Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin Unit Moves SAP from UNIX to Windows, Cuts Technology Cost 41 Percent

SAP software is mission critical to the Missiles and Fire Control unit of global aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which wanted to significantly reduce the costs of its deployment while improving its performance. Its solution: migrate the SAP infrastructure from Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) platforms running UNIX to the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 on Intel technologies. The company expects to save up to 41 percent of SAP hardware (server and storage), software, and maintenance costs over the next five years—while exceeding the performance it saw on the RISC-based UNIX solution. That in turn contributes to the company’s business agility and competitiveness, helping it to continue to lead in its highly competitive market.

Situation

Lockheed Martin is well known as one of the world’s premier aerospace and defense suppliers. As such, it’s also one of the world’s largest manufacturers, producing a broad range of electronic and integrated systems, aeronautics, and space systems. Its operations are massive, with U.S.$37.2 billion in 2005 sales, produced by more than 135,000 employees in 939 facilities in 457 cities and 45 states throughout the United States plus another 56 nations and territories.

SAP on Windows and SQL Server meets or exceeds all of our performance criteria. Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems Manager, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

To run its manufacturing and enterprise resource operations, Lockheed Martin has relied on SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for nearly a decade. The company had become a major customer of SAP, deploying both SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) systems, with multiple production instances deployed across the corporation in the U.S. All of these SAP instances were installed on UNIX-based technologies with Oracle as the database.

By 2003, one of the largest SAP production instances at Lockheed Martin was at the company’s Missiles and Fire Control unit, with about 1.65 terabytes of data spread across its R/3 and NetWeaver BI systems (1.2 terabytes in R/3 and 450 gigabytes [GB] in the BI), 4,700 users, with 1,000 concurrent users. Missiles and Fire Control used the entire R/3 suite, including Finance (FI), Controlling (CO), Materials Management (MM), Quality Management (QM), Project Systems (PS), Production Planning (PP), and portions of Human Resources (HR) for handling Time and Attendance (CATS) and Travel Management. In addition, the company uses the SAP discrete industries solution (DIMP) for many customizations unique to its industry.

From the initial deployment, Missiles and Fire Control had chosen to run its SAP system on a combination of UNIX hardware and software with an Oracle database.

“UNIX and Oracle had been a logical choice for us,” says Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems Manager at Lockheed Martin, Missiles and Fire Control. “In the late 1990s, we felt it was the best platform for price and performance. And we had a history with UNIX and Oracle in our environment.”

But by late 2003, the Missiles and Fire Control unit was ready to reconsider that choice. With the SAP environment growing at a rate of 33 percent for R/3 per year, costs—for everything from data storage to system maintenance—were certain to grow. Reliability remained a factor for a system of such mission-critical importance.

“We wanted maximum reliability,” says Eckhout. “Clustering would have been one way to achieve it, but we had several false starts with UNIX clustering in the SAP environment.”

Solution

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control had an alternative to consider: the Microsoft® server product line, including the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 running on Intel technologies.

Looking for Lower Cost

“SQL Server had become a more powerful, enterprise-ready solution since we first adopted Oracle,” says Eckhout. “And we thought

We must continue to lead in our markets and SAP running on Windows will help us to do that. Dwight Custis, Vice President of IT, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

the combination of Windows Server [2003] and SQL Server [2005] on open, standards-based hardware, could lead to significantly lower costs. In a highly competitive marketplace, running as lean as possible is extremely important. The question was: could Windows®-based servers and Intel technologies support an SAP environment as large as ours and improve reliability and performance?”

It was a good question because Lockheed Martin would be one of the first companies in its industry to migrate from UNIX to Windows Server–based software for its SAP environment.

To answer it, the company consulted with other large manufacturers who had made the move. It confirmed that the UNIX-to-Windows migration could be implemented successfully and that DBAs would be more productive on SQL Server than on Oracle because of the former’s easier management.

The due diligence work was productive, helping Missiles and Fire Control to decide to implement its solution on the 64-bit versions of Windows Server and SQL Server, and to wait for the newest version of SQL Server—SQL Server 2005—which was released shortly before Missiles and Fire Control began to implement its migration.

For hardware, Missiles and Fire Control chose IBM xSeries® servers based on the 64-bit Intel® Xeon® processor, which provides enterprise-class performance and reliability for 32-bit and 64-bit computing. The external storage infrastructure backbone is the IBM System Storage® DS4800 disk subsystem with IBM TotalStorage™ 3584 Tape Library to materially reduce daily back-up time.

“We wanted the greater memory footprint of 64-bit SQL Server [2005] to ensure we could handle our entire batch processing, which ranges up to 33,000 dialog steps per day. We are moving as high as 131 gigabytes of data between R/3 and the database,” says Eckhout.

A proof-of-concept conducted at the Microsoft Technology Center in Dallas, Texas, demonstrated the value of high-availability clustering in SQL Server 2005 and made the Missiles and Fire Control team comfortable with an active-passive cluster database implementation.

A Concern for Support

One concern of the Missiles and Fire Control team was getting the support it would need for a solution running on Microsoft and Intel technologies.

“Previously, we went to a single vendor for our hardware, operating system, and applications issues,” he says. “Our major concern with the Windows-based architecture was having multiple vendors and the risk of support issues falling between the gaps.”

All of our vendors worked extremely well together to achieve excellent results. Companies that we once viewed as vendors, we now view as partners. Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems Manager, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

Those multiple vendors were Microsoft for the software, IBM for the hardware, SAP for the application software, and REALTECH for implementation of the migration, with support from Intel. Far from being an actual problem, however, the support situation for the new platform was a big plus, according to Eckhout.

