Meeting the needs of a growing SAP environment with smart IBM storage
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Russia
Product
- IBM® FlashSystem™ V840
- IBM Real-time Compression Appliance™ STN7800
- IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller
- IBM XIV® Storage System
- IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager
Tech Stack
- SAP ERP
- IBM FlashSystem
- IBM Real-time Compression Appliance
- IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller
- IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Metals
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Human Resources
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Factory Operations Visibility & Intelligence
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Severstal is one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, with assets in Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Liberia. It has approximately 61,000 employees, and generated revenues of USD13.31 billion in 2013. Over the past seven years, Severstal has built one of the largest SAP ERP environments in Russia, supporting operational processes such as planning, production and plant maintenance for both its mining and steel divisions. The SAP landscape is constantly evolving to meet new business requirements. For example, this year, Severstal introduced SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for supply chain management, and SAP Mobile Platform to give employees anytime, anywhere access to SAP applications. Next year, it plans to introduce SAP Supplier Relationship Management too.
The Challenge
Severstal, one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, has built one of the largest SAP ERP environments in Russia over the past seven years. The SAP landscape is constantly evolving to meet new business requirements, such as introducing SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for supply chain management, and SAP Mobile Platform for anytime, anywhere access to SAP applications. However, introducing these new functionalities, increasing the user-base and gaining deeper insight into operations all come at a price. The volume of data in the SAP environment was increasing rapidly, and performance was beginning to suffer. Severstal was faced with the challenge of designing a storage landscape that would scale to meet its future needs, while avoiding the expense of replacing all its existing storage systems.
The Solution
Severstal decided to work with IBM to build a smarter storage landscape. The solution uses IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller to create a single virtualized “pool” of storage, which includes Severstal’s existing storage systems and also introduces the IBM FlashSystem V840. Two IBM Real-time Compression Appliance™ solutions are used to compress the company’s data during backup, freeing up significant space previously used for SAP data, Oracle, VMware and the company’s email system. IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager is used to manage the tiering of the storage landscape. It automatically moves older, less important or less frequently accessed files onto lower-cost, higher-capacity storage, as well as managing the company’s backups and restores. The IBM FlashSystem platform’s all-flash array provides extremely high throughput for the data-intensive workloads generated by Severstal’s SAP applications.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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