1. case study
Callaway Golf
Technologent and EMC help Callaway Golf leverage
XtremIO all-flash arrays to improve the performance of
its SAP environment while reducing storage requirements
and enhancing backup and recovery processes.
C
allaway Golf Company manufactures and sells golf equipment and
accessories under the Callaway Golf and Odyssey brands worldwide.
The Carlsbad, Calif.-based company was looking to refresh its storage
infrastructure with flash and called upon Technologent to assist.
Callaway began evaluating various flash storage platforms and found that
EMC’s XtremIO all-flash arrays offered many compelling features.With
assistance from Technologent and EMC, Callaway’s technical team set up a
proof of concept (PoC) based upon a cluster of XtremIO X-Bricks.The solution
was not evaluated from a storage point of view but rather in terms of how
mission-critical applications would benefit.
In the first phase of the project, Callaway migrated virtualization, database
and email archival applications to XtremIO.Then the company decided to
move the entire SAP environment onto flash storage, and set up a second
PoC to evaluate XtremIO under that workload.
Like many organizations that use SAP, Callaway needed to meet increasingly
stringent business SLAs and support growing data volumes — all while
keeping a lid on costs.The company’s technical team knew that flash storage
would enhance the performance of their enterprise applications; however,
they were looking for a solution that would also reduce TCO and minimize
complexity.
From an application perspective, XtremIO met all of Callaway’s criteria in
terms of performance, ease of implementation and day-to-day operational
requirements. Based upon the success of the PoC,Technologent and EMC
worked with Callaway on the successful migration from VMAX enterprise
storage to XtremIO scale-out flash.
The Technologent/EMC Solution
The XtremIO platform significantly improved the interaction between various
SAP applications — in some instances as much as 150 percent. XtremIO also
brought improvements in average application and database response times,
and improved the execution of batch jobs in SAP ERP Central Component
(ECC) by as much as 100 percent.These metrics were achieved without Calla-
way having to change any code or tune any database parameters.
After the successful migration of the SAP production instances, Callaway’s
technical team explored XtremIO’s ability to handle the snapshots and
cloning that are required in SAP environments.Those functions required a tre-
mendous amount of storage space on the VMAX. By leveraging the XtremIO
platform, Callaway is able to create snapshots and clones using essentially
zero storage space.
Overall, XtremIO substantially reduced Callaway’s physical storage re-
quirements through de-duplication, compression and thin provisioning. In
addition, the solution enabled Callaway to improve its database backup and
recovery processes. Backups that normally took eight hours to run were com-
pleted in three and a half hours, and restores could be performed in as little
as an hour and a half.At the storage level, Callaway saw data transfer rates
close to 2GBps but still had plenty of application performance headroom.
Technologent served as Callaway’s advisor throughout the PoC and imple-
mentation. Because XtremIO is a new technology,Technologent engaged
EMC resources as needed to help advance the project.The first stage of the
initiative — cutover from VMAX to XtremIO — is complete and has been
very successful. Callaway is continuing to explore ways to further leverage its
investment in the XtremIO solution.
Solution Summary:
• Analysis of Callaway’s requirements for an SAP storage
platform refresh
• Proofs of concept based upon XtremIO X-Brick cluster
• Migration of virtualization, database and email archival
software to XtremIO
• Migration of SAP applications from VMAX to XtremIO
• Significant performance improvements in SAP
application interactions and batch jobs
• Substantial storage efficiency gains through de-
duplication, compression and thin provisioning
• Reduction of storage requirements for snapshots and
cloning to near zero
• Improved database backup and recovery processes
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