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How Dell
Does IT When the computer company moved one of its critical supply chains from a
legacy UNIX system to industry-standard technology and Oracle Database 10g,
it boosted performance and cut $5 million out of IT costs.
t Dell, fast, flexible, and lean supply chains operational, we don’t build and ship products.
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system—and with the ongoing success operational, because the problem is chain database platform—and man
of Dell products and the resulting IT stopping manufacturing at one of our agers wanted to do so quickly, before
workloads, that system was reaching domestic or international facilities.” the coming holiday season, when the
the limits of its capacity. What’s more, the IT group could company’s sales tend to spike.
“We were starting to get ‘Sev 1’ calls see that things weren’t going to be
regularly,” says Miller. Such calls, he getting any easier. The demand for Saying good-bye to UNIX
explains, occur when an outage in the Dell’s products was increasing, and Dell’s challenge was hardly unique:
supply chain management system forecasts called for higher production Running out of headroom on a large
interrupts production. “They are the volumes in the near future. In addition, legacy server is a familiar problem for
highest level of severity in terms of the company was bringing on new IT professionals in many organizations.
problem calls, based on the degree of factories the system had to support. Traditionally, the solution has been to
impact to the business. With those calls, To handle these growing workloads, add another legacy server, in essence
it’s all hands on deck, and we drop the IT department clearly needed to implementing a relatively large amount
everything and get them back up and increase the capacity of its supply of capacity in one pass—and then hope
the new server will meet the company’s
needs for several more years. But Dell
IT leadership took a look at advancing
technology and decided there was a
better way.
“We saw that there was an oppor
tunity to move the database from the
expensive UNIX environment to a more
cost-effective standards-based envi
ronment that could provide the high
levels of performance we needed,”
Dell on Dell at a Glance says Miller. The platform Dell selected:
groups of Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers
Business system running Oracle® Database 10g with
Database supporting a supply chain involving: Oracle Real Application Clusters, and
• More than 10 manufacturing plants worldwide drawing on Dell/EMC storage devices.
• 1 million part numbers The platform uses the Linux® operating
• 3 million inventory movements per day system, reflecting a growing trend in
• More than 2 million bills of materials per year the Oracle community: According to
• 1.8 million purchase order lines per year an Independent Oracle Users Group
member survey in early 2006, Linux will
Old environment overtake Sun’s UNIX-based Solaris as
Sun® UNIX server the top operating system for Oracle
database deployments in 2007.
New environment The demands on the Dell and Oracle
• Dell PowerEdge servers platform were clearly going to be signif
• Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters icant. The database has to support a
• Dell/EMC storage devices range of vital supply chain processes,
including configuration management,
Benefits procurement, material-cost manage
• More than $5 million in IT savings ment, inventory, and accounts payable.
• 90 percent reduction in the number of product units not manufactured In terms of workloads, that means han
due to system outages dling the volumes of information needed
• 40 to 50 percent shorter financial closings to manage 1 million Dell part numbers
• Increased IT flexibility and scalability across nearly 200 product families. It
• Reliable, cost-effective support for critical supply chain also means tracking nearly 3 million
inventory movements a day, more than
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2 million bills of materials a year, and And new nodes can be easily added to
nearly 1.8 million purchase order lines the cluster to increase capacity.
per year—and doing so with high levels In recent years, Dell and Oracle have
of reliability and speed. “The availability tested and validated a variety of configu
of our supply chain systems is paramount rations using Dell PowerEdge servers
to keeping our factories running,” says and Oracle software, including such
Curt Johnson, director of Worldwide Pro clustered systems. As a result, Dell’s IT
curement IT at Dell. “And because we’re group has been able to take advantage
building more than 100,000 systems each of the strengths of both companies’ tech
day, any downtime costs us thousands nologies. In terms of performance, for
of dollars per minute.” example, using Oracle Database 10g,
Not surprisingly, Dell’s IT group put Dell servers lead other vendors’ servers
the platform through an extensive and in the 300GB clustered TPC-H price/
rigorous evaluation. “Given the high performance results. The PowerEdge Better performance, lower cost
stakes involved, the choice was certainly servers also include Dell OpenManage™ In operation, the Dell and Oracle plat
not a matter of simply choosing the com tools, which offer integrated deployment, form has proven to be highly effective.
pany’s own servers,” says Miller. “We monitoring, and change-management “The reliability and stability has just been
built an environment where we could capabilities for updating server software, phenomenal,” says Miller. For example,
simulate a full online set of users, as well operating systems, databases, and appli Dell tracks the number of product units
as the batch processing we use to inter cations, all from a single console. that are not manufactured due to system
face this data with numerous other appli Dell’s IT group has also drawn on outages—and that figure has been
cations.” The group also put the system Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid reduced by more than 90 percent. At
to the test in the real world, implementing Control tools to streamline the monitoring the same time, he adds, “we’ve seen
and evaluating it in its Malaysian opera and management of its databases. “Grid tremendous performance improvements.
tions before rolling it out globally. Control lets us manage the clustered The new environment can process sig
The system passed these various database on multiple servers through nificantly more data than before.”
tests, and today Dell’s supply chain one central location,” says Ravee Avutu, That improvement is especially
database is run on clusters of up to six senior manager of Database Manage evident during weekly, end-of-quarter,
Dell PowerEdge servers, depending ment Services at Dell. “This has helped and end-of-month financial processing
on the region being supported, with us improve reliability and reduce man times, which have been cut by an esti
mirrored disaster recovery systems at agement costs.” mated 40 to 50 percent—or more. Basic
remote sites. That means that Dell has With the new system, Dell IT is now month-end batch jobs that used to take
redundancy at both the backup and supporting supply chain operations at eight hours now take two to three hours.
cluster levels. If a server node goes more than 10 plants around the world, In more complex cases, there can be
down, its workload can be picked up as well as several merging centers in the some 40 steps involved in closing the
instantly by another node in the cluster. U.S., where products such as computers, books and calculating cost, a process
Additionally, individual nodes can be printers, and flat panels are consolidated that used to take 13 hours or more to
brought down one at a time for mainte into orders for more efficient shipping. complete. Those closings are now com
nance without affecting the operation Within months, Dell plans to have all of its pleted in six hours or less. Such reduc
of the overall system—as opposed to regions using Dell and Oracle Database tions have been key, because during
having to take the entire UNIX server 10g, giving the company a powerful, con these closing processes, the supply
down when maintenance was required. sistent platform worldwide. chain system is shut down—and so is
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July 2006. Printed in the U.S.A. Dell, the DELL logo, OpenManage, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Linux is a registered
trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to
either the entities claiming the marks or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. © 2006 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner
whatsoever without the written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, please contact Dell Inc.
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