4-page Case Study - Posted 4/16/2007
Views: 2515
Rate This Evidence:
American Power Conversion Runs Siebel on SQL Server; Saves $800,000 over Oracle
American Power Conversion (APC) contemplated major increases in its use of Siebel software—including consolidation of separate instances into a single, global database and expanding its use to include the real-time needs of its call center. That required even more performance than it was getting from Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database software. So, the company upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). Siebel transaction response times are 100 percent faster; the call center responds more quickly and cost-effectively to customers; the solution will scale to support a 300 percent increase in the current 3,000-user base; and availability is “rock-solid” according to the company. APC gets all this and more for less than half of the estimated cost of an Oracle-based solution, saving the company U.S.$800,000.
Situation
In today's "always on, always available" world where businesses can't stop and downtime is measured in dollars, American Power Conversion (APC) provides protection against some of the leading causes of downtime, data loss, and hardware damage: power problems and temperature.
When you’re known as the technology company that keeps other companies up and running, your own infrastructure needs to be state-of-the-art. And APC’s infrastructure certainly is that. The company adopted Siebel customer relationship management software in 1999, running the solution with a 40 gigabyte Microsoft® SQL Server™ 7.0 database. By 2005, APC had upgraded that solution to Siebel 2000 software running on a 270 GB SQL Server 2000 Itanium Edition (64-bit) database. The solution supported both APC’s field service and sales force operations.
 |
With SQL Server 2005, we’re getting all the mission-critical, enterprise-level performance we could want from Oracle for a fraction of the price of Oracle. |
 |
|
Arindam Sen
Lead Database Administrator, American Power Conversion |
|
|
But APC’s operations were continuing to grow, and its technology needed to grow with it. The database was continuing to grow at a rate of 15-to-25 percent per year. That meant APC needed to find increasingly cost-effective ways to manage and work with ever-larger quantities of data, so that the data could continue to provide mission-critical benefit and competitive advantage to the company.
In addition, APC wanted to gain greater benefit from its Siebel solution by using it more broadly. That meant extending the Siebel solution to support the company’s call-center operations. Those operations include 600 call-center employees who field 150 customer calls per hour. The use of Siebel would streamline the patchwork of applications and screens that the call-center employees were using, enabling them to respond to customers more quickly and, thus, to provide better customer service. But that in turn required Siebel to deliver better performance than it was providing on SQL Server 2000.
“The real-time performance of Siebel was a new demand we were putting on SQL Server if we were going to adopt Siebel for our call center,” says Arindam Sen, Lead Database Administrator, APC. “We hadn’t needed real-time response when we deployed SQL Server 2000 and, frankly, we weren’t getting real-time performance.”
APC also wanted to merge its separate SQL Server 2000 instances—for operations in North America, Asia, and Europe/Middle East—into a single instance that would avoid the need for cumbersome Siebel replication. But a single, global instance means that there are always users somewhere in the world who need to access the database at any given moment.
“Siebel has always been a mission-critical application for us but contemplating a single, global instance meant we could afford zero downtime,” says Arindam. “SQL Server 2000 was rock-solid for us, but we were increasing the database, increasing the user base, and increasing the application modules accessing the data. We needed to ensure we would get that same rock-solid performance from our database despite all these increased demands.”
An obvious choice for APC was to move from SQL Server to Oracle—a choice made all the more obvious both by Siebel’s acquisition by Oracle, and by APC’s own extensive use of Oracle for its financials, human resources, and manufacturing.
“We’re constantly asked within the company why we don’t move our Siebel and Web back-ends from SQL Server to Oracle,” says Arindam. “My view was that SQL Server provides the performance people expect from Oracle, and at a far lower cost. But this proposed consolidation and expansion of SQL Server at APC would test that proposition like nothing else. If we were going to increase our bet on SQL Server, we needed to be right.”
Solution
To stack the odds of that bet in its favor, APC did more than consolidate and expand its Siebel deployment on SQL Server. It also upgraded from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), while upgrading its Siebel deployment from Siebel 2000 and Siebel 7.5 to Siebel 7.8.
APC implemented the migration in-place on the active/passive, two-machine cluster of Dell 6850 computers it was already using to run its SQL Server 2000 databases for Siebel. Those computers each have four Intel dual-core 3.6GHz processors and about 33 gigabytes of memory and are connected to an external EMC storage array. The Siebel deployment also includes nine computers for the Siebel application and two load-balanced computers for the Web front-end.
“We used the internal upgrade tools that come with SQL Server 2005 and the whole process was very smooth,” says Arindam. “There was very little work required to implement the upgrade. We accomplished the cutover in a couple of hours.”
|
The use of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to monitor Siebel and SQL Server performance opens an entirely new world to us. |
|
|
Arindam Sen
Lead Database Administrator, American Power Conversion |
|
|
Arindam and his colleagues also deployed a range of features newly available or enhanced in SQL Server 2005, including SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 Notification Services, and SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring.
