In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, companies are constantly seeking ways to innovate, improve efficiency, and stay competitive. For many organizations, this means partnering with specialized service providers to manage and optimize their critical business applications and IT infrastructure. OEDIV (Oetker Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung), a leading IT service provider, has been at the forefront of helping businesses leverage the power of SAP solutions for over 25 years.
Recently, OEDIV embarked on a journey to enhance its SAP S/4HANA services by implementing IBM Power10 technology and advanced automation tools. This strategic move has not only improved OEDIV’s operational efficiency but also enabled them to offer more flexible, cost-effective, and powerful SAP solutions to their customers. Let’s delve into OEDIV’s transformation and the benefits they’ve realized.
The Challenge: Meeting Evolving Customer Demands
As a managed service provider, OEDIV faced the challenge of offering enterprise-grade reliability, security, and performance while also providing the agility, ease of setup, and cost-effectiveness typically associated with public cloud services.
“There is no single cloud strategy that fits every company. Choosing the solution that is the most effective depends on the customer’s processes and management requirements.“
Dominik Münch, Team Manager – Power & Operating System Center at OEDIV
To meet these diverse needs, OEDIV required a highly flexible, high-performance IT infrastructure that could support a wide range of customer requirements. The company identified several key areas for improvement:
- Enhancing scalability and performance
- Increasing operational efficiency through automation
- Improving cost-effectiveness
- Maintaining high levels of availability and reliability
- Supporting sustainability initiatives
The Solution: IBM Power10 and Advanced Automation
OEDIV chose to implement four new IBM Power E1080 servers, leveraging the advanced features of the IBM Power10 architecture. This decision was driven by several key capabilities:
1. Virtualization and Resource Optimization
OEDIV utilizes IBM Power Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity, which creates a shared pool of compute and memory resources. This technology allows OEDIV to allocate capacity tailored to each SAP S/4HANA instance in the most cost-efficient manner, avoiding over-investment in unused capacity while ensuring optimal performance for each customer.
2. Enhanced High Availability
The IBM Power Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity solution enables seamless workload migration between servers in case of maintenance or technical issues. This capability ensures continuous service availability without incurring additional costs.
3. Streamlined Management and Automation
OEDIV leverages several IBM tools to streamline operations:
- IBM PowerVC for centralized orchestration of deployments, storage management, and LPAR management
- IBM Cloud Management Console for real-time capacity planning and insights
- IBM PowerVM for creating multiple independent virtual machines on each server –
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for automating routine tasks
4. Improved Performance and Efficiency
The move to IBM Power10 has delivered significant performance improvements.
“On average we see up to 15% performance boost with Power10, which in turn reduces costs for customers thanks to improved CPU performance and lower core allocations for their systems.“
Dominik Muench, Team Manager – Power & Operating System Center at OEDIV
5. Sustainability Benefits
OEDIV’s implementation of IBM Power10 and associated technologies has yielded impressive results:
- Cost Savings: Up to 25% cost savings for SAP HANA on IBM Power, and 16.6% cost savings for LPARs running IBM AIX.
- Improved Efficiency: 20-30% faster and more efficient system provisioning.
- Time Savings: Approximately 200 hours saved each month through automation of key tasks.
- Performance Boost: 15% performance improvement with IBM Power10.
- Memory Efficiency: 10% improvement in memory cost efficiency.
- Extended Lifespan: 30% longer lifespan without failures or issues compared to x86 servers.
Future-Proofing with AI Capabilities
Looking ahead, OEDIV is well-positioned to take advantage of the built-in AI processing capabilities of IBM Power10. As AI features become more prevalent in SAP applications, OEDIV will be able to offer these advanced capabilities to its customers without requiring significant infrastructure changes. Dominik Münch emphasized the strategic importance of this capability:
“IBM Power10 provides a very clear, strategic roadmap for OEDIV, enabling us to optimize, automate and streamline our infrastructure, helping us to offer outstanding SAP S/4HANA services to our customers.“
Dominik Münch, Team Manager – Power & Operating System Center at OEDIV
The Power of Partnership
OEDIV’s success with IBM Power10 is not just about technology – it’s also about the strong partnership between OEDIV and IBM. The company relies on IBM Technology Lifecycle Services for ongoing support of its SAP HANA on IBM Power landscape. Dominik Münch highlighted the value of this relationship:
“The big advantage for us is that IBM technicians already know our environment, our technical requirements, and our business needs. IBM assists OEDIV across all components, with a central contact for IBM Power, storage virtualization, storage, networking, Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux and SAP applications.“
Dominik Muench, Team Manager – Power & Operating System Center at OEDIV
Conclusion: A Foundation for Future Growth
OEDIV’s implementation of IBM Power10 and advanced automation technologies has created a solid foundation for delivering flexible, efficient, and powerful SAP S/4HANA services to its customers. By leveraging these cutting-edge solutions, OEDIV has not only improved its own operations but also positioned itself to meet the evolving needs of businesses in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world.
As organizations continue to seek ways to optimize their SAP environments and prepare for future technological advancements, OEDIV’s experience with IBM Power10 serves as a compelling example of the benefits that can be realized through strategic infrastructure investments and partnerships.
Credit:
Anette Loercher, Product Manager, SAP Hana on IBM Power, IBM
Dominik Muench, Team Manager – Power & Operating System Center at OEDIV
Martin Stratmann, CEO, OEDIV
Further Information:
- OEDIV relies on IBM Power to serve its SAP customers Webinar Replay HERE
- OEDIV boosts performance by 40%, wins new clients Online Case Study available HERE
- Presentation from the above Webinar available to read and download below
- Streamlining customer service with automated private cloud Case Study available to read or download below. Download the latest direct from IBM HERE
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