Mitsubishi Power Systems turbocharges SAP with Nimbus

Mitsubishi Power Systems is using Nimbus S-Class multi-protocol flash memory to accelerate its SAP deployment, and Matt Wattles, enterprise infrastructure architect of Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas, says it has solved persistent performance challenges. Those, he says, had been compromising its SAP ERP deployment, so the company has since seen productivity gains that high-end disk arrays had failed to achieve. "The Nimbus S-Class system significantly increased performance in our SAP and SQL environment by relieving unacceptable IO bottlenecks that hampered our production ERP installation," explains Wattles. "The S-Class delivers very low latency and rock-solid reliability that will continue to benefit our organisation as we expand our infrastructure to include more I/O-intensive database and virtualisation solutions." Interestingly, 90% of respondents to a recent Gartner survey reported lost productivity and revenue due to ERP performance issues. For Mitsubishi, the process of converting data from its existing ERP system to a new SAP SQL database was especially burdensome. Users of the ERP system also voiced concerns over "lethargic performance", with long delays and slow screen updates when switching between functions. Nightly SQL backups were also exceeding their allotted windows, so reducing performance of production operations. Apart from the headline improvements, Wattles says the company is now completing SAP SQL Server database backups well within its allotted backup windows. Just as important, Mitsubishi Power Systems has increased end user adoption of its SAP system and improved end user satisfaction.