“All of our vendors worked extremely well together to achieve excellent results,” he says. “Companies that we once viewed as vendors, we now view as partners.”

A variety of factors contributed to that coordination and success. Perhaps most important was a detailed project plan that addressed all potential risks in the migration process. For example, the partners recommended a three-week performance testing period, including testing by business users.

Because the SAP graphical user interface doesn’t change in a typical migration, many companies omit user testing. Such testing allowed the partners to check not just how well specific queries were performing in the new environment, but also how users perceived that performance, enabling them to make any required adjustments.

In addition, Missiles and Fire Control and the partners established a detailed schedule of status meetings, including weekly internal meetings, biweekly partner meetings, and steering committee meetings for team leaders.

The partners worked together when problems arose, and performance assurance on the hardware configuration and a fixed-bid price for the migration implementation transferred risk from Missiles and Fire Control to its partners. As a result, the migration was “better, faster, smoother than I  anticipated,” says Eckhout.

Migrating Business Intelligence First

Missiles and Fire Control chose to migrate its SAP NetWeaver BI implementation first to minimize the risk to mission-critical R/3 applications while it gained migration experience that it could then apply to a second-step R/3 migration. The BI migration was completed between January and March 2006. The R/3 migration began in May 2006 and is scheduled for completion in September 2006.

The solution uses Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and Tidal Horizon for proactive monitoring.

The new environment is hosted on 16 IBM System x servers. The production environment consists of an active-passive pair of

Now we have a centralized, consolidated view of all events and errors in the SAP system. Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems Manager, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

quad-processor IBM System x 3950 servers (formerly the x460 series) powered by the 64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP for the database and four dual-processor x360 Intel Xeon processor–based servers as application servers. A third System x 3950 server at a remote site supports disaster recovery through the use of SQL Server 2005 log shipping and another System x 3950 server supports the production-instance NetWeaver BI.

Benefits

As a result of its migration from Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC)–based UNIX to Windows-based servers, Missiles and Fire Control expects to cut SAP hardware and software costs by 41 percent and exceed UNIX performance.

Cuts Costs by 41 Percent

Missiles and Fire Control first considered Windows Server–based software for its SAP environment to reduce costs. Its detailed projections show that the Microsoft and Intel solution will do just that—by 41 percent over the next five years, compared to the cost of continuing on the UNIX and Oracle platform. The savings are all “hard dollar” savings for hardware, software, and maintenance.

One of the greatest savings is in software maintenance costs, which Missiles and Fire Control projects to drop by 42 percent as the business unit reduces its Oracle licenses and the need for contracted software maintenance. Missiles and Fire Control expects additional hard-costs savings in data storage to come through efficiencies and self-tuning abilities of SQL Server and IBM data storage hardware. These savings have yet to be realized or measured but early analysis shows them to be significant.

“We believed that we could run a much leaner operation by migrating from UNIX to Windows for our SAP infrastructure,” says Randy Reeves, IT Financial & Computer Asset Manager. “Both our hardware and software requirements are now lower—which also makes it more feasible for us to expand as needed to support our growth.”

As a result of the cost savings, Missiles and Fire Control expects an internal rate of return from the migration of 29 percent with payback in three years, making it a highly successful investment for the unit.

Exceeds UNIX/RISC Performance

Missiles and Fire Control wanted to save costs and increase performance by migrating to Windows-based servers. After testing the configuration and deploying the SAP NetWeaver BI, Eckhout and his colleagues say they are on track to achieve this goal.

“SAP on Windows-based software, Intel processors, and IBM hardware meets or exceeds all of our performance criteria,” says Eckhout. The solution supports 83,726 dialog steps per hour, subsecond response, and significantly improved batch processing times. Chris Church, SAP Basis Administrator, says that refining the deployment will enable Missiles and Fire Control to achieve virtually 100 percent availability.

Much of the reliability of the new environment comes from the ability to use Windows Server–based software such as MOM 2005. “MOM [2005] and Tidal Horizon are very big for us,” says Eckhout. “We weren’t doing as much proactive maintenance before. Now we have a centralized, consolidated view of all events and errors in the SAP system. We could get that before with SAP, but not out of the box, easily implemented, without weeks of tweaking. Now we get daily reports of how our batch jobs ran, so we can address any issues, and we get a daily checklist for administrators. That’s automatic—and it was something we had to produce manually before.”

For Missiles and Fire Control, the integration of SAP and Microsoft software extends beyond MOM 2005. “We have to integrate SAP with our e-mail system, with our word-processing system, and with a range of other systems that are all Microsoft products,” says Dwight Custis, Vice President of IT for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “This integration improves our use of both SAP and Microsoft products.”

Increases Competitiveness

Far from being purely technical benefits, the lower cost and equal or greater performance of Windows Server–based software as compared to UNIX has bottom-line business benefits for Missiles and Fire Control.

“Because we can do more for less with SAP on Windows instead of UNIX, we can increase our responsiveness while streamlining our cost base,” says Custis. “That makes us more competitive. We must continue to lead in our markets and reducing our cost by running on SAP running on Windows will help us to do that.”

SAP on Microsoft
For more information on the Business Value and Technical Merits of deploying or migrating SAP applications to the Microsoft environment, please visit the Microsoft | SAP Customer Information Center. This Web site is maintained by the Microsoft SAP Global Alliance Team and provides a wealth of information to help you understand how Microsoft technologies are able to scale to support the largest of SAP landscapes with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This site is also designed to help you understand why Microsoft and SAP customers are more productive with the interoperability between Microsoft .NET and SAP NetWeaver.
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