Retail Firm Spar Austria Group Chooses Two Hitachi Unified Compute Platforms and Imtech ICT

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, announces that SPAR Austria Group has chosen Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for its SAP HANA initiative that the company hopes will power its future success and expansion in the retail industry.

After planning and research, SPAR Information & Communication Services (ICS) GmbH, together with partner Imtech ICT Austria, chose to migrate its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) infrastructure to HDS technology.

“SPAR is moving away from being mainly an Austrian retail company to becoming a central European retail group. This change gives IT an even greater strategic importance in the success of the business. Using real-time data analytics with SAP HANA, we’re able to stay competitive by making quicker business decisions and ultimately by providing better service to our customers,” said Andreas Kranabitl, MD, SPAR ICS. “Thanks to HDS and Imtech, we are able to scale our SAP HANA landscape, and the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform solution gives us the high performance we need to support our future vision as a group.“

The solution from HDS and Imtech was selected by SPAR ICS primarily due to the scalability of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for the SAP HANA Platform. This datacenter class solution delivers performance, scalability and availability for SPAR Austria Group, and also the advanced SAP HANA technology on an integrated and optimized converged platform. The solution matches the performance requirements SPAR Austria Group needs to improve its business processes and increase its competitiveness.

The UCP for SAP HANA that SPAR deployed includes two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems and two enterprise Hitachi Compute Blade servers. Tthe rapid implementation capability, the level of professionalism and optimal price/performance ratio stood out for SPAR during its decision making process. These attributes were important for SPAR when they chose HDS and Imtech as the providers for the new converged solution. HDS and Imtech together created a foundation for SAP HANA with over 150TB of capacity and plans for significant future growth.

In-Memory Computing Defies Big Data
UCP for SAP HANA helps companies speed up, simplify and economize decision-making processes through real-time, in-memory analytics. These capabilities deliver advantages in big data analysis, and accelerate the speed of business decisions. The solution supports SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) for SAP HANA and provides the necessary scalability for the company.

“Our Hitachi UCP for SAP HANA solution is the ideal choice for SPAR as a retail company. SPAR is not only introducing SAP’s innovation roadmap into its group but also is an early adopter of tomorrow’s technology platform for the retail business. This will allow SPAR to respond quickly to market changes in the best way possible,” said Matthias Czwikla, VP global SAP field alliance, HDS. “This is an exciting time for both SPAR and Hitachi Data Systems who are currently undergoing business transformation and we look forward to continuing to grow our relationship.“

The Hitachi scale-out architecture lets SAP HANA run in business-critical environments without interruption. Hitachi Compute Blade server technologies, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, and the Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) family of enterprise storage systems ensure a high level of availability and uninterrupted operation. The use of the Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) solution as part of the overall architecture allows a consolidated backup solution with no interruption of service.

Planned Expansion
With a view toward future trends such as predictive retail, SPAR’s new SAP HANA solution is an investment in future-proof, technology and is supported by an agile IT architecture, benefitting the company. In addition to SAP BW, SPAR is also installing SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for HANA, and evaluating future projects for the transition to HANA for the existing SAP finance, controlling, human resources systems. The SAP retail solution is also on SPAR’s HANA roadmap.

HDS and Imtech: A Partnership With Added Value
SPAR has placed its trust in the strategic partnership of HDS and Imtech for the joint completion of long-term, complex IT projects. Imtech previously managed the SAP landscape at SPAR and with HDS, is able to offer the company business-relevant data analysis combined with a professional team with optimal support.

“The challenges and problems we faced previously at SPAR ICS were due to the complex existing infrastructure and associated high costs. Together with HDS and its single enterprise converged solution, we were able to create a future-proof IT environment capable of handling SPAR’s requirements as a growing retail company,” says Andreas Weig, sales manager, Western region, Imtech ICT Austria.