JMC Steel Group, the largest independent pipe and tube manufacturer in North America, has chosen the Forward by Unisys enterprise computing platform to run its mission-critical SAP applications.
Beta-testing of the Forward! platform, which was launched in Australia in October 2013, show that it delivered 40 per cent better performance than JMC’s current servers, with greater predictability, with an additional test demonstrating that the physical partitioning on the Forward! platform provides a performance advantage over virtualised environments.
JMC Steel had been experiencing performance bottlenecks when running key ERP applications, SAP Business Warehouse and BusinessObjects on its current production systems.
Approximately one-third of the company’s employees – including the sales organisation – use BusinessObjects to access latest transactional information such as inventories, product features and price quotations, so bottlenecks prevented sales representatives from accessing updated information in real time from their laptop or other mobile device.
The migration of the SAP applications from JMC Steel’s servers to a two-node Forward! configuration running Microsoft Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition was completed in just a few days.
While application performance in the partitioned Forward! environment showed steady one-percent variability, performance in the virtualised environment immediately declined 10 per cent and degraded to 20 per cent with the addition of more workloads.
“We couldn’t have been more impressed with the improvements in performance and predictability that Forward! by Unisys delivered for our SAP applications,” said Bill Kempert, director of IT infrastructure, JMC Steel Group. “We believe that Forward! could deliver significant value as a platform for future mission-critical workloads as we transition to the SAP HANA platform and other big-data applications.”
