One of SAP's first customers, Burda Digital has decades of experience with SAP business solutions. Burda Digital is renowned for its abilities in this field and is responsible for providing SAP® R/3® services to 1,300 of the 7,400 employees of Hubert Burda Media, ensuring that the IT environment is capable of handling up to 800 users simultaneously.

Challenge
• It is the responsibility of Burda Digital GmbH to provide vital SAP business applications to 1,300 employees in virtually every discipline of the Burda Group.
• Burda’s SAP environment was running on two AlphaServer GS160 systems but they had reached the end of their life.
• This was compromising not only the current ability to deliver SAP but also future growth plans of the group.

Solution
• It was decided to migrate the SAP environment to two powerful Intel® Itanium® 2-based HP Integrity rx8620 servers.
• Storage and backup were provided with HP StorageWorks EVA 5000, HP StorageWorks ESL9595 and two HP Integrity rx2600 servers.
• The new HP Smooth Transition Process developed jointly by HP and Oracle was used to speed up the migration of the SAP R/3 data.

Results
• Processing power has doubled with just four HP Integrity servers now doing the work of the previous eight Alpha processors and SAP R/3 performance has accelerated as a result of database reorganization.
• The complex migration ran seamlessly and was achieved in under 36 hours.
• Burda Group now has the business advantages of scalability, flexibility, increased customer satisfaction and reduced overheads.


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