Case Study Server Heritage Foods Ltd. The poor performance and reliability of Heritage Foods Ltd.’s existing platform for SAP ERP was causing delays and lost sales. By migrating from UNIX to SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, the company boosted performance, increased availability and fault tolerance, and reduced costs. With SAP ERP on the SUSE operating system, Heritage Foods Ltd. is better equipped to get the right stock to the right stores at the right time, increasing customer satisfaction. Overview strug gling to meet the company’s expec­- The Heritage Group, founded in the year tations. 1992 by Mr. Nara Chandrababu Naidu, is one of the fastest growing public listed Srikant Pachigolla, Senior Manager, IT, at companies in India, with five business di­ Heritage Foods Ltd., said: “SAP ERP runs vi sions—Dairy, Retail, Agri, Bakery and many aspects of our retail business from Re newable Energy—under its flagship financials and cost accounting to sales company Heritage Foods Limited. Cur­ and distribution and from warehouse Heritage Foods Ltd. at a Glance: rently Heritage’s milk and milk products man agement to human resources. Given have a market presence in Andhra Pra­ the criticality of the system, we needed to Industry and Location desh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil significantly improve the performance and Retail, India Nadu, Maharastra, Odisha and NCR Delhi reliability. We also found that the platform Products and Services and its retail stores across Bangalore, was expensive to run and to upgrade.” SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Chen nai and Hyderabad. Applications One of the key problem areas for Heritage SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Challenge Foods Ltd. was ensuring reliable integration Since deploying SAP ERP on a proprietary­­ between Microsoft SQL Server databases Results distribution of UNIX in 2008, Heri tage running in its stores and the central SAP + Cut 50 percent from IT capital and operational Foods Ltd. had seen steady business growth system. Data on sales, stock levels, pricing costs by embracing Linux + Gained a reliable, high-performance, easy-to- take a heavy toll on performance and avail­ and promotions is exchanged overnight between these systems, and challenges manage platform for SAP ERP ability. The chosen platform for this mis­ + Enabled high availability at low cost, with with VPN connectivity made it hard to en­ sion­critical environment was increasingly near-zero RPO sure that all the necessary transfers took + Boosted performance, cutting runtime for place outside of store opening times. At SAP jobs by up to 93 percent times, this was impacting Heritage Foods “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Ltd.’s ability to get the right stock to the for SAP Applications gave us the right stores in a timely manner, ultimately confidence we needed: the OS is leading to missed sales opportunities. tightly integrated with the ERP system and is built for SAP. It not “The integration between SQL Server and only gave us cost benefits but iDocs on SAP ERP was problematic, and we also had availability issues with our also enabled our move to x64.” SAP applications,” said Srikant Pachigolla. “In general, response times for SAP were SRIKANT PACHIGOLLA too high, and occasionally background Senior Manager IT jobs would fail to complete in time for the Heritage Foods Ltd. Server Case Study Heritage Retail start of the working day. We also had I/O The SAP landscape at Heritage Foods application memory once the page­cache issues in the data storage layer, and back­ Ltd. is fully virtualized using VMware is filled to the configured limit. Using this ing up or restoring data took too long, so ESX Server 6.0 and uses the SUSE Linux feature, Heritage Foods Ltd. is able to limit our ability to recover rapidly in the event Enterprise High Availability Extension to the amount of page­cache used by the of a disaster was in doubt.” cluster application servers in the primary Linux kernel whenever there is competi­ data centre. For protection against disas­ tion between the application memory and Solution ter, the company operates a secondary the system page­cache, thereby avoiding With the aim of reducing costs, improving data centre, asynchronously replicating the possibility of degraded performance. performance and enhancing availability, the SAP data at the Oracle database level Heritage Foods Ltd. rejected upgrading its using EMC RecoverPoint software. “We Results existing platform for SAP ERP. “The cost cannot afford to lose any data, so we Looking first at the technical benefits, of new hardware for our existing platform set a target of near­zero Recovery Point Srikant Pachigolla cites the tight integra­ was much higher than for Intel­architecture Objective (RPO),” said Srikant Pachigolla. tion between SAP ERP and SUSE Linux systems, and we did not want to be locked “Our Re covery Time Objective (RTO) is Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, into a proprietary architecture any longer,” less critical—we can tolerate a couple of which includes a number of SAP­specific said Srikant Pachigolla. “Equally, we had hours of downtime in the event of a disas­ libraries, configuration tweaks and a SAP­ only a partially virtualized environment, ter—so asynchronous replication of data to specific update channel. He said, “The and we knew it would cost too much to the secondary data center was the option SUSE operating system’s built­in libraries get the degree of flexibility and sophistica­ that made the most sense economically.” eliminate compatibility­related issues, and tion we wanted in virtualization.” the deployment wizard enables us to get EMC RecoverPoint enables point­in­time new SAP applications up and running very Heritage Foods Ltd. reviewed the leading database recovery in the primary data quickly. We also benefit from a single point dis tri butions of Linux, and selected SUSE center, working with the SUSE high­avail­ of support via SUSE for the entire SAP Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications ability components to support continuous ERP stack—though in practice we have running on Cisco UCS servers as its new local production. Certified by SAP, the had almost no requirement for support, platform for SAP ERP. “At the time of se­ SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability such is the reliability of the solution.” lection, SUSE was the only Linux vendor Ex tension provides not only a clustering to have a well­developed support network solution for application servers, but also Heritage Foods Ltd. also achieved its ob­ in India, and we also wanted to take advan­ solutions for high­availability storage and jective of reducing capital and operational tage of having an operating system adap­ network load­balancing—all delivered and expenditure: hardware and software costs ted specially for the demands of SAP ERP,” licensed as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise have been cut in half, and the company said Srikant Pachigolla. “A further attraction Server for SAP Applications. can run as many virtual instances of the of the SUSE solution was that it includes SUSE operating system as it requires with­ high­availability components for ser vers, Heritage Foods Ltd. is using a kernel­ out paying additional fees. “The move to storage and network at no extra charge.” tune option in the SUSE operating sys­ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP tem to optimize performance for its SAP Applications on Cisco UCS has given us SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP workloads. As standard, the Linux kernel an open, flexible, stable and low­cost plat­ Applications is a tailor­made distribution swaps out any rarely­accessed applica­ form that will serve our needs for the com­ of Linux specifically tuned for SAP soft­ tion memory pages, using these freed­up ing years,” said Srikant Pachigolla. ware. SUSE runs a completely separate pages as a cache to accelerate file system update channel for this distribution, pre­ operations. However, some SAP applica­ Beyond the immediate benefits to the testing all new and updated packages and tions require large amounts of memory to IT function and its budgets, the solution reverting to the last good version of any ensure fast access to data—and some of has also had a significant positive impact package that is found to create problems this memory is accessed very infrequently. on the business. Migrating from UNIX to in SAP—whether in terms of performance, If the application needs to access memory SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP security or stability. The company then that has already been paged out by the Applications on Cisco UCS resulted in im­ works to fix the faults in the package so kernel, this will naturally result in impaired mediate and dramatic performance im­ that it can be safely added back into the response times. The kernel­tune option provements for Heritage Foods Ltd.. main branch of the distribution. instructs the kernel to avoid paging out 2 The response time for a sample of 100,000 under 51 minutes—a 77 percent reduction. has come down by 59 percent, 81 per ­ screen changes in SAP has fallen from Heritage Foods Ltd. has seen similar per­ cent and 60 percent for the Bangalore, 1,909 seconds to 455 seconds, a reduc­ centage reductions for a number of other Chennai and Hyderabad stores respec­ tion of 76 percent, and the time taken to common SAP jobs: for example, the time tively. Meanwhile, the time required to de­ process inbound iDocs from the stores required to prepare and deliver purchase termine Stock on Hand for the Bangalore has fallen from 3 hours 42 minutes to just orders to vendors for direct store delivery stores is 93 percent lower. www.suse.com 3 “Although the number of retail outlets grew from 70 to 110, there was no impact on system performance.