Copyright 2013© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved.Copyright 2013© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved. Document # APP2013015 v1 September 2013Document # APP2013015 v1 September 2013

Where IT perceptions are reality

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 U.S. 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.

Specialist MR&O (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) suppliers can

save manufacturers cost and time in spare parts procurement. MRO

HD Supply

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.

The philosophy of the IT team at HD Supply Facilities

Maintenance in San Diego is to stay one step ahead of

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.

Manage the growth of multiple databases concurrently with the

virtualization of Tier-1 enterprise application workloads. Goals

Click the video link to hear IT Director Frank Olszewski highlighting

the core applications and databases that power HD Supply’s

customer and internal-facing business operations.

The fastest growing database 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 TB by the end of 2013.

The SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) database holds 8.5TB of data and is highly

archived to keep the size down to a manageable level.

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

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

Fast Growing Databases

APOAPO

ERPERP

CRMCRM

BWBW

Blueprint for Growth

Making information available in a timely manner from a

SAP production process to non-production processes for

testing, QA, training, or other purposes.

System Refresh

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 more than 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) at each location. In addition, management capability was enhanced with the deployment storage aware SAP Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM). 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 reducing 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

SAP

Database

The HD Supply blueprint for the future

included virtualizing the servers hosting multi-

terabyte SAP databases.

Virtual Server

Watch the IT Director at HD Supply in San Diego talk

about upgrading their SAP and eCommerce

infrastructure.

Storage Optimization

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. Flash

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 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

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

maximize the performance and scalability of the virtualized workloads.

Flash SSD Application 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.

Evaluating and experimenting with nascent flash-

based solid-state storage is consistent with the

“look ahead” approach to ensure IT remains a

competitive advantage.

HP DL580 G7 server

Server I/O Drives Performance

Nine consecutive years of Fibre Channel market share leadership with

more than 14 million ports shipped. QLogic

8Gb Fibre Channel Storage

Virtualization results in an aggregation of storage I/O from multiple VM workloads

running simultaneously on a host server. The IT team at HD Supply realized that this

could strain I/O performance and neutralize the impact of other upgrades. In response,

they upgraded the speed of the Fibre Channel SAN from 4Gb to 8Gb per second. To

support the faster storage, the IT team at HD Supply retrofitted installed servers, and

equipped new servers, with QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel 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

(10GbE) to address the performance limitation. In addition, the VMware

backup links use 10GbE on an independent network to ensure a shorter

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 Bus Adapters

use the Fibre Channel SAN to cache and share SAN data. Adding large caches to servers

places the cache closest to the application and in a position where it is insensitive to

congestion on the SAN. FabricCache features a shared-cache architecture that satisfies

the cache coherence requirement for clustered

application environments and multi-server

virtualized infrastructures. In addition to looking at flash-based

storage arrays, 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’s QLE2562 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter is optimized for I/O- intensive virtualization host servers.

QLogic QLE8362 10Gb Converged Network Adapters support

simultaneous LAN and FCoE or iSCSI SAN traffic at line rate.

QLogic’s innovative FabricCache Adapter enables sharing of flash- based cache memory among clustered and virtualized applications.

Results and Lessons Learned

Results: Proactive IT and Automation Deliver a Lean Operating Cost Structure With a proactive approach to maintaining its SAP environment, HD Supply was able to increase the power and scalability of its infrastructure. And by putting a priority on automation using the vSphere hypervisor, the IT team was able to simultaneously lower operating costs for more than 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 Fibre Channel storage I/O Host Bus Adapters 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 a SAP Virtualization—There is never certainty about 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 of 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.

Strategically, eCommerce is the new delivery system, creating additional

value for HDSupply’s MRO business. Results

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 more than 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 more than 18 years of experience in the storage networking industry, Tim 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, Tim 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.