Australian Paper knows green is good for business with IBM

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1 IBM Australia Australian Paper knows green is good for business with IBM Highlights Business Challenge Australian Paper needed to reduce the high cost of maintaining the servers and storage used for running its SAP enterprise applications. It wanted to replace this infrastructure with an energy-efficient, flexible and highly scalable system that used storage more adeptly. Solution To improve its carbon footprint and the performance of its business management software, Australian Paper implemented IBM servers based on industry-leading POWER6 processors and PowerVM virtualisation technology, as well as IBM storage and tape libraries. About Australian Paper and the PaperlinX Group One of Australia s largest paper manufacturers, Australian Paper employs approximately 1,400 people and operates paper mills in Victoria and New South Wales. The company produces more than 500,000 tonnes of paper annually and creates over 2,000 types of paper, which are used every day in homes and businesses around the world. The company s head office is located in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley. Its primary data centre is in East Burwood, and its secondary data centre is in Mulgrave, both in Melbourne. Australian Paper was the manufacturing arm of the PaperlinX Group until June 2009, when it became part of the Nippon Paper Group of Japan. Improve service. Reduce cost. Manage risk In 2008 Australian Paper was spending more than $700,000 a year maintaining the servers and storage used for running its SAP enterprise software. This infrastructure was approximately eight years old and reaching the end of its life. The company relied on four SAP applications to manage its business. It used SAP R/3 for enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse for business intelligence, SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for capacity and manufacturing planning and SAP Customer Relationship Management. To keep up with forecast growth, Australian Paper planned to upgrade its ERP system from SAP R/3 to the latest ECC 6 suite. However, it knew the latest version of SAP s ERP software wouldn t perform at its peak on old servers and storage.

2 IBM Australia Business Benefits The new hardware platform for SAP enterprise software is 50 percent more energy efficient than its previous platform, reducing power bills and carbon footprint. The firm has shaved $700,000 off its maintenance costs and staff have gained faster, more reliable access to critical business data. The lack of flexibility in the company s previous infrastructure meant Australian Paper s IT team had a limited ability to balance workloads and share capacity between its primary and secondary data centres. When demand on the system peaked during busy work periods, such as the end of financial year, the systems would slow down. This made it difficult for staff to access data to make timely business decisions. With business continuing to grow, we knew we not only needed to increase data storage capacity, but also create a more flexible SAP environment that would improve the responsiveness and performance of SAP systems for end-users, says Shaun Scallan, CIO, Australian Paper. Australian Paper takes it environmental responsibilities very seriously. Its management is strongly focused on sustainability and minimising the environmental impact of its business. The company wanted to extend these values to include its IT infrastructure. When we put together the business case for upgrading our server and storage systems, it was not just about minimising costs to the business, says Shaun Scallan. Just as importantly, we wanted new infrastructure that was extremely energy efficient that consumed less power and required less cooling and floorspace. Discovering new ways to work with dynamic infrastructure With the assistance of IBM Consulting Services, in early 2009 Australian Paper consolidated its 13 servers running SAP programs and six additional application servers onto two new IBM Power 570 servers with POWER6 processors running the IBM AIX Version 5.3 operating system. We cut it over on a single weekend in May 2009 and everything went live at once, says Shaun Scallan. There was no phasing of the different systems they all went live in one hit. It was a very smooth transition. Australian Paper used IBM PowerVM, the virtualisation technology built into IBM Power 570 servers, to run each application in a separate virtual machine. PowerVM dynamically allocates processing, memory and storage resources across multiple applications running on the one physical server.

