Healthcare

Business challenge Due to the rapid growth of its business, a large US health product provider needed to accelerate the performance of its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environment to meet increasing demand from more users.

Transformation A large US health product provider upgraded its Oracle® JD Edwards™ EnterpriseOne ERP applications and database environment with IBM® Power® Systems servers and IBM FlashSystem® V9000 storage systems. Supported by IBM Business Partner Sirius Computer Solutions, the complete system is designed for high availability, greater performance and more scalability.

Results “We’ve seen great results Large US health with IBM systems running 40% improvement Oracle . IBM in workload performance product provider allows us to keep the promises we make to our Saves costs customers.” of buying more software licenses by using A healthy alliance–how processor cores more efficiently —Platform services manager for a integrated IBM solutions large US health product provider From hours to minutes to backup data and restore processes optimize Oracle software performance

One of America’s largest manufacturers of high-quality vitamins, minerals and other dietary supplements, the provider markets its products through major mass retailers and drugstore chains under a variety of popular brand names. Share this Meeting the health product provider’s platform hardware proposal from another The company chose FlashSystem services manager. “We also needed vendor. The competitor indicated V9000 storage to take advantage of demands of a to consolidate our database and that, no matter what price IBM the speed and scalability of IBM growing business systems on a single platform to use offered, it would match the price. FlashCore® technology which with a new JD Edwards “That made it much easier because enhances storage functionality Increased public awareness about implementation. That was now we knew that we were not going through simplified data management, nutrition. Faster-paced lifestyles. the challenge.” to pick a solution based on price,” data reduction and storage tiering. To More people living with chronic says the platform services manager. improve application availability and conditions. A growing geriatric Long waits for system access created efficiency, V9000 also insulates population. Because of these and other issues. “We didn’t want to pay a “Once we looked at what it would applications from physical storage. other factors, a 2019 Harris poll team of five or six engineers to just sit take to implement what the other reported that 86 percent of adult there and wait for the data to be vendor proposed, it was clear that “IBM has a track record of delivering Americans take vitamins or dietary refreshed,” says the platform services was going to be a monumental task,” when they say they are going to supplements. Annual sales for manager. “And sometimes, our says the platform services manager. deliver,” says the senior systems vitamins, minerals and dietary impatient customers would tell us, ‘I “We were just not as confident with engineer. “IBM usually exceeds the supplements (VMS) in the US now can’t wait, let me start looking inside,’ them as we were with IBM engineers, performance parameters they set, so exceed USD 14 billion. and that could cause more problems. with the help they were going to give that was very appealing.” We needed to do it faster.” us and with our knowledge of IBM As it sold a growing volume of VMS systems. Having a single vendor and To support their Oracle environment, products through more retail stores, a Launching an a product that actually performs the IT team decided to migrate from large US health product provider made it easier to decide to stay IBM i to IBM AIX® operating system needed to expand its production optimization with IBM.” software, taking advantage of their capacity to serve more customers. program in-house expertise with AIX systems. Expansion also placed greater Prior working experience also “We already had very solid processes demands on the provider’s IT The provider recognized that factored into the decision to choose for backups, restores, copies and infrastructure, making it necessary to optimizing its Oracle software IBM. “We have been using IBM management for our Oracle start planning a systemwide upgrade. environment would require an products for a long time and we offerings,” says the platform services integrated solution built on existing already had success with running manager, “so it made it a lot easier for In addition to , the IBM products already customized for Oracle databases on IBM Power us to consolidate our databases for provider used JD Edwards its IT system. To manage the upgrade Systems,” says the platform services JD Edwards into that environment.” EnterpriseOne software as well as process, an enterprise solutions manager. “So now we just wanted to other Oracle software for planning, delivery team launched an expand running Oracle databases to With such a complex implementation budgeting, forecasting and supply optimization program and worked our JD Edwards implementation.” involving so many components, the chain management. Each time the with the platform services team, optimization program occasionally system needed to be