Virtualization Project Overview

DataXstream LLC and Lumber Liquidators have announced a business relationship in which Lumber Liquidators has purchased a completely virtualized SAP platform from DataXstream built on VMware and Dell EqualLogic.

Lumber Liquidators’ SAP Needs

Lumber Liquidators acquired SAP to automate all their back-office processes.  Prior to implementation, they were instructed to deploy a hardware platform that would support not only their initial implementation, but incremental growth for the next 3-5 years.  As a new implementation, they were also concerned with minimizing total project cost, delivering high availability and consistent performance to an increasing number of users, and be easily maintainable by a streamlined IT staff.

SAP Virtualization Solution

Lumber Liquidators turned to DataXstream, an SAP professional services organization focused on technical consulting and integration, with particular skills in landscape design and implementation.  After reviewing the business requirements and technical constraints, DataXstream proposed, and then deployed a completely virtualized SAP environment, covering Development, Quality Assurance, and Production landscapes.  The resultant solution exceeded the expectations requested by Lumber Liquidators:

• Reduced by 2/3 the amount of hardware (servers, storage, network, and peripherals) compared to a traditional, non-virtualized solution, thereby lowering Total Cost of Ownership
• As a reseller of both VMware and Dell, DataXstream’s proposal proved to be almost 40% lower than competitive offerings

Download:

VMware Infrastructure & SAP Use Cases

SAP Solutions on VMware

Virtualized SAP Performance

SAP VMware Technical Study

To Learn More:

SAP Virtualization Solutions Page

Contact Us

• Leveraging DataXstream’s  longstanding expertise in SAP, the solution was tuned specifically to support current SAP needs, while remaining flexible enough to grow incrementally as new deployment phases started.
• Utilizing VMware features such as DRS, SRM, and HA, the solution insured consistent SAP response to users, even during scheduled maintenance, or fail-over conditions.

As a result of working with DataXstream, Lumber Liquidators met their implementation timelines and budgetary forecasts.  Simultaneously the choice enabled  its IT team to easily support the landscape without having to add resources.

Advantages of a Virtualized SAP Landscape

Virtualization is a technology that logically groups hardware (servers and optionally storage) together to create a computing  pool which applications access as needed to respond to customer requests.  As needs grow, the application dynamically absorbs more computing power, thereby providing a consistent user experience.  Computing power can be added or removed from the pool at any time without disrupting the application’s performance.  This changes the paradigm from traditional hardware deployments where SAP applications were tied to specific servers, creating underutilization of that server during slack times, a bottle neck during peak times, and a failure point if the server went down.

VMware, the world’s largest dedicated virtualization provider, and a DataXstream partner, was deployed at Lumber Liquidators.  Dell, one of the world’s largest computing and peripherals providers, and a DataXstream partner, has created “VMware ready” systems which were also deployed.   Some of the key technology used included:

DRS (Distribution Resource Scheduler): distributes and harmonizes computing resources which allows you to align your SAP infrastructure with your business goals.

• Dynamically allocate resources to the highest priority applications
• Provide dedicated IT infrastructure to business units while still achieving higher hardware utilization through resource pooling
• Empower business units to build and manage virtual machines within their resource pool while giving central IT control over hardware resources
• Improve service levels for all applications and ensure that each virtual machine has access to appropriate resources at any point in time
• Easily deploy new capacity by redistributing virtual machines without system disruption
• Automated planned server maintenance
• Reduce energy consumption and cooling costs by up to 20% in the datacenter during low utilization time periods

SRM (Site Recovery Manager): automates and accelerates recovery.

• Eliminates the need to test and manage complex and time consuming recovery plans
• Reduces risk by eliminating manual recovery steps

HA (High Availability): is provided across the whole virtualized SAP ERP environment.

• Eliminates the cost and difficulty of traditional solutions
• No planned downtime for maintenance tasks
• Recover quickly from server failures with automatic restart of systems

To learn more about virtualizing your SAP landscape contact one of our technical experts

DataXstream has launched a strategic certified partnership with Dell in the realm of SAP and ERP based business solutions. About Dell: Dell is a multinational technology corporation that develops, manufactures, sells, and supports personal computers and other computer-related products. Dell is committed to helping businesses simplify IT. We want to reduce the headaches IT complexity creates for your customers so they can have more time and money to spend on innovation.

About VMware: VMware, the global leader in Business Infrastructure Virtualization, delivers proven virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud.

After the system goes live, there may be a time period of stabilization, with a frantic scramble to make the system operational. Additionally, over several years, different projects and technologies will be incorporated. In larger companies, this can mean thousands of interfaces using dozens of different technologies coexisting in the support infrastructure. This “Band-Aid” approach to integration is typically never thought of as inefficiency that can be addressed to save real money in the organization, but merely viewed as a black box, or something the organization has to “live with.“

Even though the integration may fundamentally work well enough to run the business, there is definite and achievable ROI in re-architecting and optimizing the integration processes, especially in larger companies that have thousands of interfaces and hundreds of ways to connect them!

The return on investment of any project in SAP can have varied measures of success. Integration projects are no exception. Unique problems associated with company specific architecture impact the overall return. Listed below are the top seven identifiable ROI areas in integration technologies:

1. Greatly increase cost savings in new development
2. Reduce or eliminate the maintenance cost of multiple middleware technologies
3. Provide better system performance during interface operation, speeding up the effective speed of the SAP system for end users
4. Reduce the workload of users responsible for resolving errors, freeing them up to be productive on essential business tasks
5. Reduce charge backs by retailers for improperly formed EDI
6. Reduced head count by middleware consolidation
7. Reduced hardware cost

To read more about these cost saving techniques please download the whitepaper here or simply click on the “Learn More” tab to the right to request this and other DataXstream white papers.