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Speeding response to support the business

The PA-RISC servers running HP­UX were reliable and meeting tough uptime goals. Version 4.7 of SAP’s ERP software, housed at company headquarters in Lisle, Illinois, was taking care of business for the system’s 9000 users. The single-instance implementation has a global profile, supporting 59 plants and manufacturing sites in 19 countries. Of the 9000-strong user base, 3000 are likely to be on the system at once during peak periods—a tough goal for any infrastructure to meet.

“We’re very conscious of system performance, and we try to be proactive about that,” says Dave Hubert, Manager, SAP Business System. This means tracking metrics such as CPU utilization, system load and response times, while also analyzing reports generated by the SAP system itself. “We also get subjective feedback from the user community,” Hubert says. “We put all of these elements together with our own plans going forward.”

Reaching limits

CPU utilization growth stats indicated that the company was reaching the limits of its infrastructure. And the company was facing a Unicode upgrade to its four-terabyte database in advance of its planned switch to SAP ERP 6.0.

Molex had tested HP Integrity servers based on the Itanium architecture earlier in 2006, and was familiar with this successor to PA-RISC. The company considered competing systems, but the logic of HP Integrity servers based on the Intel® and Itanium® processor proved persuasive. “We felt Itanium would get us through the increased utilization levels, with the Unicode variable thrown in and the upgrade to ERP 6.0,” says Hubert. “We had all those to think about at one time and we wanted to have it transparent to the user community.”

“One factor was the ease of the migration,” says Clayton Hinkle, Manager, SAP Basis/DBA. “With competing systems we would have had to do a full export-import of the database, which would have been a real challenge. With the HP Integrity platform, we didn’t have to do a major migration from HP’s PA-RISC platform, as the Oracle® database is binary-compatible.”

Maintaining performance

Ninety-five percent of the company is now connected with the centralized SAP system, and Molex is finding that the ability to conduct all its data exchange through the ERP program is a huge competitive advantage.  Molex also exceeded the uptime to schedule for the ERP production environment in the last fiscal year with a mix of both HP PA-RISC and Itanium servers.

“We’ve had no problems,” says Hubert. “We continue to maintain our performance levels while increasing the load on the system.” Although SAP transaction levels have reached 2.5 million dialog steps a day, the response time per request is unchanged.

Future plans include leveraging the added functionality of SAP ERP 6.0, especially the manager and employee self-service applications. These applications give employees and managers access to portals where they can complete a range of tasks independently. Managers can perform budget and staffing functions, while employees can access expense management, training programs and more.

“We have to do things very quickly,” says Hinkle. “With our SAP R/3 installation we have a good response time, and the performance of the HP Integrity servers helps us to turn things around faster for the business and attain our goals.”

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