backed up, systems team, IBM and Sirius to “When I started with the company, encountered technical issues related updated and refreshed, users were develop a system migration plan. The we were running on POWER5 and to performance tuning. “If you have unable to access the system or key system performance goals POWER6 systems,” says the bad SQL code, if you’re not asking for retrieve data for hours. included faster data replication, faster provider’s senior systems engineer. data the right way, you’re going to database cloning and the ability to “We consolidated to POWER7 with have performance issues,” says the “We needed to enable our business stand the system up every morning IBM i and with the optimization senior systems engineer. “IBM has customers, analysts and other IT without human intervention. program, we consolidated everything great resources for when issues are team members to get fresh data on POWER8.” caused by things ‘in between’ and all much faster,” says the large US Along with the IBM solution, the of IBM’s internal expertise on Oracle provider was presented with a stuff has helped a lot.” 2 Storage virtualization, supported by With the completion of the A healthy boost in IBM SAN Volume Controller server optimization program, the provider’s Solution components performance virtualization, enables the system to enterprise solutions delivery team has • IBM® FlashSystem® V9000 scale up according to demand. successfully upgraded its Oracle ® “Every morning at 6AM, without • IBM PowerHA “When we first got FlashSystem environment and met all of its long- human intervention, we refresh the • IBM Power® Systems V9000, we were able to hang disk term goals. “If you want to improve Oracle environment so anyone in IT drives on the back end when we the system and get the performance • IBM SAN Volume Controller can come in and start working,” says needed extra capacity,” says the that you really feel the system can • Oracle® Database the platform services manager. “This senior systems engineer. “Things also give you, you have to spend a little is such a big win for us to do a • Oracle JD Edwards™ run much faster on flash than they do more time,” says the platform backup in five minutes instead of EnterpriseOne on spinning disks.” services manager. “We did that and it hours and provide a clone of the was worth it, thanks to the IBM environment. If there’s a problem, we With Power Systems servers and engineering team.” can work on solutions right away Take the next step FlashSystem storage arrays To learn more about IBM Services without having to touch production. If ® integrated in an IBM PowerHA for please anyone requests data refreshes for a cluster, the provider also takes contact your IBM representative or particular project, that happens in a “IBM is a great partner for advantage of IBM Global Mirror IBM Business Partner, or visit: . really fast manner.” whenever you have technology, a storage-based disaster questions. You can call com/services/oracle recovery solution designed for high After upgrading to POWER8® when you have a availability. The platform services processor-based servers, the problem and their About Sirius Computer Solutions engineer says: “Global Mirror is one Founded in 1980 and headquartered provider is seeing a 40 percent engineers will reach out of the main ingredients in this magic, in San Antonio, Texas, IBM improvement in workload right away and say, ‘we’ll so we can take a snapshot of a Business Partner Sirius has over performance. Memory overhead is production environment and clone it get you some answers 2,600 employees and is one of the also reduced through virtualization. into a development environment. And and get this taken care largest IT solutions integrators in “We’re able to put many more when we perform disaster recovery of immediately.” the US. Specializing in IT strategy, databases into a single box without exercises, we are able to bring up all security, business innovation, cloud having to build another server cluster —Senior systems engineer for a of our systems from Nevada to computing and managed services, and buy more Oracle Database large US health product provider California in minutes.” Sirius deploys dedicated teams of licenses,” says the platform certified experts to serve over services manager. 5,500 active clients and offers integrated multivendor technology to small businesses with fewer than 500 employees as well as large enterprises with thousands of employees and hundreds © Copyright IBM Corporation 2020. IBM Corporation, IBM Services, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504. Produced in the United States of America, April 2020. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, AIX, IBM of locations. FlashCore, IBM FlashSystem, Power, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 and PowerHA are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle Database are not IBM products or offerings. Oracle products are sold or licensed, as the case may be, to users under Oracle’s terms and conditions, which are provided with the product or offering. Availability, and any and all warranties, services and support for Oracle products is the direct responsibility of, and is provided directly to users by, Oracle.

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