-date and at the latest levels. Should you require the solution to be integrated into specific IT processes like high availability, Centiq specialists are at your service. Functional training and consulting services on the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator application are also available to keep your business running real time, round the clock.
HIGHLY AVAILABLE AND FULLY FLEXIBLE:
Centiq’s innovative, token-based BWA support facility provides a flexible, cost effective and secure route to access a wide range of skills and services according to your resourcing and budgetary needs.
SERVICE BENEFITS INCLUDE:
- Maximise your technical efficiency through on-tap access to our highly skilled technical resources.
- Deliver support and services as they are needed, when they are needed: over the phone or on-site.
- Avoid problems by using the service for both quick advice and guidance as well as substantial project support.
- Use your support budget for a multitude of purposes including consultancy and training.
Our Token Based Support is almost infinitely flexible and can cover service areas such as:
- Day-to-day management and support of your BWA Environments.
- On-site Consultancy - access to our skilled consultants from our Professional Services Team.
- Assistance on Hardware and Software upgrades, including firmware.
- Planning advice and information for software fixes, patch identification, maintenance levels.
- Project Scoping
- Hardware Installations and Upgrades e.g. technology refresh.
- Remote or On-site System and Technology Health Checks.
- Diagnostic reviews to isolate the cause of a problem.
- Training: on-site or off-site.
- 3rd or 4th line technical support (e.g. for operating systems).
- Product compatibility and interoperability queries.
- Interpretation of product documentation.
- Monitoring of systems and applications (a permanent network connection, e.g. VPN, to Centiq Support Centre and an annual commitment of tokens is required).
- Capacity planning of CPU, memory and storage (monitoring option is required).
- Provision of ‘key man insurance’ strategies allowing Centiq staff to work as part of your team in case of loss of key technical or management personnel (e.g. through vacation, sickness etc.)
Tokens are pre-purchased and valid for the duration of the support contract. The unique token approach means that tokens are only ‘burnt’ as support is provided and for the exact amount you use.
When a call comes into our helpdesk, you assign a severity level. It is the combination of severity level and the length of time used to resolve the call completely that determines the number of tokens to be used. You can top up your pool of tokens during the life of the support contract.
All of the service is provisioned via our highly skilled central Centiq Helpdesk, the same Helpdesk that assist with the management of all our customers support and maintenance requirements allowing you a complete, one-stop facility and only one number to call.
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