MAXIMA Boosts Retail Operations Efficiency with HPE And

Case Study

MAXIMA boosts retail operations efficiency with HPE and SAP Objective Streamline business processes and supply chain logistics to improve Drives higher SAP performance with HPE efficiency serving retail customers across 500 stores servers, storage and data protection Approach Modernize business-critical SAP infrastructure with HPE Gen9 servers and HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage

IT Matters • Accelerated nightly SAP batch processes dramatically • Reduced cycle times to replenish merchandise at stores • 3X faster backups and restores

Business Matters • Ensured business continuity and data integrity with active-active data centers

• Enabled recovery of business operations within one hour in the event of a site loss

• Gained an IT infrastructure that will Strengthening the to manage business operations. For that, the support business expansion for the next company relies on SAP as the backbone for five years SAP backbone everything from inventory management and pricing, to supply chain logistics, distribution, MAXIMA’s roots trace back to 1992 when a sales forecasting, and financial reporting. SAP small group of enterprising students started simply must perform—without fail—to ensure a retail business to put food on store shelves happy customers and healthy business in their home city of Vilnius, Lithuania. Today, revenues. MAXIMA has become the largest Lithuanian- based company in the Baltic States and an Mažvydas Stundžia, MAXIMA’s chief international enterprise that operates in five information officer, remarks, “If SAP fails, countries. customers might not find the bread and milk they need on store shelves. Or members of With more than 500 shopping centers, our loyalty program could miss promotions 64,000 products, and 4,300 suppliers from that would help them save money. SAP is of 60 countries around the world, MAXIMA vital importance to our business.” requires a sophisticated technology platform Case study Industry Page 2 MAXIMA Retail

“Our business people want to make everything faster—delivery times, order generation, forecasts—which requires IT to promise more performance and efficiency to the business. With the SAP system improvements enabled by our latest HPE infrastructure, IT is now in a position to fulfill those promises.”

— Mažvydas Stundžia, Chief Information Officer, MAXIMA

Therefore, MAXIMA has long turned to of its SAP environment, including HANA. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as its After a two-day workshop in HPE’s SAP trusted provider for the server and storage competency center, followed by a proof-of- infrastructure running SAP. Traditionally, concept to validate the benefits HANA could MAXIMA operated SAP out of a single data deliver on the right architecture, MAXIMA was center for all five countries where it conducts convinced. business. But given the criticality of SAP, the company recognized the need for greater “HPE’s expertise in SAP was very important business continuity assurance in case a major in our decision,” says Mažvydas. “We operate system failure or natural disaster struck its a highly complex SAP environment so it primary data center. was critical that the vendor could not only provide an infrastructure capable of running With its existing HPE infrastructure SAP, but also had people knowledgeable in approaching end of warranty, MAXIMA also SAP who could help us architect a complete saw the opportunity to modernize. This solution. Considering technology, architecture would provide the company with added expertise, and SAP knowledge, HPE was the performance and capacity to handle ongoing best choice for us.” business growth, as well adopt resource- demanding SAP technologies such as HANA. HPE developed a new architecture for MAXIMA, which includes two active-active HPE proves to be the data centers to ensure continuous availability of SAP if the main site goes down. At the right choice for SAP infrastructure level, MAXIMA replaced legacy HPE servers running UNIX with the latest MAXIMA evaluated several major IT vendors, HPE ProLiant Gen9 servers and a Linux including IBM and Dell, before choosing HPE. operating environment. In addition, MAXIMA Unlike the other competitors, HPE offered upgraded its legacy HPE XP storage to the more than just hardware. HPE brought deep latest HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage for its knowledge and experience with SAP, and superior performance, density, and capacity. was able to advise MAXIMA on an optimal MAXIMA engaged HPE Technology Services infrastructure design to get the most out for Installation and Deployment Services. Case study Industry Page 3 MAXIMA Retail

