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行业: Technology
位置: Italy
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Emmelibri raises the publishing game with SUSE to support booksellers everywhere

亮点

  • Boosts processing capacity for business-critical SAP applications.
  • Helps to save 25% in software and hardware licensing costs.
  • Offers a clear, realistic roadmap for future requirements.
  • Expand virtual server landscape at zero incremental software cost.

产品

Established in 2008 and headquartered near Milan, Italy, Emmelibri provides distribution and commercial services to several companies within the Italian publishing sector. Employing approximately 200 people, the company strives to improve its support to both the traditional business of brick-and-mortar bookshops and the digital operations of online resellers.

At-a-Glance

To provide impeccable services that would help its clients in the publishing industry to thrive, Emmelibri wanted to become more agile and cost-efficient. To take advantage of its mature virtualized environment, eliminate superfluous costs and boost processing power for critical SAP applications, the company needed a leaner, more sustainable operating system. After attending SUSECON, Emmelibri realized that SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications was the ideal solution to increase processing capacity, generate cost savings and deliver unprecedented scalability.

挑战

Providing services which enable brick-and-mortar publishing companies to thrive and web-only resellers to surpass their online rivals, Emmelibri continually needs to raise its game. This translates into the requirement for faster, more cost-effective and scalable service delivery to ensure that publishing companies can keep flourishing whatever their chosen business model.

Luca Paleari, CIO at Emmelibri, said: “We identified the proprietary UNIX operating system and hardware platform for our SAP landscape as one of the elements that hindered the innovation strategy that we were pursuing. First of all, the existing platform was too expensive to manage, maintain and upgrade, particularly if we wanted to fully virtualize the SAP landscape. Second, enabling full business continuity and disaster recovery functions was prohibitive in terms of costs and complexity.”

High availability and disaster recovery are essential to the companies Emmelibri serves because 75 percent of them use SAP applications for their core business processes. That means any unexpected downtime could potentially translate into financial or reputational damage.

We expect to leverage SUSE Manager for alerting, monitoring and upgrading. Because this is a very user-friendly and intuitive tool, we are confident that our small but busy IT department will find it easy to manage our SAP landscape with it.

SUSE 解决方案

Emmelibri identifies the SUSECON event as instrumental in choosing its new operating system, as Luca Paleari said: “By attending SUSECON, we came in closer, more in-depth contact with the SUSE world and appreciated the company’s dynamic, skilled and professional approach. This helped us to better evaluate SUSE’s offering and realize that SLES for SAP Applications was the solution that best suited our long-term strategy.”

SLES for SAP Applications is a SAP-certified system and SAP’s preferred Linux platform, designed to increase performance, dramatically lower costs and provide higher availability.

During the first phase of the implementation project, the joint Emmelibri and SUSE team migrated most of the company’s SAP world — including SAP ERP with modules for financials, control, materials management, SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Business Warehouse and SAP BusinessObjects — to the SUSE platform. The remaining applications, running third party operating systems, will also soon be migrated to SLES, fully virtualized on VMware and running on Cisco UCS servers. By moving SAP to its preferred virtualization platform — Emmelibri has more than 500 virtual servers on VMware — the company benefits from being able to concentrate skills and investment on a single platform.

Emmelibri is currently also deploying SUSE Manager, which will become a crucial part of the company’s standardized SUSE environment. As Luca Paleari said: “We expect to leverage SUSE Manager for alerting, monitoring, and upgrading. This is a very user-friendly and intuitive tool, and we are confident that our small but busy IT department will find it easy and enjoyable to manage it.”

成果

Migrating its SAP landscape from AIX to SLES for SAP Applications has already delivered significant benefits to Emmelibri, with more to come.

Luca Paleari said: “We can finally enjoy all the advantages of having a scalable, reliable, fast platform for SAP which enables us to rapidly deploy our virtual SAP application servers, run snapshot backups and over-provision new virtual servers in preparation for expected increases in demand. This allows us to boost processing capacity for our business-critical SAP applications and to ensure business continuity.” He added: “Migrating SAP from a proprietary platform to an open platform has also been beneficial financially. We estimate that we have reduced our software and hardware costs by 25%, and we can also now expand our virtual server landscape at zero incremental software cost as our requirements grow. In our previous landscape, the licensing conditions effectively made it impossible for us to fully virtualize our SAP landscape.”

Emmelibri also benefits from the fact that SLES for SAP Applications is specifically tuned to meet the demands of SAP ERP software and includes a completely separate update channel for certified and pre-tested software packages. SUSE provides integrated priority support, working with SAP to support the whole stack from a single point of contact.

“The SUSE OS cuts our costs, improves support and gives us a clear, realistic roadmap for future requirements,” said Luca Paleari. Ultimately, this translates into improved service delivery and better outcomes for the companies that we serve.”