Sun Microsystems has announced that its hardware and Unix-based operating system, Solaris, has received renewed commitment from Dallas-based semiconductor giant Texas Instruments (TI) to support its SAP solutions.
"This move by TI underscores the efficacy of SAP business applications hosted on Sun infrastructure," notes Renee Ramdew, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems in KwaZulu-Natal.
Ramdew explains that TI initially invested in Sun systems in an effort to improve enterprise readiness for long-term business plans. "By implementing SAP solutions on Sun systems, Texas Instruments' performance improvements have yielded increased efficiency in financial data processing, and cost savings in software and systems expenditures," she says.
Since 1999, TI has been using SAP software on Sun systems for accounting, logistics, material management, production planning and control, sales and distribution functions. In its most recent work in May 2002, TI opted for upgraded Sun Fire V880 and 6800 servers and Solaris platforms designed to accommodate its projected growth over the next two years.
"Building on successes with Sun and SAP since 1999, we chose to upgrade to the latest version of Sun hosting SAP, and have already seen better than expected results overall," says Dan Patrick of TI. "First, Sun helped us complete the cut-over from test to production in a four-and-a-half hour window with no upgrade issues. Since the migration to the new systems, our business has experienced less downtime. In addition, SAP batch processing time has typically been reduced by 50% to 60%, and we've reduced our transaction times by more than 40%."
In its most recent investment in Sun and SAP, TI migrated to an environment based on Sun Fire V880 and 6800 servers running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment, SAP 4.0B, Hitachi Data Systems storage, Oracle 8.1.7.4, and Veritas Cluster server over a gigabit Ethernet network.
Ramdew says research from IDC has named the Sun Fire V880 as the world's top-selling 8-way server. "This machine is capable of meeting the memory intensive, scalability and reliability requirements that companies like TI demand on a daily basis for production applications," she says.
Additionally, notes Ramdew, the Sun Fire 6800 delivers mainframe-class functionality for demanding SAP applications at a midrange server price. "Businesses the world over are demanding performance at ever lower price points. The 6800 is ideally positioned to address this demand with its highly competitive pricing and rich functionality," she adds.
A demonstration of its proficiency in handling SAP applications is the fact that Sun has set a new world record in performance on the two-tier configuration of the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark, SAP R/3 Release 4.6C.
"The test was on a Sun Fire 15K system running the Solaris 9 Operating Environment and Oracle9i Database. The server was configured with 104 1.2GHz UltraSPARC III CPUs and 576GB memory, and showed the 1.2 GHz CPUs to be 44% faster on a per CPU basis than the earlier 900MHz chips.
"With this performance benchmark, Sun has delivered the world's fastest hardware and operating environment for enterprise SAP applications," concludes Ramdew.
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