HP customer case study: Remodelled data, saved costs and enhanced value

Industry: Manufacturing

Jinan Steel improves Oracle database application performance with HP DBA archiving tools

To address current challenges facing its database, Jinan Steel uses the HP Oracle EBS database archiving solution to solve a series of problems brought about by its sudden increase in data. By moving obsolete and closed transactions’ data to another historical, yet online database, the continually expanding data can be managed effectively, costs of IT infrastructure can be reduced, and service levels of systems can be enhanced.

Jinan Steel is part of the Jinan Iron and Steel Company Limited. Established in 1958, Jinan Steel is the largest steel manufacturer in Shandong province and China’s largest steel plate producer and exporter, with customers in more than 20 countries. In the wake of China joining the World Trade Organisation, Jinan Steel has become even more focused on seizing domestic opportunities while fending off rising competition from home and abroad. At present, the company’s 1,750 cubic--metre blast furnace, 120-ton converter and medium plate mill are amongst the best in China. Furthermore, its modern production lines are internationally advanced, and the company has vigorously promoted an “enterprise-led, market-oriented, joint industrial and academic” open technology innovation system. It has persisted in combining independent and indigenous innovations to improve overall capability and gradually

Objective To implement a database archiving solution to improve database tuning and upgrading issues caused by the continual growth of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system data.

Approach HP Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) database archiving solution. HP Database Archiving software (HP DBA).

IT improvements • Reduction in overall size of database: saving

database space, minimising systems’ key disaster recovery time and improving (software and hardware) downtime.

• Improvement in system management and maintenance: improving manageability, avoiding server and storage upgrades within five to six years and simplifying system maintenance.

Business benefi ts • Improvement in system service level: shortening

application response, backup and recovery time, improving manageability of systems and providing efficient data growth management for systems in a business application environment.

• Increased compliance: conforming to regulatory requirements for data retention, automating data retention policies, and being able to achieve compliance management based on access requirements and configuration record classification.

• Reduction in IT infrastructure costs: eliminating need to frequently fine-tune database or upgrade basic server and storage infrastructure within five to six years, thereby reducing software and hardware expenditure and effectively reducing IT infrastructure costs.

“The successful implementation of the HP Oracle EBS database archiving solution has greatly improved the overall effi ciency of Jinan Steel’s ERP systems, ensuring highly effi cient operation even with a high number of concurrent users. With the fi nancial crisis and the entire iron and steel industry needing increased effi ciency with reduced expenditure, HP Database Archiving software (HP DBA) brings strong performance and clear return on investment, and enables effi cient data growth management. The HP solution not only brings technological improvements to Jinan Steel, but also innovation of concept. We look forward to our next collaboration with HP.” Guiqiang Gao, ERP project manager, Jinan Steel

established brand superiority in three main areas of ship plate, boiler vessel plate and high-strength low-alloy plate.

After more than 50 years of development, the company adheres to a cyclical economic model with, “value innovation as the core, concept innovation as the guide, technological innovation as support, and management innovation as guarantee to implement resource management, distributed systematic management, to achieve the efficient usage of resources, efficient energy conversion, efficient regeneration of metabolites, as well as the pursuit of business, environmental and, social benefits, harmony and unity.” This model rapidly improves the scale of the business as well as operational quality, and its IT systems also grow quickly alongside the rapid growth of the business.

With fierce market competition, Jinan Steel has deployed a set of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

systems based on Oracle E-Business Suite solution. However, since the systems have gone live, Jinan Steel’s ERP data has started to grow exponentially. Due to continual data growth, Jinan Steel has already had to tune its database and upgrade the server and storage facilities a number of times in order to maintain processing performance and the necessary increase in storage and backup. However, the frequency of upgrades has led to a number of system risks, failures and excessive downtime.

To address the current challenges facing its database, Jinan Steel uses the HP Oracle EBS Database Archiving Solution to solve a series of problems brought about by its sudden increase in data. By moving obsolete and closed transaction data to another historical, yet online-database, the continually expanding data can be managed effectively, the costs of the IT infrastructure can ultimately be reduced, and the service level of the systems can be enhanced.

Implementing database archiving solution to achieve efficient database growth management After recognising that a reliable IT platform is a key factor in the competitiveness of an enterprise, Jinan Steel decided to construct a commercially-proven e-commerce system to combine the group’s strategy and operations, and promote business development through the optimisation of internal and external resources. Therefore, at the end of 2003, Jinan Steel deployed a new set of ERP systems based on Oracle E-Business Suite.

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After experiencing a number of cumbersome upgrades over a period of five years, Jinan Steel began to look for reliable database archiving solutions to fundamentally solve the problem of the sudden increase in data in its ERP systems. Through shortening application response, backup and recovery time, improving the manageability of the systems and reducing continuous management overheads with regard to database tuning, its ERP systems were provided with efficient growth management.

