CASE STUDY
downtime lasting six days, which would
inevitably have disrupted our commercial
operations,” recalled Rainer Steffl.
“IBM Services helped us optimise the
migration process so that we needed
only two days of downtime. That was a
remarkable success because it meant that
the outage took place over a weekend, so
there was zero disruption to the business.
“On the Monday morning following the
SAP HANA go-live, everyone was holding
their breath. The SAP Business Warehouse
solution is used by employees at all levels
of the business, including senior executives,
every day to guide decision-making so
if something wasn’t working, we would
need to fix it fast. But in fact, rather than
complaints, we received brilliant feedback
from users who were delighted about how
much faster their reports were running.”
“In addition, unlike many other SAP
projects, the migration to SAP HANA
requires extremely close collaboration
between application and infrastructure
teams. Since we had recently renewed a five
year contract outsourcing our data centre
operations to IBM, it made perfect sense to
ask the same provider to manage the SAP
HANA migration.”
A dedicated team of 12 people from IBM
Services in Austria provided consulting and
solution design services for the migration.
A further team from IBM Services based in
India manages Mondi’s SAP applications
and rolled out the solution across Mondi’s
global business. In addition, five experts
from IBM Services performed the migration
of the existing Oracle database to an entirely
new SAP HANA environment.
“We originally anticipated that we would
complete the migration with system
www.intelligentcio.com
Rainer Steffl continued: “Our experience of
working with IBM on the migration to SAP
HANA was excellent. The IBM team was
highly professional, extremely organised and
very much focused on solving our business
challenges. What’s more, SAP was involved
from day one. The SAP team assisted us
during the test period, conducted quality
reviews after each important milestone
and helped us find fast fixes for any glitches
we encountered. The application and
infrastructure teams from Mondi and IBM
worked hand-in-hand with product experts
from SAP throughout the migration process.
Thanks to this close collaboration, we
achieved a textbook migration, everything
went exactly as planned.”
Tasking IBM Services to manage its data
centres enables Mondi to benefit from
excellent reliability and performance
without the burden of day-to-day
system administration.
“We outsourced our application
management operations to IBM Services
years ago and we’ve never looked back,”
remarked Steffl. “We work with various
IBM teams spread all over the globe and
they all collaborate brilliantly to give us an
excellent service. Because of our long-term
relationship with IBM, there is mutual trust
between the teams and excellent coverage
from the IBM management team. I am a
very happy customer.”
To boost performance and gain greater
flexibility, Mondi is planning to migrate its
16 productive SAP applications from the
existing POWER7 platform to state-of-the-art
IBM Power System E870 servers.
“IBM Power Systems provides a high-
performance, ultra-robust platform for
our mission-critical SAP ERP systems,”
commented Steffl. “We plan to execute
further proof of concepts on the POWER8
hardware such as SAP ERP powered
by SAP HANA to explore options for
further increasing flexibility, continuous
improvement of reporting performance and
further simplification of our infrastructure.”
To support its mission-critical SAP
environment, Mondi relies on cutting-edge
IBM storage technologies. The production
environment is a tier-one storage on
enterprise storage IBM DS8000, while the
non-production landscape is supported by an
IBM Storwize V7000 machine.
Mondi is looking forward to further
improving storage performance by using
an IBM FlashSystem 900 device. The
company takes advantage of the Easy Tier
functionality of Storwize V7000 to ensure
that frequently accessed data is stored on
ultra-fast solid-state drives (SSDs), while data
used less often is automatically transferred
to more economical disks. As a result, Mondi
WE RECEIVED BRILLIANT FEEDBACK
FROM USERS WHO WERE DELIGHTED
ABOUT HOW MUCH FASTER THEIR
REPORTS WERE RUNNING.
INTELLIGENTCIO
65