3 Under peak loads, an application can utilise more CPU cycles outside its entitled capacity, which means our SAP programs run more efficiently, says Shaun Wimpory, SAP Basis Consultant, Australian Paper. The extra server capacity allowed Australian Paper to implement a fifth application, SAP Solution Manager, to centralise control of system monitoring. The new software gives Australian Paper s IT team new capabilities including earlywatch alert reporting, SAP patch downloads and upgrade licence keys. Australian Paper migrated more than 15TB of data from its previous storage system to a new IBM System Storage DS5300 SAN. This was connected to the server environment with IBM TotalStorage SAN16B-2 Express fabric switches. The SAN is managed by IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controllers (SVCs), which provides storage virtualisation that allows Australian Paper to maximise its storage capacity, with a simplified management interface. The company also replaced its backup tape library with two IBM TS3310 Tape Libraries, which provides the company with a flexible and highly available backup system that meets the ever-increasing needs of its SAP applications. Energy consumption halved Introducing new energy-efficient hardware and virtualisation technology has meant Australian Paper immediately halved its data centre energy consumption, reducing the company s total carbon footprint. Solution Components Hardware 2 x IBM Power 570 servers with POWER6 processors and PowerVM for server virtualisation IBM System Storage DS5300 IBM TotalStorage SAN16B-2 Express switches IBM System Storage TS3310 Tape Library IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controllers Software SAP R/3 Enterprise Release 4.6c, to be followed by SAP ECC 6.0 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer SAP Customer Relationship Management SAP Solution Manager The 50% in power consumption was an important outcome for this project, says Shaun Scallan. These new systems are helping us meet our green IT best-practice goals. The reduction in our carbon footprint is equivalent to taking 45 cars off the road.

4 IBM Australia The after-sales support by our IBM sales representatives was outstanding. At no point did we feel in the dark or at risk. IBM continually stepped up to the difficult task at hand, and it was their technical expertise, dedication, and a few late nights, that made the project an outstanding success. Shaun Wimpory, SAP Basis Consultant, Australian Paper Backups made faster and easier The company also reduced the space taken up by its backup tape library while increasing its capacity. Backup time has dropped from six hours to 1.5 hours for a 2.4TB database. The job of tape recycling has also been taken off the IT team s daily to-do list. By introducing the IBM TS3310, tape consumption has fallen from over 570 tapes to less than 120. Wimpory adds: In reality we were using a lot more than 570 tapes, but the old tape library only had 570 slots and the IT team had to keep cycling-in new tapes every day. Operating costs reduced In addition to cost benefits of improved energy efficiency, Australian Paper s new IT infrastructure has removed $700,000 from its annual cost of maintenance. Updating our aged infrastructure to the latest IBM POWER6 processor technology was a no-brainer, says Shaun Wimpory. We achieved realworld, tangible savings, including reductions in our day-to-day data centre costs. Greater responsiveness By improving the speed and responsiveness of its SAP applications, staff can work more efficiently, without delays previously associated with accessing or processing data. A great feature of PowerVM is the rapid online dynamic resource allocation that allows us to move CPU and memory resources without outages, adds Shaun Wimpory. For the users, this means no interruption to the processing of information data contained in SAP is up-to-date and always available. SAP application response times have dropped from 0.7 of a second to 0.3 of a second a performance improvement of more than 100 percent. We re happy we ve implemented a new hardware platform that is scalable, highly available, reduces complexity in the data centre, and showed immediate returns including a significant increase in SAP performance, says Shaun Wimpory. Dynamic support IBM Consulting Services was an integral part of the implementation project, providing the core expertise for server and storage system design. The IBM services team worked closely with Australian Paper, who project managed the implementation and provided the necessary SAP skills.

5 For more information Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: ibm.com/systems/au/dynamicinfrastructure Copyright IBM Australia Limited 2010 ABN Copyright IBM Corporation All Rights Reserved. IBM Australia 55 Coonara Avenue West Pennant Hills NSW Australia 2125 TRADEMARKS: IBM, the IBM logo and Smarter Planet are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and services marks may be trademarks or services marks of others. Business Partner is used informally and does not imply a legal partnership. This customer story is based on information provided by Australian Paper and PaperlinX and illustrates how one organisation uses IBM products. Many factors may have contributed to the results and benefits described; IBM does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere. IBM is not in a position to verify the accuracy of the information or any claims made by third parties. Subject to any rights which may not be excluded or limited, IBM makes no representations or warranties regarding non-ibm products or services. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. GL_12162