Balluff GmbH Migrate From HP and Oracle to IBM Smarter Computing

IBM Corp. announced that Balluff GmbH has migrated its SAP software and storage environment to IBM hardware and software to help optimize its global supply chain.

Balluff GmbH, a manufacturer of sensor technology, uses SAP applications to complete the execution of core business processes such as sales and distribution, production planning, and materials management.

With the new system, Balluff achieved greater systems reliability and performance – including 60% faster batch processing for the SAP ERP system and 15% lower total costs through reduced administration and management overhead for the database and system backup. Administrative expenses for the entire SAP system environment are also expected to be reduced.

Balluff GmbH replaced its existing IT infrastructure of HP Integrity servers, HP StorageWorks Data Protector and Oracle Database with a suite of IBM software and hardware.

This includes:

• Power 750 system with 24 POWER7 processor cores and 384GB main memory, replacing the previous HP server environment.
• Traditional SAN storage and a virtualized storage environment including more than 79TB of XIV Storage System capacity and high-end System Storage DS3500 disk storage with over 30TB of additional disk space for backup to disk. By using Tivoli Storage Manager with DB2 database software, storage compression backup time was reduced by about 50%, which is expected to save annual spending in a five-figure range.
• DB2 database software replaces Oracle. The migration went quickly and without incidents as DB2 integrated into the new system environment.

The collaboration between IBM and SAP, and compatibility of the systems resulted in lower testing efforts. In addition, Balluff has gained a 15% improvement in SAP response time within interactive mode.