Product Data Sheet / Brochure
Case study | Geberit Verwaltungs GmbH
Challenge
A highly available storage
infrastructure for SAP HANA
Geberit is an expert in both new builds and
building renovations and modernisations.
The company is Europe’s market leader
in sanitary technology and provides
comprehensive systems for commercial
and trade customers as well as end-users.
Having highly exible, sustainable
products is very important to the
company and its IT infrastructure has
to meet these requirements too.
The company is growing and its data volumes
increase by an average of 20 per cent each year.
“We need a highly available IT infrastructure
that the business can use to help it react
quickly and exibly,” says Thomas Vetter,
head of IT infrastructure/CTO at Geberit.
So it’s no wonder that the Swiss manufacturer
of sanitary products wanted to migrate its SAP
environment and the Oracle database at its
heart, to SAP HANA as quickly as possible.
“With SAP HANA, calculations are carried out
directly in the storage system. This gives us
an amazing potential to increase the speed
of analyses for sales and distribution,”
explains Vetter. In the past, large analyses
had to run overnight due to their sheer
volume. The results of the data analyses
were therefore always based on the previous
day’s values. This was simply not sucient
for some parts of the company. “With
SAP HANA, sales and distribution can now
access real-time data, which means they
can act much more quickly,” says Vetter.
As well as the modernisation of the database
platform, the company also chose to renew
its existing storage infrastructure,
which consisted of two HP Enterprise
Virtual Arrays (EVA) 8400 systems, an
HP EVA 8100 system and an HP EVA 8000
system in Pfullendorf, Germany. This is
where Geberit’s largest production site is
located. The existing storage systems were
aging and the company urgently needed to
expand its capacities and performance.
The SAP HANA project was the nal, decisive
push for Geberit to completely renovate its
storage infrastructure. The company quickly
acknowledged that an appliance solution
would not be suitable for SAP HANA due
to the high administration expenditure.
The database solution would – as it had in
the past – instead need to run on the same
storage platform as the other systems
in the company. A tailored data centre
integration (TDI) approach was needed.
“The interchangeability and reutilisation
of the hardware components is very
important to us,” says Vetter. “We simply
have to use standard components to make
our operations cost-eective, as only
these guarantee us enough exibility.”
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