Application Report: Virtualizing Tier-1 Workloads using FC SANs

Where IT perceptions are reality

Application Report
Virtualizing Big Tier-1 Workloads

Featuring
HD Supply XXL SAP Environment
VMware Infrastructure Refresh
QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters
High Performance Networks and SSD
Document # APP2013015 v1 August, 2013

Copyright 2013© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved.

One of North America’s largest industrial distributors
Do-it-yourselfers shop Home Depot or Lowe's, but the pros do business at HD Supply, one of the largest
industrial distributors in North America. Formerly the professional services division of Home Depot, HD
Supply was formed in 1997 when big-box retailer Home Depot bought Maintenance Warehouse.
HD Supply operates about 630 locations across some 45 US states and nine Canadian provinces that
distribute building materials and tools and provide installation services to professionals in the
construction, maintenance and repair, and energy and infrastructure markets. The company operates about
10 business units, including HD Supply Waterworks, HD Supply Facilities Maintenance, and HD Supply
Canada.
Growth for HD Supply accelerated in 2012 with sales of $8.0 billion, an increase of $1.0 billion, or 14.3
percent.

IT is key to a lean operating cost
structure at HD Supply Facilities
Maintenance
HD Supply Facilities Maintenance in San
Diego, California is a leading supplier of
maintenance, repair and operations
(MRO) products to owners of multifamily,
hospitality, educational and commercial
properties; healthcare providers; and
municipal and government facilities. HD
Supply Facilities Maintenance offers more
than 22,000 items in stock, strategically
positioned distribution centers, and a fleet
of more than 600 vehicles to deliver MRO
supplies on site, and on time.
Profitable growth for HD Supply Facilities Maintenance requires flawless execution of the fundamentals of
the MRO business. The areas requiring flawless execution are led by a lean operating cost structure,
constantly hammered down by the efficiencies of advanced ERP technologies.

MRO

Specialist MR&O (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) Suppliers can
save manufacturers cost and time in spare parts procurement


Page 2 of 7

Driving the Need for Agility
Databases grew 2x in last 18 months
HD Supply operates two data centers, a production
site in San Diego and a backup site in Orlando, to
ensure business continuity and real-time disaster
recovery. They support a transaction-intensive IBM
WebSphere eCommerce environment for online
supplies sales, and an SAP R/3 based Enterprise
Resource Management system virtualized on a
VMware vSphere (ESXi) platform.
Click the video link to hear IT Director Frank Olszewski highlighting
The philosophy of the IT team at HD Supply Facilities
the core applications and databases that power HD Supply’s
Maintenance in San Diego, is to stay one step ahead of customer and internal facing business operations.
growth. That means deploying servers, storage,
networking and operating platforms that can keep pace with the growth of business-critical databases which
doubled in size during the last 18 months.

Fast Growing Databases

APO

The fastest growing is the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) database which
went live in Oct 2012 and is anticipated to grow from 2.5TB to about 6-7 terabytes by the
end of 2013

ERP

The SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) database holds 8.5 terabytes of data and is
highly archived to keep the size down to a manageable level.

CRM

The customer resource management (CRM) database has 2.5 TB of business information.

BW

The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) database that has grown from 7.5TB to about 12 TB.

Goals

Manage the growth of multiple databases concurrently with the
virtualization of Tier-1 enterprise application workloads


Page 3 of 7

Blueprint for Growth
Virtualizing the XXL SAP Environment
The HD Supply blueprint for getting ahead, and staying ahead, of
relentless database growth included virtualization of the SAP
database servers. Only with an advanced hypervisor could HD Supply
achieve the level of efficiency needed to address their priorities:
automated system copies, system refreshes, snapshots, and backups.
The project required the migration of mission-critical, Tier-1, SAP and
eCommerce workloads onto the VMware vSphere ESXi platform
resulting in over 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) at each location. In
addition, management capability was enhanced with the deployment
storage aware SAP Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM).

SAP

Database
Virtual Server

Extensive performance testing and run-time in a pre-production
environment proved to HD Supply that VMware vSphere was up to
the task of hosting their multi-terabyte databases. They now expect to
reap the following benefits:








Agility to add or remove application server capacity on
demand by bringing up or bringing down VMs
Automation and improved management of system builds and
system refreshes
Increased frequency of SAP system refreshes
Simplification by removing cluster technologies
Simplification by reduction in the number of tools
Agility and speed to react faster to customer needs and
special business scenarios such as M&A integrations
Increased productivity as automation frees staff from system
refreshes and builds

System Refresh

The HD Supply blueprint for the future
included virtualizing the servers hosting multiterabyte SAP databases.

Watch the IT Director at HD Supply in San Diego talk
about upgrading their SAP and eCommerce
infrastructure.

Making information available in a timely manner from an
SAP production process to non-production processes, for
testing, QA, training or other purposes
Page 4 of 7

Storage Optimization
Optimizing Database Performance
Databases are essentially the “heart and soul” of the HD Supply IT operations. Various steps were taken to
ensure optimum and stable performance:


Key Table spaces are located on the fastest disks in their own LUN environment



Production on 15K RPM disk drive spindles



RAID Level 10 for high performance ERP and Supply Chain
with Reporting on striped blocks

Frame based Storage Replication
Underperformance of replication for Disaster Recovery (DR) was
another issue that was addressed by upgrading to identical frame
(storage controller) based replication at all sites to simplify the
process and achieve consistent results.

