Overview
The Challenge
Shiju Shanmughan, Network and Infrastructure Manager at Lulu Group, said: “We decided that it would be more cost-effective to migrate to Intel-architecture servers because this would allow us to choose freely from the offerings of a range of different vendors. We also needed to migrate to a new operating system—one that would offer the same or better availability and security, but with lower cost of ownership and easier expansion."
SUSE Solution
Taking advantage of the bundled SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension solution has enabled Lulu Group to ensure extremely high availability for its SAP landscape in the two years since deployment. Equally, the group uses a special kernel-tune option to improve SAP performance; this protects less-used memory from being paged out and used by the Linux file system, keeping it available for SAP applications.
“We remain very happy with our decision in favor of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications,” said Madhav Rao, CIO of Lulu Group.
Lulu Group’s positive experience kept the SUSE option top of mind when the time came to extend its SAP landscape. As the business continued to expand, both locally and in new territories, there was a growing appetite within Lulu Group for high-speed business analytics and reporting. The company was also seeing dramatic growth in data volumes generally and recognized the need to invest in faster database technology.
“We decided to deploy SAP HANA both for business intelligence and as the operational database for our complete SAP landscape,” said Madhav Rao. “Given our experience of the availability, flexibility, scalability and ease of management of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, this was the logical platform on which to deploy our new SAP HANA software.”
The Results
“We have entrusted our mission-critical SAP applications to the SUSE operating system for the last two years, and we continue to be extremely happy with that decision,” said Shiju Shanmughan. “The operating system requires minimal management, and the benefits are now also clear in our new SAP HANA landscape, which has enabled us to dramatically increase the performance of both analytics and conventional SAP ERP workloads.”
As Lulu Group continues its expansion, the added speed of analysis provided by SAP HANA in-memory technology will help the company’s business managers to identify new opportunities and competitive threats faster, and determine the optimal response.
“Our initial migration from Solaris to the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform reduced our total operational costs for the SAP landscape by at least 20 percent,” said Madhav Rao. “However, the increases in performance and availability are more important to the business because these help us to ensure excellent customer service at all times. We trust SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to provide extreme stability for our mission-critical SAP ERP and SAP HANA landscapes.”