Success Story
Canadian Utility Company
Improves Customer Service
and Cash Flow with SAP
on FlexPod
Another NetApp
solution delivered by:
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Industry
Utilities
The Challenge
Maintain excellent customer
service and reduce risk by
providing predictable performance
for SAP® Utilities, SAP CRM, and
other business-critical workloads.
The Solution
Migrate applications and databases
to a FlexPod® environment and use
storage quality-of-service (QoS)
policies in the NetApp® clustered
Data ONTAP® operating system to
meet performance requirements.
Benefits
• Enables consistent revenue
collection, improving cash flow
• Improves customer service and
call center efficiency
• Reduces SAP storage TCO
by 50%
• Accelerates SAP upgrades and
deployments by 25%
An energy powerhouse
With its vast natural resources, Canada
is already the fifth largest producer of
energy in the world. It also has enormous potential for renewables, with
wide expanses that could be used for
wind and solar power generation. Provincial governments have jurisdiction
over the generation and production of
electricity, which is sold to the public
through regulated utilities.
This Canadian utility company uses
SAP applications to keep its business
moving. SAP Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) provides account
information to customer service professionals in the utility’s call center, while
SAP Utilities (IS-U) automates billing
and revenue collection. The utility also
depends on SAP business intelligence
applications for revenue forecasting.
The Challenges
Achieving consistent, predictable
performance
The utility must avoid downtime for
SAP at all costs, and maintaining
consistent performance is equally
important. Each SAP application has
a “runbook”, or nightly compilation
procedure, that must complete within
a predictable time window. The IS-U
runbook is directly tied to revenue collection. If it does not complete on time,
billing delays can occur and cash flow
could be impacted. The CRM runbook
is linked to customer satisfaction. If call
center employees cannot access customers’ account information, customer
service grinds to a halt.
When upgrading to new versions of SAP
applications, the utility must make sure
that runbooks still complete within time
windows that are acceptable to the business. New releases offer compelling
features but often demand more compute and storage resources.
The Solution
Converged infrastructure lowers risk
As the utility began the testing and development cycles for a major SAP upgrade,
it decided to virtualize SAP applications
with VMware® vSphere® as part of a move
to a converged infrastructure. It turned to
its trusted technology advisor, Long View,
for recommendations. Long View helped
the utility evaluate two competing converged infrastructure solutions—FlexPod
and Vblock—to determine which would
best support the utility’s future growth.
Business Benefits
Together, Long View and the utility
determined that FlexPod, which includes
NetApp storage systems and Cisco®
data center and networking solutions,
was a better fit for the utility’s business
requirements and IT skill sets. The utility also wanted to virtualize its FlexPod
environment using VMware vSphere. A
long-time NetApp customer, the utility
was impressed with the ease of using
NetApp storage. NetApp also offered
three technologies that were instrumental in reducing risk for SAP and other
applications:
• Secure multi-tenancy: Storage virtual machine technology in NetApp
clustered Data ONTAP allows administrators to configure completely
separate storage environments for
applications sharing the same FlexPod
system. This will enable the utility to
move its Genesys Contact Center
application into the FlexPod clustered
storage environment, improving call
center efficiency and uptime.
• Quality of service (QoS): Storage
QoS policies in NetApp clustered
Data ONTAP can be used to throttle
rogue workloads and give priority to
SAP runbooks. Without QoS, it would
be difficult for the utility to guarantee
the necessary throughput and IOPS to
keep its SAP runbook times consistent.
• Intelligent caching: When the utility introduced NetApp Flash Cache™
PCIe-based caching, the SAP runbook
time decreased by two hours, providing the headroom it needed for the
next SAP upgrade.
The utility also benefits from NetApp
storage efficiency and data protection
technologies. Deduplication and thin
Another NetApp
solution delivered by:
cloning help maximize storage utilization,
while array-based replication and diskto-disk backup protect SAP data for
disaster recovery purposes.
Reducing storage TCO for SAP by 50%
The FlexPod Datacenter solution was
deployed, configured, and ready for
SAP testing and development in just
two weeks, meeting a crucial business
deadline. Moving SAP to FlexPod helped
speed testing and quality assurance,
accelerating the entire upgrade process
by 25% and giving the utility faster time
to value for new SAP features. Overall,
moving to FlexPod reduced storage and
data management costs for SAP by 50%
and cut the underlying hardware footprint
in half. Meanwhile, the utility is spending much less time, power, and cooling
supporting FlexPod compared to what it
spent with its previous systems.
Keeping customers happy and cash
flowing
With FlexPod, the utility can anticipate,
automate, and manage SAP performance even as application demands
increase. As the environment grows, the
utility can scale its storage nondisruptively while retaining full application and
data mobility. That means it can enable
uninterrupted customer service and
consistent revenue collection—two
primary goals for every utility.
About Long View
Long View is one of the most powerful
IT solutions and services companies in
North America, with offices across the
continent. With a clear focus on combining business and technology through
our Hybrid IT solutions, including cloud,
IT infrastructure, managed services, and
end user support, Long View is able to
define and customize what the future
of IT looks like for its clients. Innovative,
flexible, cost-effective, and business
focused...that’s Long View.
Leading organizations worldwide count
on NetApp for software, systems and
services to manage and store their data.
Customers value our teamwork, expertise
and passion for helping them succeed
now and into the future.
www.netapp.com
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
FlexPod Components
NetApp FAS8080 and FAS8020
storage systems running clustered
Data ONTAP
NetApp Flash Cache
Cisco Unified Computing System™
blade servers
Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series switches
NetApp Software
NetApp Snapshot® and
SnapRestore® technologies
NetApp SnapManager® for
Microsoft® SQL Server®
NetApp SnapManager for Oracle®
NetApp SnapMirror®
NetApp SnapVault®
NetApp FlexClone®
NetApp deduplication
Environment
Applications: SAP Customer
Relationship Management 7,
SAP ECC/IS-U 6, SAP BW 7.1,
BusinessObjects, and Genesys
Contact Center
Databases: Oracle 11g and
Microsoft SQL Server
Virtualization: VMware vSphere
Operating Systems: SUSE Linux®
Enterprise 11and Windows Server®
Protocols
NFS
iSCSI
CIFS
Fibre Channel
© 2015 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may
be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications
are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Data
ONTAP, Flash Cache, FlexClone, FlexPod, SnapManager, SnapMirror,
SnapRestore, Snapshot, and SnapVault are trademarks or registered
trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
SAP is a registered trademark of SAP AG. VMware vSphere is a registered
trademark of VMware, Inc. Cisco and Nexus are registered trademarks
and Unified Computing System is a trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc.
Microsoft, SQL Server, and Windows Server are registered trademarks
of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle
Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other
brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective holders and should be treated as such. CSS-6788-0215
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