Power with and through Open Source

Manfred Leistner, Director and Head of Technology at Blanc and Fischer IT Services, the central IT service provider of Blanc and Fischer Family Holding, explains: "We were looking for ways to better leverage our strengths in several specialized areas. To develop new products and business models, such as a fully integrated and easy-to-use online store that combines all our solutions, we need fast, direct and reliable access to data across all subgroups of the holding company."

For many years, the companies of Blanc und Fischer Familienholding have already relied on SAP software. In the next step, they decided to use the modernization to SAP S/4 Hana to further drive operational efficiency through consistent standardization in both processes and IT infrastructure. In the course of the standardization, Blanc und Fischer IT Service also introduced SAP BW/4 for the companies and also converted SAP Manufacturing Execution to Hana. Manfred Leistner explains:

"Optimizing central business applications is always a challenge. With IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage, we have implemented an infrastructure that is an ideal platform for our requirements. It allows us to flexibly combine existing systems with entirely new workloads on a proven and reliable architecture to even better realize the vision of cross-enterprise integration in IT as well."

Blanc und Fischer IT Service worked closely with consultants from IBM and Red Hat to build a highly available IT landscape based on IBM Power System E980 servers combined with IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM FlashSystem 9200 storage solutions to run SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions. Thanks to the features of IBM PowerVM, even the business-critical systems are fully virtualized without having to compromise on performance or security.

Head of IT Manfred Leister illustrates the benefits of this architecture: "With IBM Power Systems and storage, we can flexibly scale our SAP systems without complex configuration adjustments. Specifically, this means that we can react quickly and dynamically reallocate our resources as needed to ensure the best performance and availability at all times."

For maximum resilience, Blanc and Fischer IT Services mirrors all data to a second data center using IBM Spectrum Virtualize. In addition, the company relies on Spectrum Protect for data backup and fast recovery. Manfred Leister summarizes: "We have a unified, efficient, and highly available environment for mission-critical data by combining IBM Spectrum software with IBM FlashSystem storage systems. This allows us to ensure high data availability for all our SAP applications on the IBM Power Systems servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

Advantages of unification

As part of the standardization with S/4 Hana, the company is also migrating all existing Hana instances to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Manfred Leistner describes his experiences:

"Linux on IBM Power Systems is important for us to be able to attract new employees to the platform. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Power Systems, even those colleagues who have never worked with Power Systems before have no trouble getting to grips with the environment right away. We benefit from our many years of experience with Red Hat Linux and can thus implement new requirements more agilely and solve problems faster.

We are a big fan of the open source idea and Red Hat's attitude towards open source software. So as soon as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified by SAP for IBM Power Systems, we went live with the first Hana system running Red Hat Linux. Thanks to the close collaboration between the teams at IBM and Red Hat, we were then able to go live in a timely manner."

At Blanc and Fischer IT Services, they were particularly impressed with the support for the platform. The team at Red Hat showed a genuine interest in really understanding the technical details of IBM Power Systems, which made the collaboration very pleasant. And when tricky questions arise, the company also has direct access to a network of experienced specialists at IBM and Red Hat.

More agility, lower costs

By migrating from SAP Manufacturing Execution to Hana, Blanc und Fischer IT Services was able to speed up processes in the production lines, such as the printing of labels, by 30 percent. The better performance is achieved with 50 percent fewer processor cores. Due to the performance, the central SAP Manufacturing Execution application could previously only be used at three production sites in Germany and Canada. Now the holding company plans to roll out this solution based on Power Systems, Hana and Red Hat Linux at other production facilities worldwide.

Across all applications, the company sees significantly better performance with Power9 processors. Some workloads can now run with 25 percent fewer processor cores. This means significant cost savings in IT operations and gives the IT team additional flexibility to respond even faster to new business requirements.

For Manfred Leistner, the advantages are obvious:

"We are currently modernizing our entire SAP landscape with S/4 and BW/4, running these business-critical applications on Power Systems servers, IBM storage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and automation solutions. We are using this migration to SAP S/4 to consolidate several separate ERP systems for the different subgroups of the holding company, reducing the number of SAP instances by up to 30 percent from 70.

The tighter integration of planning, production and accompanying business processes with the associated data helps us to develop our business further. With SAP, IBM and Red Hat solutions, we can try out new business models and further connect the kitchen habitat from our production lines to value-added services for our customers."

The team at Blanc und Fischer IT Services is already thinking ahead to streamline internal IT processes even further. Together with Red Hat Premium and IBM Platinum Business Partner SVA, they are already working on the implementation of a far-reaching DevOps strategy with the automation solution Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite for cross-platform infrastructure management.

It is also hoped that the use of Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform, will further increase productivity in IT operations in the future. The goal of these efforts is to standardize IT services against the backdrop of a multi- and hybrid-cloud strategy to continuously reduce IT efforts.