1) EURONICS is a large European electrical retailer cooperative that needed a flexible IT infrastructure to support its network of independent retailers. 2) It consolidated its storage on two IBM XIV Storage Systems for full virtualization and easy scaling. This simplified management and improved flexibility by allowing rapid provisioning. 3) Using the IBM XIV systems reduced latency by 66% and increased throughput by 300%, providing excellent database performance for SAP and other systems with almost no performance issues.

1. IBM XIV Storage Systems
Case Study
EURONICS charges up
its business agility with
IBM XIV Storage for SAP
In a fully virtualized, zero-downtime storage
landscape
EURONICS is an international cooperative partnership of more than
Overview 6,400 independent consumer electronics and household appliance
retailers. It constitutes Europe’s largest electrical buying group,
The need
operating 11,300 stores in 29 countries and employing 50,000 people.
To support its network of independent
Total revenues exceeded e14.4 billion (US$17.3 billion) in 2008.
electrical retailers, EURONICS needed a
flexible IT infrastructure. Storage com-
plexity was preventing the IT team from Germany is one of EURONICS’ largest markets, with more than
responding quickly to new business 2,000 dealers. The IT organization supports these dealers with
needs.
centralized services.
The solution
EURONICS consolidated all of its stor- The need for flexibility
age on the IBM® XIV® Storage System,
“The business requires the IT department to provide speed and
gaining full virtualization, easy scaling,
and highly availability with cross-site flexibility,” comments Ulrich Müller, Head of IT for EURONICS
mirroring via IBM SAN Volume Deutschland eG. “We have continuous changes in national and
Controller. international markets, and our dealers and departments. The IT team
The benefit must have the flexibility to meet the changing needs of our different
Supports key systems with zero down- business units.”
time. Increases flexibility with rapid
provisioning. Improves performance, The company invested in virtualization. The IT team runs its SAP,
cutting latency by 66 percent. Simplifies
management through consolidation and DB2®, Tivoli® and Lotus® systems in IBM AIX® 5.3 environments
ease of use. on two IBM Power® 570 servers, leveraging IBM PowerVM™ virtual-
ization technology. For Microsoft® Windows® and NetWare, the
team chose VMware vSphere 4, on eight IBM System x® 3850 servers.
Centralizing the storage infrastructure
“We needed to virtualize our storage,” says Müller. “If you manage
storage physically, it is very difficult to be flexible in provisioning new
applications. We had three different storage systems, and maintaining
skills for each system led to high administrative costs. So we decided to
move to a single virtualized storage system.”

2. IBM XIV Storage Systems
Case Study
Finding the right partner
EURONICS asked Fritz & Macziol, an IBM Business Partner, to help
“Since we started using them find a new storage solution.
the XIV, we have
“Our initial proposal involved different technologies,” explains
reduced latency by
Maik Hahnel, IT Architect for Virtualized Environments at Fritz &
66 percent and increased Macziol. “Then IBM showed us what the XIV can do. It seems mirac-
throughput by ulous that the box can stripe the data across all the disks, with no need
to create RAID arrays. With XIV, it’s not unusual for a disk to be
300 percent. This gives rebuilt in about five minutes, which definitely sounds like a miracle!”
us excellent database
performance for both First XIV implementation in Germany
Working with IBM and Fritz & Macziol, EURONICS became the first
real-time and batch company in Germany to implement the XIV storage system. Two full-
workload.” rack XIV systems are located at separate data centers, connected to the
company’s AIX and VMware servers via a four-node IBM System
—Michael Bucher, Storage Database Storage® SAN Volume Controller (SVC) storage virtualization layer.
Administrator, EURONICS Deutschland eG SVC is used to manage data replication between the two XIV systems.
“As the first mover in Germany, we expected challenges,” comments
Müller. “But after two months, we had resolved all issues, and we
have now been running the XIV for more than a year without any
problems.”
Boosting ease of management
EURONICS’ SAP and VMware applications, which create high levels
of random I/O workload, are its most important systems. With a tradi-
tional storage infrastructure, this type of workload is difficult to
manage as the organization grows, requiring planning to optimize per-
formance. With the XIV, since the data is striped evenly across all
available disks and accessed in parallel, the required performance levels
are easily achieved without any specific planning.
“The most impressive thing about the XIV is the ability to distribute
the data across all the drives,” says Müller. “If a dealer wants more
storage, we just ask ‘how much do you need?’ We can expand systems
easily, with little need for planning and no hot spots or performance
issues. As a result, just two people can manage the whole storage
environment.”
Delivering high performance
EURONICS stores all its data—approximately 35 TB—on the
XIV system, and has a volumes growth rate of 5 TB/year. The
XIV grid architecture, massively parallelized, delivers very high levels
of performance regardless of the volume of data.
2

