Project Environment

Sumitomo Electric Bordnetze SE (SEBN), originally founded as a joint venture between Volkswagen and Siemens, has been part of Sumitomo Electric Industries since 2006. The full system supplier to the international automotive industry employs more than 25,000 people at 21 locations worldwide.

Permanent innovations and the requirement to be able to react quickly to changing market situations are part of SEBN’s daily business. In order to keep up with the rapid pace of the industry and drive new developments, the Group needs reliable enterprise applications. SEBN keeps the responsibility for application and network management in-house, while the operation of the infrastructure all the way up to SAP Basis is in the hands of a service provider. When existing hosting contracts with the old service provider expired, SEBN put potential new IT service providers to the test in 2014.

Requirements & Objectives

A call for bids was made to identify a suitable new partner for hosting the systems that included the mission-critical applications Infor XPPS (production control), SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Objects and SAP Hana (for Analytics).

Together with the SAP partner BLUE S’TEC, DATAGROUP convinced Sumitomo with a comprehensive service and hosting portfolio and finally migrated the existing SAP environment under Linux / VMware to one of the DATAGROUP data centers in Frankfurt.

Implementation

Performance was and is a critical issue for the core application Infor. The idea of using IBM Power 8 systems with IBM Flash systems as sole memory was discussed in detail. Not least because of the attractiveness of IBM Flash in terms of price together with the unsurpassed performance for both Infor and SAP HANA, the decision for such a concept was easy.

“Thanks to our worldwide locations with production in three-shift operation, we were able to provide a maximum maintenance window of 48 hours between Friday night and early Monday morning for each migration section to be carried out,” says Ulf Schmalfuß, explaining the procedure, which was not allowed to interfere with the ongoing operation of the plants in Mexico, Tunisia and Europe.

Today, the IBM Power for Infor as well as the Intel VMware environments for SAP run in the DATAGROUP data center. High availability is achieved by installing the production as well as the HA environment in two separate fire compartments. A third fire compartment houses the data backup media and the Quorum disk of the IBM SVC Stretched Cluster. The 24×7 operation is supported by proactive monitoring.

Project Result

“The performance of our new environment is excellent,” says Ulf Schmalfuß: “My employees initially thought the application was broken because the reports were ready in seconds. In the meantime they have gotten used to the speed”.

Today, regular service calls offer all parties involved the opportunity to continuously align the managed services with the needs of SEBN. In doing so, DATAGROUP attaches great importance to “one face to the customer”, i.e. to personnel consistency in the cooperation. “At DATAGROUP we are not a number, but know our contact persons and know who is responsible for us. We enjoy the constructive cooperation, which leaves a lot of freedom for the further development of ideas.

Unser Partnerschaftsprinzip, Keine Straße ist lang mit einem Freund an der Seite, wird mit DATAGROUP perfekt gelebt“, ziehen Ulf Schmalfuß und Hartmut Wüst ihr Resümee.

Ulf Schmalfuß and Hartmut Wüst sum up: “Our partnership principle is No road is long with a friend by your side. With DATAGROUP, we live it perfectly”.

Contact