Specifically, the new infrastructure includes an Higher performance SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) implementation, with HPE ProLiant streamlines retail operations BL460 Gen9 Server Blades running SAP Since adopting the new HPE infrastructure, Forecasting and Replenishment (F&R). This MAXIMA has improved SAP performance included a migration of F&R from Oracle to dramatically, affecting everything from SAN HANA. The infrastructure also provides overnight batch processing of store orders HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 Servers to run to real-time inventory monitoring and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and accelerated merchandise distribution. For HPE ProLiant BL460 Gen9 Server Blades to example, the time to generate an inventory run SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (PI), report and move merchandise from the both supported by Oracle databases. distribution center to the stores has been reduced substantially. In addition, MAXIMA relies on HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8400 for production storage, “Our business people are focused on supporting both Oracle and SAP HANA. To streamlining the supply chain and protect Oracle and SAP HANA data, MAXIMA accelerating order processing,” notes uses HPE StoreOnce 4500 System and HPE Mažvydas. “They want to make everything StoreOnce Catalyst software, along with HPE faster—delivery times, order generation, StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library. MAXIMA forecasts—which requires IT to promise more uses HPE OneView to centrally manage performance and efficiency to the business. the infrastructure, which is backed by HPE With the SAP system improvements enabled Technology Services Support for BladeSystem by our latest HPE infrastructure, IT is now in a and 3PAR Storage. position to fulfill those promises.”

“We’ve been using HPE BladeSystem for Moving from Oracle to HANA on the HPE years to run SAP applications and our other infrastructure also added to improved virtualized systems,” notes Mažvydas. “HPE performance for the SAP F&R application. BladeSystem has demonstrated excellent “With Oracle, to have optimal F&R performance and reliability for a reasonable performance, it was very important to carry price, so it was a natural choice to continue out statistics updates of certain tables at with the Gen9 servers. HPE could also provide precisely the right time,” Mažvydas explains. a complete solution with the latest storage “Sometimes we had to use locked statistics technology. We considered competitive and other similar methods to achieve the storage, but none could offer a platform correct execution plan. With HANA we do not as fully developed as HPE as part of a full have any database performance optimization solution stack.” issues at all.” Case study Industry MAXIMA Retail

Customer at a glance Assured business continuity As MAXIMA continues to grow and expand operations into new markets, Mažvydas is Application With active-active data centers and a highly confident that the HPE infrastructure will • SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), SAP NetWeaver Process reliable data protection infrastructure from stand up to increased SAP workloads. “We Integration (PI), SAP Forecasting and HPE, MAXIMA is also assured of maintaining designed the HPE infrastructure to support Replenishment (F&R) business continuity and data integrity. our projected business needs for the next five years,” he says. “It provides the performance Hardware • HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 Servers Mažvydas Stundžia points out, “With HPE, and scalability to cope with more stores, more we have reduced potential downtime to a users, and more data. We have worked with • HPE ProLiant BL460 Gen9 Server HPE for a long time and trust their ability to Blades minimum. If a disaster struck our primary data center, it would take us no more than one support our needs well into the future.” • HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8400 Storage hour to be back up and operational.” • HPE StoreOnce 4500 System Learn more at • HPE StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library On a day-to-day basis, data backup and recovery is also much faster with HPE hpe.com Software StoreOnce 4500 System, which ensures • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 valuable business data is properly protected and helps keep the business productive. • HPE OneView • HPE StoreOnce Catalyst “We chose StoreOnce as we needed a • HPE Data Protector faster backup solution than we had before,” • SAP HANA Mažvydas advises. “The disk-based backup appliance is three times faster for both • Oracle Database backup and recovery compared to our Services previous HPE StorageWorks solution. For • HPE Technology Services Installation longer-term archives, StoreEver is the perfect and Deployment Services complementary solution as tape is still the • HPE Technology Services Support for most economical media for long retention BladeSystem and 3PAR Storage times.”

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