Optimizing SAP on the WAN

By Lynn Haber, contributing writer 13 Feb 2009 | SearchEnterpriseWAN.com

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WAN optimization to speed application suites brings great benefits for any enterprise. And like most organizations, Mindspeed Technologies Inc., a global supplier of semiconductor network solutions for communication applications, wanted all the benefits of deploying a full-blown SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suite and none of the challenges that ultimately drive up ownership costs. Savvy network engineering helped Mindspeed meet its objectives.

A 2003 spinoff of Conexant Systems Inc., Mindspeed -- a $160.7 million company headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif. -- put its enterprise application backbone in place with the purchase of a full-blown ERP solution from SAP that included financials, human resources, operations, materials and supply chain. With outsourced manufacturing in Asia and eight design centers and nine sales locations located worldwide, maximizing its ERP investment with optimal application performance was a priority for the company.

Mindspeed locations include three U.S. sites, France, Dubai, India, China and Ukraine, with between 15 and 80 employees at each location. Running the centralized SAP software at the company's data center in California means large amounts of data traversing the global network.

"During the two- to three-year ramp-up as we deployed the application, our global users began to complain about slow network links," said Mahdu Gondi, director of global operations at Mindspeed.

Network and application degradation affected everything from browsing the Internet to emails and applications timing out. "We use Lotus Notes, which is very sensitive to a slow network, to the point where users can lose data," Gondi said.

A variety of data, such as file system data, Lotus Notes, Internet and code verification suite (CVS) ship code back to the main data center, dragging out communications.

The company gets its MPLS network from Verizon and was running 1 Mbps or 2 Mbps links to its locations, depending on the number of employees, the work they were doing, and the amount of traffic going over the network. But it wasn't enough. In a nutshell, the communication links started to choke, and accessing corporate applications was difficult, with potential ramifications of reduced productivity. It was time to act.

Mindspeed's options were to increase bandwidth or look at WAN optimization. "Upgrading our links was a tedious process. Nothing happens in less than three to six months," Gondi said. In addition, upgrades usually required a one- to two-year commitment, when Mindspeed couldn't be sure of long-term growth plans, and bandwidth upgrades were expensive.

WAN acceleration offers speedy solution
The global enterprise looked at a new company called Riverbed and its Steelhead WAN optimization appliances. No purchases were made before Mindspeed's IT department put the device through its paces. After a month of testing, it took only three days before the company's general manager asked where to sign the check. "We were getting an 8:1 performance ratio," Gondi said.

After several more months of testing the WAN accelerators on different applications and addressing issues such as quality, security and ease of use, Mindspeed moved ahead. "Riverbed had its own protocol streaming through TCP/IP pipes," Gondi said, "and we had to make sure it didn't have any negative impact."

Today, Mindspeed has deployed 16 devices and reports 40% to 60% compression, depending on the application. SAP benchmarks at Mindspeed have been good, taking 18 seconds for a data screen without Riverbed and a hair under 13 seconds with WAN acceleration. Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) Version 5.0, which became available earlier this year, further improved acceleration by two-thirds or drove screen refresh down to six seconds.

The company is also reaping the benefits of WAN optimization on other applications -- Mindspeed reports 9x performance improvements in Oracle's Lifecycle Management tool. Best of all, the company estimates that it saves between $100,000 and $200,000 annually in bandwidth upgrade costs using a WAN optimization solution.

Gondi noted that successful outcomes are possible when network engineers work closely with the company's application team, run pilot tests, and keep each other abreast of new application deployment. Losing user confidence isn't an option.

Citrix for Business One
I-Business Network is an application service provider (ASP) providing SMBs with financial, e-commerce and business process systems. From its headquarters in Marietta, Ga., I-Business Network delivers SAP's Business One ERP solution to about 100 clients, with between five and 50 accounting users. Clients are based in the U.S., China and Japan.

The company runs Business One on physical servers using Citrix XenApp 4.5. "Then, after we virtualized the server, we deployed XenServer 4.5 on top of the virtualized server," said Ty Hacker, director of IT at I-Business Network.

XenApp, a Windows application virtualization and delivery system, allows I-Business Network to offer an on-demand service to its customers. The ASP takes a base install and converts it to an image. "Once we have an image, we have a single workload for patching and updating," Hacker said.

XenServer improves application delivery and provides high availability and utilization of IT resources for wide-scale deployment by streaming the application to a player that resides on the client's computer. For the ASP, XenServer provides an application delivery technology over the Internet with low bandwidth requirements.

On execution, the [SAP Business One] application is streamed to the end user with the look and feel of running physically on their machine Ty Hacker director of IT, I-Business Networks

I-Business Network hosts the application at its data center and deploys new servers virtually, as needed. On the network side, the ASP had two concerns about application delivery -- providing bandwidth for clients with multiple sites and ensuring that the user has an experience akin to being on a LAN.

Citrix XenApp pushes out the SAP Business One application. "The application is presented in a browser in native form. On execution, the application is streamed to the end user with the look and feel of running physically on their machine," Hacker said. Citrix streaming, he added, requires about 33 Kbps of bandwidth from the user. For example, an office with five users with a fractional T1 line requires about 33 Kbps to 64 Kbps of continuous bandwidth. A T1 line contains 24 channels, each with a data transfer capacity of 64 Kbps.

The ASP has unlimited bandwidth from its data center, according to Hacker, and could double its client base in 24 hours without repercussions. "Our application and network engineers work together to optimize data delivery from inside our data center," he said.

I-Business Network initially wanted to package SAP Business One for streaming, but the application was designed to talk to a single licensed server. So, at this time, the company can't virtualize the application -- first lesson learned.

Another lesson learned was to be aware of memory requirements and to properly size the physical server before putting it on a virtual server.

About the author: Lynn Haber reports on business and technology from Norwell, Mass.

Tags: Application performance on the WAN,  WAN optimization and application acceleration,  Site Highlights,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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