32-core servers

Evaluating and experimenting with nascent Flash
based Solid State Storage is consistent with the
“look ahead” approach to ensure IT remains a
competitive advantage

To ensure fast performance on multi-terabyte databases,
HP DL380 G7 Generation servers are used by HD Supply as SAP application servers in the
VMware environment. The eCommerce applications run on HP DL380 mid range servers.
New servers deployed are DL580 G7 servers with 32 processor cores and 512GB RAM to
HP DL580 G7 server
maximize the performance and scalability of the virtualized workloads.

Flash SSD Applications Acceleration
Looking further ahead HD Supply has installed a Solid State Disk (SSD) array in a pilot effort to evaluate
further improvements in database and transaction performance—however, with the market fast evolving,
current efforts are geared towards evaluation and vendor monitoring.

Flash

Flash Solid State Storage delivers higher I/O throughput performance and
lower I/O latency typically at a higher I/O per Gigabyte acquisition cost


Page 5 of 7

Server I/O Drives Performance
8Gb Fibre Channel storage

QLogic’s QLE2562 8Gb
Fibre Channel Adapter is
optimized for I/O
intensive virtualization
host servers

Virtualization results in an aggregation of storage I/O from multiple VM workloads
running simultaneously on a host server. HDSupply realized that this could strain I/O
performance and neutralize the impact of other upgrades. In response, they upgraded
the speed of their Fibre Channel SAN from 4Gb to 8Gb per second. To support their
faster storage, the IT team at HD Supply retrofitted installed servers, and equipped new
servers, with QLogic 8Gb FC Host Bus Adapters.

10GbE networking to the server edge
Communications between the SAP database and application servers strained the
capacity of 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE) links requiring an upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet
QLogic QLE8342 10Gb
(10GbE) to address the performance limitation. Additionally, the VMware
Converged Network Adapters,
support simultaneous LAN and FCoE
backup links utilize 10GbE on an independent network to ensure a narrow
or iSCSI SAN traffic at line rate
backup window.

QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series Adapters Cache Hot VM Data
QLogic’s FabricCache 10000 Series Adapters are the industry’s first caching SAN adapter.
This new class of server based PCIe Flash/Fibre Channel Host Based Adapters use the
Fibre Channel SAN to cache and share SAN metadata. Adding large caches to servers
QLogic’s innovative
FabricCache adapter
places the cache closest to the application and in a position where it is insensitive to
enables sharing of Flash
based cache memory
congestion on the SAN. With the FabricCache architecture, the new generation of PCIe
among clustered and
Flash caching SAN adapters provide
virtualized applications
redundancy and failover for a new level of
enterprise-class availability. In addition to looking at a flash-based
storage array, HD Supply IT is considering evaluating the FabricCache
solution for flash-based application acceleration.
The IT group’s hardware strategy focuses on
proactively optimizing and improving database
performance with Storage and Server I/O upgrades

QLogic

Nine consecutive years of Fibre Channel market share leadership with
over 14 million ports shipped.


Page 6 of 7

Results & Lessons Learned
Results: Proactive IT and automation deliver a lean operating cost structure
With a proactive approach to maintaining their SAP environment, HD Supply was able to increase the power
and scalability of their infrastructure. And by putting a priority on automation using the vSphere hypervisor,
the IT team was able to simultaneously lower operating costs for over 1,000 VMs.

Lessons Learned
The following are some lessons IT Director Frank Olszweski wants to share with his peers:


Large Workloads CAN be virtualized—The right infrastructure with multi-core servers and a large DRAM
footprint complemented with high performance 8Gb FC storage I/O Host Bus Adapters s and 10GbE
inter-server networking provides the required horsepower to virtualize a Tier-1 workload.



Follow Guidelines—For HD Supply’s larger databases, strict VMware guidelines on system setup had to
be followed for a successful implementation.



Never oversubscribe CPU or Memory in an SAP virtualization—There is never certainty which jobs are
running simultaneously and competing for resources. For example a large order entry job might be in
process into the ERP system while simultaneously managing a forecast process in the Supply Chain
System, and both these jobs might be competing for CPU resources leading to unpredictable
performance.
 Keep ahead of the curve— Proactive planning and deployment of infrastructure for anticipated workload
demands AND keeping pace with hardware technology advancements ensures seamless IT operations
transitions

Results

Strategically, eCommerce is the new delivery system creating additional
value for HDSupply’s MRO business


Page 7 of 7

Resources
Related Links
IT Brand Pulse
VMware ESXi 5.5
SAP on VMware Best Practices
QLogic 10GbE Converged Network Adapters
QLogic Fibre Channel Adapters

About the Authors
Rahul Shah, Director, IT Brand Pulse Labs
Rahul Shah has over 20 years of experience in senior product management and marketing
positions with semiconductor, storage networking and IP networking manufacturers including
QLogic and Lantronix. At IT Brand Pulse, Rahul is responsible for managing the delivery of
technical services ranging from hands-on testing to product launch collateral. You can contact
Rahul at rahul.shah@itbrandpulse.com.

Tim Lustig, Director of Corporate Marketing, QLogic Corporation
With over 18 years of experience in the storage networking industry, Lustig has authored
numerous papers and articles on all aspects of IT storage, and has been a featured speaker at
many industry conferences on a global basis. As the Director of Corporate Marketing at
QLogic, Lustig is responsible for corporate communications, third party testing/validation,
outbound marketing activities and strategic product marketing directives of QLogic. His
responsibilities include customer research, evaluation of market conditions, press and Media
relations, social media and technical writing.


Page 8 of 7

Application Report: Virtualizing Tier-1 Workloads using FC SANs

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