Challenge
To realize its vision, the company strives for the highest levels of efficiency in every aspect of its operations: from the factory floor to the back office. Like many manufacturers of medical products, the company relies on SAP ERP solutions to integrate and optimize workflows from end–to–end.
A spokesperson comments: “Our SAP ERP environment includes applications for materials management, sales and distribution, and quality assurance, allowing us to maintain high levels of product quality and on–time customer deliveries. We also use our SAP solutions to share important data with key decision–makers, including profit and loss statements for our manufacturing plants.”
The company recognized that timely data on operational performance would enable it to make faster, better–informed decisions. Cutting time–to–insight promised to deliver other benefits too—for example, by allowing managers to identify and resolve production and customer services issues more rapidly. To help achieve these goals, the company aimed to move its subsidiaries to the cutting–edge SAP HANA data platform.
Why Lenovo? Rock–solid reliability and high performance.
After a thorough review of several potential data center solutions, the company decided to build its new infrastructure platform on Lenovo technology. The solution is based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR550 and Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers, connected to a Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000H Hybrid Storage Array.
To deliver low latency for SAP HANA workloads, the new platform includes a 10GbE network fabric. By virtualizing the environment with VMware vSphere, the company empowers its IT team to provision and manage new SAP environments rapidly. To protect its mission–critical SAP data, the company performs regular, automated backups using an IBM TS4300 Tape Library.
“We’ve relied on IBM and Lenovo data center solutions for many years, which gave us great confidence that the Lenovo ThinkSystem platform would meet our technical requirements for SAP HANA,” adds the spokesperson.