SQL Server 2005 Integration Services replaced APC’s use of SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services (DTS), which the company used to pull data from Oracle and Lotus Notes into Siebel and SQL Server. “SQL Server 2005 Integration Services is far more robust and enterprise-scale than DTS, with much more functionality than we saw in DTS,” says Arindam. By moving to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, we were able to eliminate our use of third-party integration tools, such as Informatica.”
APC used SQL Server tools to migrate its DTS packages to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. The process worked well but Arindam cautions that this was the biggest challenge of the upgrade. “The difference between the functionality of DTS and SQL Server 2005 Integration Services is so great that we really needed to bring our staff up to speed on the new technology,” he says. “We took the time to ensure our staff had the skill sets they needed and that they understood the dynamic processing of data that the new technology makes possible.”
APC also used the upgrade to adopt SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, using it to replace its prior use of Siebel Replication for Reporting. “We found the Siebel technology cumbersome,” says Arindam. “The ‘snapshot’ technology in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services makes it easier for us to manage reporting instances of the database.”
Arindam and his colleagues use SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to publish a range of system performance measures of interest to their users, including disk utilization, screen response time, and CRM usage analysis. The data is mined by a Siebel tool called Siebel Application Response Management, pulled into SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for the creation of the reports, and made available to users through an intranet site based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
APC uses SQL Server 2005 Notification Services to provide its IT staff with real-time alerts to Siebel and SQL Server components that suddenly perform outside of accepted parameters. The technology replaces the use of custom stored procedures that formerly provided a more basic version of this capability.
Benefits
The upgrade to SQL Server 2005 delivers the major increase in performance that APC wanted, and at a fraction of the cost of the Oracle alternative.
Performance Up by 100 Percent
By upgrading its Siebel installation to SQL Server 2005, APC has achieved the performance it needs to support a single global instance of Siebel 7.8 accessed by 3,000 users, including the expanded use of Siebel to APC’s call-center operations.
That needed performance includes a 100 percent increase in the speed of Siebel transactions, cutting the time for database searches in half. In the call center, the faster database queries with SQL Server 2005 enable faster, more effective, and more cost-effective customer service.
“We needed to see a dramatic increase in performance with SQL Server 2005,” says Arindam. “And that’s what we got. We’re able to serve the enterprise more successfully as a result. It’s a major reason we upgraded.”
Arindam isn’t just contemplating the 3,000 users that the Siebel and SQL Server deployment now serves. APC was recently acquired by Schneider Electric and is being merged with that company’s MGE UPS Systems division. The merged organization will have 12,000 employees—and Arindam expects that SQL Server 2005 will successfully support this 300 percent increase over the current user base.
Performance Monitoring Enables “Rock-Solid” Availability
“The use of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to monitor Siebel and SQL Server performance opens an entirely new world to us,” says Arindam. “It’s dramatically increased the amount and type of information we have on how our system performs. We have visibility into Siebel performance that we never had before. That was another big reason for upgrading and it’s turned out to be extremely successful for us.”
APC uses the performance data to proactively identify potential problems and to address them before they affect system performance. That facilitates the ability to meet service level agreements, such as screen response times of less than five seconds. The ability to post performance metrics automatically on a SharePoint site means that users always have access to the most current performance information, without having to request it from the IT department. Arindam expects to enhance the reporting capability further through the adoption of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.
“We’re seeing absolutely rock-solid availability with SQL Server 2005, despite consolidating on a single global instance, and increasing the size of the database, the number of users, and the number of application modules accessing the data,” says Arindam. “SQL Server 2005 just works—so our users can, too.”
The monitoring and reporting capability that APC gains with SQL Server 2005 and related Microsoft technologies gives the company an even broader benefit, according to Arindam.
“With SQL Server 2005, we not only have a better understanding of the ‘snapshot’ of our performance, but we also have a better understanding of performance trends, where we’re going with transaction volumes, response times, and other measures,” he says. “That means we’re better able to do capacity planning and scalability planning than we ever could before.”
Saves $800,000, 50 Percent over Oracle
SQL Server 2005 not only meets all of APC’s technical and business requirements—it does so for a fraction of the cost of the chief alternative: Oracle.
Arindam estimates that APC achieved $800,000 in first-year savings by moving to SQL Server 2005 instead of Oracle—about 50 percent of the estimated cost of an Oracle solution. That includes a 75 percent savings on software licensing, plus a continuing $200,000 annual savings in reduced personnel costs, given the easier use and greater manageability of SQL Server.
“When you license SQL Server 2005, you’re getting much more than SQL Server 2005,” says Arindam. “By choosing SQL Server over Oracle, we saved on the cost of a data integration solution, a reporting solution, and a notification solution, all of which would have cost extra with Oracle. We also saved by being able to run the solution on commodity hardware rather than on expensive UNIX hardware. That was absolutely crucial to us, given the need to operate as cost-effectively as possible.”
“With SQL Server 2005, we’re getting all the mission-critical, enterprise-level performance we could want from Oracle for a fraction of the price of Oracle,” says Arindam. “When people say we should standardize on a single database platform rather than running both SQL Server and Oracle, I agree—and the success of our Siebel upgrade shows that SQL Server is the way to go.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about American Power Conversion products and services, call (401) 789-5735 or visit the Web site at:
www.apcc.com
