German engineer revs up SAP with BLU Acceleration

A German electronics firm has chosen DB2 with BLU Acceleration over SAP HANA or SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator in a bid to speed up data delivery.

Headquartered in Neuhausen, Balluff is a world-leading manufacturer of sensor solutions, employing around 2,750 people in 50 countries. The firm runs its operation on Power p and, as part of its overhaul, it installed two new model 750 servers.

The result, as detailed in a new IBM report, is that access to business data is 98% faster and SAP response times are up by 50%. Document access is seven times faster than before.

Bernhard Herzog, SAP I.T. team manager at the firm, says: “Balluff relies on SAP solutions to manage the business, including SAP Business Warehouse for data analysis and reporting. As the business grew, data delivery slowed down, and without timely, accurate information we risked making poor investment decisions and were unable to deliver the best possible service to our customers.”

SAP Business Warehouse serves around 500 concurrent users at the firm. When Balluff’s team looked at tuning it up, they evaluated SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator and DB2 with IBM’s BLU Acceleration by looking at price, complexity and predicted system performance.

Bernd Dümmel, apps dev and SAP BW team manager at Balluff, says: “Deploying IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration was a low-risk project; implementation was quick and easy without affecting availability. IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration is already included in our IBM DB2 licenses, and we can operate it without additional training, and the investment and operating costs are much lower than other solutions.”

Although Balluff already used compression, the new solution compressed data by a further 14%. In turn, the smaller databases enabled faster backups, cutting backup time by 30%. The company also saved storage and back space and reduced backup data volumes by another 30% Batch mode data processing improved by 25%.

In order to speed things up even further, Balluff also implemented IBM FlashSystem 840 solid-state memory drives.

Herzog says: “In the past, waiting times slowed down workflows and staff had to change between different tasks to avoid further delays. With IBM FlashSystem, we improved access to documents by a factor of five, accelerated SAP ERP batch operations by a factor of seven and halved response times in SAP ERP dialog mode.”