4-page Case Study - Posted 3/17/2006
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Germany’s TÜV NORD Deploys SQL Server 2005 for 2-Terabyte SAP Business Warehouse
Germany’s TÜV NORD Group, one of that countries largest technical service providers, offers a wide range of consulting, testing, and servicing activities with its Systems, Mobility, Certification, Energy and Systems Engineering, Academy and International Divisions. The company serves customers in 36 countries in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. After a recent merger with Rheinisch-westfälisch, the company anticipates doubling its 2 terabyte SAP Business Warehouse (BW) by the end of 2006. The TÜV NORD Group needed to replace its 32-bit system with a 64-bit solution. The company upgraded its database supporting the SAP BW to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. Upon completion of testing SAP BW on 64-bit architecture, the TÜV NORD Group will deploy the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005. The company saw a 15 percent performance increase after upgrading to SQL Server 2005.
Situation
The TÜV NORD Group, with operations on four continents, and a workforce of more than 7,000, is one of Germany's largest technical service providers, offering a wide range of consulting, testing and servicing activities in its Systems, Mobility, Certification, Energy and Systems Engineering, Academy and International Divisions. TÜV NORD is especially well known throughout Germany for its automobile emissions testing centers. The company, which generates annual revenue of some U.S.$718 million, has expertise in nearly all areas of technical safety, environmental protection, and the conformity assessment of management systems and products—nationally and internationally. Beyond its traditional boundaries as an inspection organization, the TÜV NORD Group is represented by its own personnel and companies in other German regions and in 36 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including emerging markets.
The company had a SAP Business Warehouse (BW) hosted on a Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. The database ran on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server operating system. After a recent merger between TÜV NORD Group and Rheinisch-westfälisch TÜV (RWTÜV), the 2-terabyte database is expected to soon double in size. The mission-critical database contains millions of performance data generated from a range of the company’s activities including information on inspections, security, and profitability.
In addition to the database doubling in size, the merged companies are anticipating more than a 35 percent growth in employment during 2006. To keep up with this growth, the company is planning to upgrade its SAP BW environment from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture in order to directly support more memory than its current 4 gigabytes (GB).
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SQL Server 2005 Dynamic Management Views removes a lot of the trial and error work that we used to do. |
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Sven Otromke,e
SAP System Manager, TUV NORD Group |
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“We are already facing the problem of SAP BW and a few other applications crashing due to the limit of the 32-bit address space,” says Sven Otromke, SAP System Manager of TÜV NORD Group. “But we always want to technically be one step ahead of our customers in order provide them with the best possible service.”
Looking toward the future, TÜV NORD determined it needed a solution that would:
- Support 64-bit architecture.
- Improve performance.
- Enhance availability.
- Be enterprise ready.
Solution
The TÜV NORD Group, which manages its IT operations with four administrators who are responsible for the database, operating system, server hardware, and storage area network systems, deployed SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition to host its SAP BW. The SAP BW already holds 2.1 terabytes of data and is expected to grow to 4 terabytes by the end of the year. The relational database, and some 25 multidimensional analytical data cubes each with 16 dimensions, are all hosted on a single instance of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The SAP BW is deployed on an HP ProLiant DL585 server with four processors (dual core) and 16 GB of RAM.
Additionally, the company has more than 20 SAP databases hosted on a collection of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 instances, including a 1 terabyte SAP R/3 database, which will soon be updated to SQL Server 2005. The TÜV NORD Group is considering use of the Table Partitioning feature in SQL Server 2005 to enhance management of large tables and indexes. The company manages 24 terabytes of total raw storage on an HP StorageWorks 8000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA8000).
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| Loading workflow - Example of data flow from the company’s SAP R/3 SQL Server database to its SAP BW database, also hosted on SQL Server. |
The TÜV NORD Group, which had deployed SQL Server 2000 in 1999 and was a participant in the SQL Server 2005 Technical Adoption Program (TAP), was so impressed with its early testing of SQL Server 2005 that it initially deployed the new system when it was still in beta release, upgrading to the final version after the product was released.
In addition to interest in the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005, the company plans to deploy the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005 to enhance availability and disaster recovery. At the same time the company upgraded its SAP BW to version 3.53. The upgrading to SQL Server 2005, and to the new version of SAP, was completed over a weekend.
Benefits
Upgrading to SQL Server 2005 has already provided the TÜV NORD Group with important benefits, and helped it prepare for deployment of its 64-bit solution. Benefits include: improved performance, enhanced availability with Database Mirroring, readiness for 64-bit architecture, and enterprise-grade stability.