3. IBM XIV Storage Systems
Case Study
“Since we started using XIV, we have reduced latency by 66 percent
IBM Solution Components and increased throughput by 300 percent,” says Michael Bucher,
Storage Database Administrator at EURONICS. “This gives us excel-
Hardware
lent database performance for both real-time and batch workloads.”
● IBM® XIV® Storage System
● IBM System Storage® SAN Volume
Controller On average, SAP performance has increased by 30 percent, with
● IBM Power® 570 improvements of up to 700 percent for some batch jobs.
● IBM System x® 3850
Software “At peak workload, we currently only need about 8,000 to
● IBM AIX® 5.3 10,000 IOPS—and we think the XIV can deliver up to 50,000,” says
● IBM DB2® Müller. “Our performance requirements are likely to increase, but the
● IBM Lotus® Notes® & Domino® 7.1 XIV will have the capacity to cope.”
● IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager 5.6
IBM Business Partner Zero downtime
● Fritz & Macziol With XIV and SVC systems providing remote mirroring between its
two data centers, EURONICS has created a highly available architec-
ture that delivers its zero downtime. Even in extreme circumstances,
the XIV system’s self-healing and resilience help the company recover
“The most impressive
quickly from hardware failures.
thing about the XIV is
the ability to distribute “Last year, the air conditioning in our data center failed completely,”
says Müller. “The temperature of many of the servers reached
the data across all the 60 degrees Celsius [140 degrees Fahrenheit], and our engineer nearly
drives. If a dealer wants burnt his fingers resetting them. To our surprise, several XIV modules
more storage, we just were still running—and the system was able to rebuild itself with no
loss of data! Meanwhile, operations continued uninterrupted using the
ask ‘how much do second XIV at our other data center, with zero downtime. This level of
you need?” resilience is very impressive.”
—Ulrich Müller, Head of IT, EURONICS Enhancing business agility
Deutschland eG Above all, the centralization and virtualization of the storage landscape
on IBM XIV enables the EURONICS IT team to provide a flexible
and responsive service for the rest of the business. EURONICS is now
IT Environment considering further uses of the XIV Storage System, such as desktop
virtualization.
Operating systems
● Microsoft Windows® Server 2000,
Müller concludes: “If we need to add a new application, we can provi-
2003, 2008
● Novell NetWare 6 sion the storage very easily without worrying about the technical side
● Red Hat Enterprise Linux® of things. That’s really the ‘wow factor’ in our XIV solution. XIV is
now a key piece in our IT landscape, and we look forward to finding
Databases
new ways to leverage the technology in the future.
● Microsoft® SQL Server 2005, 2008
Applications
● SAP ERP
Virtualization
● VMware vSphere 4
3

4. For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner,
“Last year the air condi- or visit us at: ibm.com/storage/disk/xiv/
tioning in our data
center failed completely. For more information about EURONICS visit: euronics.de/
To our surprise, several Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financing can
XIV modules were still enable effective cash management, protection from technology obso-
lescence, improved total cost of ownership and return on investment.
running – and the Also, our Global Asset Recovery Services help address environmental
whole system was able to concerns with new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more informa-
rebuild itself with no loss tion on IBM Global Financing, visit: ibm.com/financing
of data!”
—Ulrich Müller, Head of IT, EURONICS
Deutschland eG
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