Johannesburg, 20 Oct 2005
Tellumat, a Cape Town-based business that develops high value solutions in the communications, electronic and defence sectors, recently commissioned an extensive SAP systems migration.
The migration was a major project for outsourced IT services provider Imperatech Solutions, whose brief was to find a highly redundant, scalable and cost-effective IT system and Intel server platform for Tellumat`s SAP enterprise resource planning application suite.
The project brief was to migrate Tellumat from an ageing Unix platform, to Microsoft Windows NT and SQL Server with the objective of yielding a reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) through lower maintenance agreements and higher availability of skilled resources. Additional project requirements include integration of the new landscape with the other Microsoft.NET file and print share services already deployed.
Martin Brandt, Imperatech`s Managing Director, says: "Our project criteria were to migrate to an Intel platform, have Microsoft Architecture Support, use a SAP Approved Hardware Vendor, and on this base provide a cost-effective landscape with strong redundancy and high storage scalability."
Working closely with Siemens Business Services (SBS), Imperatech chose Fujitsu Siemens Computers as the hardware vendor on this project, largely due to its SAP approved hardware partner status and its SAP expertise resource.
"One of our first key challenges was to right-size the hardware to meet Tellumat`s requirements," says Brandt. "To meet this challenge, we used System Inspector, a dedicated software application developed in the Fujitsu Siemens Computers SAP laboratories in Germany, which determines the accurate sizing of SAP/R3 hardware architectures."
System Inspector was installed by Imperatech to interrogate the existing Tellumat SAP/R3 Production system and provide an in-depth performance analysis of the ERP application, database, and operating system. Imperatech was the first company in South Africa to deploy System Inspector automated sizing methodology.
The software was installed on a personal computer running Windows 2000 and was configured to run over six days specifically capturing peak month-end utilisation from the production system. This automated interrogation method was first tested on Tellumat`s QA system to evaluate potential performance impacts on SAP/R3. It proved to be highly efficient and was ready to be deployed in the production environment without the user community being aware of its interrogation activities.
The System Inspector results captured amounted to 450Mb of detailed information, which was saved to CD and shipped to the Fujitsu Siemens Computers labs in Germany for a comprehensive evaluation. Once received, Fujitsu Siemens Computers provided a collated report of graphs and performance measurements, which was later reviewed with Imperatech over a teleconference.
The sizing exercise enabled Imperatech to provide Tellumat with a ROI and TCO analysis of the new IT landscape in comparison with that which was in place. The recommendations, based on the evaluation of the data gathered by System Inspector were that Tellumat would need a Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY 2-way Server (RX600) running SQL Server RDBMS version 7 for Tellumat`s Development and Test environments. Additionally, it was recommended that Tellumat`s Production environment deploy a PRIMERGY RX300 2-way Server with a Fibre Channel connection to the NetApp storage. Tellumat currently operates several Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY servers. The system is currently serving 200 named users with 150 of these operating concurrently.
Phase 1 of the project, the upgrade from SAP/R 3.1H to 3.1I was completed within the project target deadline of two months. Phase 2 of the project will see substantial operating systems upgrades, and a BPR project, and will be completed in November.
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