Improved Performance
Tests showed that on average, the system, which supports some 500 users, works faster than before, even though the company had at the same time upgraded its SAP BW. “Upgrading to SQL Server 2005 enhanced our system performance by 15 percent, despite the fact we also were deploying a SAP BW upgrade that generally requires more system resources,” says Gunnar Thaden, Chief Information Officer at TÜV NORD Group. “We generally are used to seeing system performance go down by 10 percent to 30 percent after deploying a SAP upgrade because of new functionality which increases demands on I/O, CPU, and RAM. We were impressed to see SQL Server 2005 boost overall performance.”
The increased performance is attributed to a number of SQL Server 2005 enhancements, including the new Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), which collect query performance data that can be analyzed to improve query performance. “The SQL Server DMVs indicate which queries are the most expensive and should be optimized,” explains Otromke. “SQL Server 2005 Dynamic Management Views removes a lot of the trial and error work that we used to do.”
Easier Database Maintenance
The Dynamic Management Views feature helps with database maintenance by making it easier to identify indexes that are no longer needed.
“Our SAP system has perhaps 35,000 tables, and every table has three or four indexes,” says Otromke. “As we customize the system we add more indexes, but after several years it is difficult to remember exactly why any given index was added. With Dynamic Management Views you can see how long it has been since an index has been used, and this helps us decide when indexes can be removed. Every time we can remove an extraneous index, it means one less index needs to be maintained, and this in turn improves performance.”
Database maintenance also is enhanced by the Online Indexing feature of SQL Server 2005. Prior to upgrading to SQL Server 2005, the SAP system could slow quite drastically while generating indexes, requiring that such tasks be performed during the evening hours.
Now indexing can be done during the day. Additionally SQL Server 2005 DMV records which indexes are actually still being used and makes suggestions for additional indexes to improve system performance. The Database Tuning Advisor (DTA) enables the company to perform an analysis of specific workload situations. “The ability to identify and eliminate expensive queries and unnecessary indexes from the database has enhanced performance noticeably," says Otromke.
Enhanced Availability with Database Mirroring
The TÜV NORD Group is especially interested in the Database Mirroring function of SQL Server 2005. Database Mirroring is designed to provide a hot-standby of the live system. Data is sent to the replica during each transaction commit process—the commit does not complete until the data is in both the live and replica database logs. The company likes the fact that Data Mirroring is easy to set up and manage, and that all data is transferred without the database administrator having to select specific tables. In fact, as changes are made to the live system they automatically occur on the replica. The use of database snapshots on the replica server can be used to provide point in time reporting.
Using Database Mirroring, the TÜV NORD Group plans to mirror its SAP BW database between Hannover and its back-up center in Hamburg. If, for example, the North Saxon IT center of TÜV NORD happens to become non-functional on account of a fire or some other reason, the replica stored in Hamburg can immediately fill in for it. The company is a participant in the Microsoft Database Mirroring TAP program.
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…I should note that SQL Server has been extremely stable. Since deploying SQL Server 2000 in 1999 we’ve never had it crash. |
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Sven Otromke,
SAP System Manager, TUV NORD Group |
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“The administration effort of Database Mirroring compared to a cluster solution is clearly less,” explains Otromke. “Although we want to enhance availability with Database Mirroring, I should note that SQL Server has been extremely stable. Since deploying SQL Server 2000 in 1999 we’ve never had it crash.”
Readiness for 64-bit Architecture
As soon as testing is completed on running SAP on a 64-bit system, the TÜV NORD Group plans to deploy its SAP BW on SQL Server 2005 (64-bit) running on the 64-bit version of the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. Windows Server 2003 is the foundation of Windows Server System. At that time it also plans to consolidate its database servers to just 30, down from its current 50 servers. On the client side, the company plans to participate in the Microsoft TAP for Windows Vista, the forthcoming 64-bit client operating system that is the successor to Windows XP.
Enterprise-Grade Stability
The TÜV NORD Group deployed the beta version of SQL Server 2005 despite concerns expressed by some about deploying any beta product into a production environment, but the company’s testing had shown that even in beta, SQL Server 2005 was enterprise ready. It made the deployment, using in-house technical resources. “Consultants had warned me that upgrading a production system by using a beta version without the help of consultants was insanity,” says Otromke. “But we had run through our test scenarios several times using system copies and were convinced that SQL Server 2005 was already solid while still in beta release. We were proven right. It worked perfectly.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on Windows Server 2003. It creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft’s holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
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 TÜV NORD Group products and services, call +0511 986-1331 or visit the Web site at:
www.tuev-nord.de
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