Vaillant Accelerates SAP Environment Through the Use of SSD Technology

In the internal IT operation, Vaillant draws on powerful SAP environments which access memory MaxDB- and Oracle-database environments. The intensity of this access created a potential point of system instability. Due to the latency times of the disk storage systems, several software applications, both dialog transactions, and other background programs, very high volumes of optional read access (Random I/O) were generated, resulting in poor response times and delays.

A satisfied gathering in the Vaillant display room. Looking back at the company’s past is especially exciting after the successful interaction of the SSD High-End Systems. (Left to right: Berthold Schneider (Director Technique & Development, PSP), Christian Spiess (SAP Infrastructure Consultant, Vaillant Group), Andreas Kustura (Consultant, PSP), Klaus Scheid (Manager Information Technology, Vaillant Group))

Since nearly all optimizing and expansion possibilities of the SANs were exhausted, alternative ways were looked for in order to generate the necessary speed. The decision was quickly made to use the Solid State Drive (SSD) technology which at the time was more and more in focus. This technology is about storage units without movable parts such as those found in the traditional mechanical hard drives. SSD systems, which in most cases are based on flash chips, are clearly faster in the execution of processes. While a hard drive provides 250 to 350 IOPS (read-/write operations per second), the high grade SSD solutions effortlessly will provision one-half million IOPS. The Vaillant subsidiary "VAICON Vaillant Consulting GmbH" selected Texas Memory Systems (TMS) to be its partner for a "Proof of Concept" (POC). TMS is the worldwide leading producer concerning speed in the SSD environment. TMS is represented by the PSP distributor (www.psp.net) in the German speaking region and the adjacent European countries.

VAICON received the POC via PSP – a TMS RamSan 620. The POC concept stipulated that the client would be obligated to accept the solution only if pre-agreed-upon performance targets had been achieved. Six critical points were quickly outlined in which significant improvement was expected.

1. Improvement of end of the month analysis and reports, which due to the long response time were prior to the POC running parallel to the daily IT operations and negatively affecting response times for IT users.
2. Considerable acceleration of transfer time for the Material Resource Planning (MRP) which is extremely important for the production of planning, but is not allowed to run parallel to production.
3. Improvement of reload time of buffered tables.
4. Optimization of work-in-process in the Electronic Invoice Verification application in order to reduce considerably long wait times and the associated working time.
5. Reduction of long response times in the processing of the online requirements and supply list, especially for those parts which are used in multiple production lists.
6. Enabling databank consistency checks. Prior to the installation of the RamSan-620 system, this test took more than 43 hours and accordingly could not be carried out on a regular basis. This carried a very high risk, as the accuracy of the data records could only be checked periodically on a random test basis.

The POC test was carried out under real conditions on the premises of Vaillant. The 2U unit rack TMS benchmark machine was compared with the existing inserted systems, each with a disc array from the high end, in other words, mid-range field.

The basic monitoring data which was measured via the inserted databank system was impressive. The measured TMS response time under normal workload was 30 times faster in the reading of data and 7.5 times faster in writing than the high-end system.

A similar result showed up in the comparison of the midrange system. The increase in the response times of the TMS under high workload was almost negligible. Whereas, for example, the response times for the writing of data under load of the midrange system worsened drastically from 1.11 ms to 14.66 ms because the relatively small write cache filled up quickly and the writing speed was reduced to the physical speed of the hard disk drives.

In all tests unbeaten class-best and thereby up to 13.4 times faster than the existing installation. The producer’s TMS SSD solution for the worldwide fastest storage systems have been fully convincing. (Source: Vaillant Group)

To begin with, two application facilities were reconstructed in the Vaillant-QA environment (Quality Assurance) in order to, as far as possible, accurately proof the actual efficiency.

In the first test configuration, the RamSan functioned exclusively as a read accelerator and supported the mirrored redo logs and data volumes of the midrange system. In the second scenario, the RamSan was allocated full read and write functionality. The results were impressive. Critical transactions and batch jobs were enormously improved. Thus, for example, the above-mentioned data consistency check of 43 hours was reduced to only 3.8 hours. A request of actual "line items" now only took 24 seconds, whereas before it took 298 seconds. The end of the month analyses experienced a performance acceleration of the factor 3.1; however, in the tape drives backup area no significant improvement could be achieved because the speed of the tapes appeared to be the limiting factor.