Jinan Steel uses HP’s Oracle EBS database archiving solution to solve a series of problems brought about by its sudden increase in data. By moving obsolete and closed transaction data to another historical, yet online, database, the continually expanding data can be managed effectively, the costs of the IT infrastructure can ultimately be reduced, and the service level of the systems can be enhanced.

Oracle EBS database archiving solution In this solution, Jinan Steel required the Oracle EBS 11i data within the systems to be cleared or archived so as to release data space, and slim down the production database in order to improve its overall performance, without having to frequently tune or upgrade the database or basic infrastructure of the server and storage etc. in the next five to six years.

Between April and July 2009, HP technical service experts studied the conditions on the ground and future development requirements of Jinan Steel’s ERP systems. After comprehensive, in-depth communication, analysis, testing and field trips, they proposed to Jinan Steel a professional, customised Oracle EBS Database Archiving solution with four modules, namely INV (Inventory), Cost Update History, WIP Production and OM (Order Management) to carry out archiving in Jinan Steel’s ERP systems.

In accordance with Jinan Steel’s Oracle EBS application environment, HP used its HP Database Archiving software (HP DBA) to implement a single instance (SI) live archiving solution at Jinan Steel. In this solution, there is no need for additional database servers, the production data and historical data are in the same single library but belong to different table spaces, and the logic layer distributes data in order to increase overall data performance

Primary application

• HP Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) database archiving solution

Primary hardware

• HP Database Archiving software (HP DBA)

Customer solution at a glance

and to facilitate storage management. In addition, using this solution, the archiving process is relatively simple and it is possible to gain instant access to historical materials. It is also possible, according to requirements, to switch seamlessly to distributed instance. Furthermore, in Jinan Steel’s RAC environment, it is possible for this solution to make full use of server resources and cluster advantages to achieve performance improvements and failover functionality.

HP DBA possesses comprehensive data archiving functionality. It is able to manage database growth effectively and can greatly improve the manageability of the Oracle application environment. This software is able to apply relevant strategies to move data accurately with a relatively low number of access times from the production database to a different storage layer, carry out long-term archiving, thus significantly improving the performance and availability of the application of mission-critical databases and dramatically reducing total cost of ownership.

In connection with the current situation and future development requirements of Jinan Steel’s ERP systems, the Oracle EBS database archiving solution provided by HP not only helps Jinan Steel to successfully scale down its ERP systems, but also improves system performance, saving database tuning expenses and system maintenance costs. Moreover, it provides efficient database growth management in the business application environment, thus improving service levels. At the same time, Jinan Steel has been able to improve data compliance since the implementation of the database archiving solution, so that users are able to achieve compliance management according to access requirements and configuration record classification.

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Improved system performance and reduced IT infrastructure costs Today, when data is becoming ever more important, alongside the vigorous development of enterprises’ business, the scale of enterprises’ database files will gradually increase, requiring enterprises to provide ever greater high-performance disk capacity for online business. However, database operating performance has been gradually worsening. At this point, the importance of database archiving is evident, as it can provide stable database performance while maintaining a mostly unchanged online database scale, thereby ensuring efficient and stable running of systems.

Since Jinan Steel’s Oracle EBS/ERP came online in January 2004, the size of system data has been growing continually, with the size of the current database exceeding 531GB, with 420GB of actual data. This is expected to grow to 1TB within four to five years, at a monthly increase of around 13GB.

Since the implementation of the HP Oracle EBS Database Archiving solution, Jinan Steel has greatly reduced the total database scale of its Oracle ERP systems, and it will be maintained within 400GB for the next five years. By improving application efficiency and moving non-active and ageing data, the solution can save space occupied by key data, minimise as far as possible the key systems’ disaster recovery time and improve (software and hardware) downtime, while reducing associated management and maintenance problems.

In addition, HP DBA software has also reduced Jinan Steel’s server and storage infrastructure costs for the next five years or longer. After archiving, Jinan Steel’s ERP systems will be able to ensure that the size of the production database is maintained within 400GB for the next five to six years, so as to avoid database server and high-end storage expansion, saving database tuning expenses and system maintenance costs, thereby increasing return on investment.

Since the implementation of the HP Oracle EBS Database Archiving Solution, Jinan Steel has given a high evaluation of HP DBA products and the HP implementation service. “The successful implementation of HP’s Oracle EBS database archiving solution has greatly improved the overall efficiency of Jinan Steel’s ERP systems, ensuring highly efficient operation even with a high number of concurrent users,” says Guiqiang Gao, ERP Project Manager, Jinan Steel. “With the financial crisis and the entire iron and steel industry needing increased efficiency with reduced expenditure, HP DBA software brings strong performance and clear return on investment, and enables efficient data growth management. The HP solution not only brings technological improvements to Jinan Steel, but also innovation of concept. We look forward to our next collaboration with HP,” concludes Gao.

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4AA0-2823EEW, Created October 2010