Announcer:
"Ebm-papst St. Georgen GmbH & Co. KG is one of the leading manufacturers in the area of electronic cooling systems, propulsion engineering and automotive systems.
"Mr. Eberbach, what requirements did your company's IT department see itself faced with in a market driven by innovation?“
Mr. Eberbach, Head of Computer Systems and Telecommunication:
IT is a decisive factor in productivity. Therefore, IT investments must be profitable.
At the end of 1996, we began with the migration to SAP R 3 to replace the mainframe solution.
By 1999, we had a productive SAP R 3 system based on the Windows NT cluster solution.
In the meantime, we have over 650 SAP users in 5 locations. We've implemented a direct integration of storehouse systems and CAD solutions.
The functional demands placed by all the business management and technical departments are ensured.
Announcer:
"How have you met these challenges?"
In 1997, we moved away from a mainframe system and decided to change to an HP Intel server and Windows NT.
The migration from SAP R2 R3 was complete in 2001 and the mainframe system could be turned off.
Expenses for software were actually higher than for hardware.
Our goal was a homogenous, cost-efficient IT environment based on industry standards.
At the same time, we could only fall back on limited personnel resources for maintenance and support of the IT systems.
We began to look for a partner that could provide strong support in system planning and maintenance.
The cost-benefit calculation needed to be presented in terms of performance and function and also with regard to increasing demands.
Because of our direct IT connection to corporate clients, a high degree of availability was a basic requirement.
High daily production output of 120,000 products and the resulting transactions make high demands on the reaction time of the SAP system – approximately 1/2 second per transaction with about 200,000 dialog transactions a day.
Within the framework of the HP solution, more than 50 Intel servers were in operation at ebm papst St. Georgen – 8 of them in the computer center for SAP.
In 2003, we replaced the 8 SAP servers with two 64-bit HP Itanium Integrity systems. The advantages of the 64-bit technology developed jointly by HP and Intel are high performance capacity, high availability, and enormous reserves.
The reaction times achieved with the new system are now in the area of 400 ms.
The storage and backup system for the SAP data is also from HP, and resulted in a dramatic increase in performance.
Announcer:
"What was the decisive factor in your choice of IT partner?“
HP impressed us primarily by reacting so quickly to customer requests. The test of the Integrity system at full load gave us the investment security we desired.
The expenditure in terms of administration is very low. Despite rapidly rising numbers of users and computers, the new system can be run with only 4 people, the same manpower as twenty years ago.
HP not only had the right product at good conditions, they also impressed us with the expertise of their personnel and the high degree of commitment of the project head.
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