Case Study: Severstal achieves 50% faster SAP response and up to 66% storage savings with IBM FlashSystem

Meeting the needs of a growing SAP environment with smart IBM storage

Severstal, a leading vertically integrated steel and mining company with roughly 61,000 employees, faced rapidly growing SAP data and declining application performance as it expanded its SAP landscape. To avoid a costly rip-and-replace of existing storage, Severstal engaged IBM to design a fast, scalable storage architecture using IBM FlashSystem and virtualization and compression technologies.

IBM implemented a tiered, virtualized storage solution—leveraging IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, IBM FlashSystem V840, IBM Real-time Compression Appliance STN7800 and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager—while reusing existing Storwize and XIV platforms for lower tiers. The new IBM solution halved SAP response times, reduced the payroll calculation window from 12 hours to 5 hours, and freed up to 66% more space in the SAP environment (with additional compression gains for Oracle, VMware and email), delivering measurable performance and capacity improvements.

Severstal

Yuriy Shekhovtsov

CIO