Sybase, SAP and IBM —Reshaping IT Economics - Sybase.se

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Sybase ® , SAP ® and IBM ® —
Reshaping IT Economics
www.sybase.com

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
1 About the Sybase, SAP, and IBM Alliance
2 How Sybase, SAP and IBM Have Teamed to Reshape IT Economics
3 Simplify
4 Protect
5 Perform
6 Summary
2

Introduction
To keep pace with today’s fast-paced operational pressures, it’s essential that your hardware and software
environments be as optimized and well-integrated as possible. However, this is easier said than done, since
it can be a thorny challenge to cobble together best-of-breed solutions from separate vendors and ensure
that they work well together.
Individually, SAP®, Sybase®, and IBM® are well known for their successful customer engagements and
long histories of extensive investments in research and development. In response to the demands of modern
computing, they have also worked closely together to deliver innovative, cohesive solutions.
In this paper, we describe how this vision and alliance helps customers realize three essential financial and
operational advantages:
1. Simplify, by consolidating and virtualizing on open platforms
2. Protect, by preventing outages that impact revenues
3. Perform, by running daily operations more effectively
The intended audience for this paper includes line-of-business executives as well as IT leaders.
About the Sybase, SAP, and IBM Alliance
Even before the 2010 merger of SAP and Sybase, there were already significant alliances in place among
these leading technology firms. For example, SAP was IBM’s #1 Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and
Sybase was #3 ISV for IBM Power Systems. Over the years, Sybase has expended significant efforts to
optimize its product line on the IBM Power Systems platform.
1

This collaboration goes far beyond fast performance, and includes a broad range of innovative solutions in
diverse domains such as:
• Mobility, through Sybase’s mCommerce solutions
• Business intelligence, including Sybase’s analytics and Report Accelerator offerings
• Management, such as IBM’S Virtual Data Center and Enterprise Data Management technologies
Thousands of professionals in both organizations are committed to this teaming. Customers benefit from
this relationship in many ways, including:
• Solution evaluation. IBM provides dedicated IBM field engineers along with Power Systems for evaluations
and proofs of concept, along with test results, reference architectures, and sizing/configuration guides.
• Migration. Sybase professional services experts utilize IBM’s Migration Factory to streamline transitioning
to IBM servers.
• Technology. Sybase and IBM perform continual optimization on Power Systems platforms, from the
silicon up.
How Sybase, SAP, and IBM have Teamed
to Reshape IT Economics
In recent years, technology industry consolidation has considerably narrowed the choices for enterprisegrade
IT infrastructure.
Relying on a single technology vendor to address all of your needs — both hardware and software —
introduces many challenges and risks, including:
• Lock-in
• Higher costs
• Investment risks
• A “one size fits all” attitude
To avoid these potential complications, most clients have chosen to diversify their IT investments. This
strategy makes it possible to select best-of-breed solutions for the entire range of IT infrastructure. To bring
this vision to life, Sybase, SAP, and IBM have worked together to deliver the most open, integrated, and
optimized solutions. First, SAP is the world’s leading provider of enterprise applications. Secondly, Sybase is an
industry leader in enterprise and mobile software for managing information. Finally, IBM Power Systems set the
records in more than 70 real world-oriented test results, and now have over 50% share of the UNIX® market.
2

In the following sections, we’ll provide three examples of optimized solutions from SAP, Sybase, and IBM.
These offerings help you simplify and protect your data, while improving performance at the same time.
Simplify
Server sprawl — a term that describes large numbers of relatively underused computers — has become
a major problem for many enterprises. Deploying extraneous servers boosts a broad range of costs, such as
capital expenditures, floor space, heating/cooling outflows, and administrative overhead. Fortunately, server
sprawl is one of the easiest challenges to overcome with proper hardware and software tooling.
The first technique to reduce server sprawl is to deploy fewer, yet more powerful servers. For example, see
table 1 for some before/after examples of how Sybase Adaptive Server® Enterprise (ASE) on IBM Power Systems
have benefitted real-world customers.
Before
• Four IBM POWER5 570 servers
• 64 cores @ 1.9 GHz
• 30% utilization
• Ninety two Sun SPARC
Enterprise T2000 servers
• Eight HP Integrity Superdomes
• 64 cores
• 30% utilization
After
• One IBM POWER 770 server
• 24 cores @ 3.5 GHz
• 60% utilization
• One IBM POWER 750 server
• 4 cores
• One IBM POWER 780 server
• 80% utilization
Table 1: Sybase ASE/IBM Power consolidation
Running Sybase ASE on IBM Power Systems is a great start towards driving much higher transactional
workloads. But the speed and scalability of the IBM Power Systems are just part of the picture; virtualization
has a large role to play as well.
Built into the firmware of all IBM Power Systems, IBM’s PowerVM server virtualization technology allows
very fine-grained, automatic processor movement, meaning that processor resources can easily and flexibly be
moved among partitions. Active memory sharing makes it possible to move or share memory as well across
partitions. Preliminary tests have shown PowerVM to be significantly more streamlined than VMware on
x86 platforms.
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Running Sybase ASE on Power Systems in concert with PowerVM delivers additional benefits such as:
• Workload consolidation using virtualization
• Increased resource utilization
• Dynamic resource allocation/de-allocation
––
Of processors
––
Of memory
––
Of I/O devices
Protect
Global operations, 24x7 uptime requirements, competitive pressures, and user expectations are just a few
reasons why it’s harder than ever to provide enterprise-grade IT capabilities. In addition to these pressures,
there are more potential sources of business continuity disruption such as:
• Planned outages
• Disasters
• Database corruption
• Storage failure
• Application logic problems
• Human error
• Erroneous business processes
4

Since there’s no ‘one size fits all’ technology architecture or business continuity strategy, SAP, Sybase, and
IBM provide a full range of offerings to help reduce risk. These range from helping to protect and recover a
single server to ensuring continuous multi-site availability on a worldwide network, as shown in table 2.
scope goal technologies
Server
Protect the data on a given server,
and help to recover information in
the event of an outage
• Sybase Advanced Backup
Services
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Server availability
Keep a server running and
accessible to meet user needs
• Disk and hardware vendor hot
swap and redundancy
Site availability
Keep all the servers within a
single location up-and-running
with their data protected
• Sybase ASE with High
Availability option
• IBM PowerHA®
Multi-site
Protect the information contained • Storage replication
on servers located within a group
of diverse locations
Single-site high availability
(asynchronous)
Guarantee informational integrity
within a single geographic
location
• Sybase ASE with High
Availability option
• IBM PowerHA
Multi-site data replication and
high availability (synchronous)
Protect and distribute information
across a far-reaching (potentially
global) group of servers, with little
• Sybase Cluster Edition
• Sybase Replication Server®
• IBM PowerHA
to no latency
Continuous multi-site availability Deliver maximum business
continuity by keeping a broad
range of servers (often globally)
synchronized
• Sybase Cluster Edition
• Sybase Replication Server
• IBM PowerHA
Table 2: Business continuity solutions
Finally, it’s worth remembering that test results have proven that enhanced business continuity needn’t
equate to slower performance.
Perform
As described earlier, industry consolidation is making it difficult for enterprise IT organizations to exercise
choice when selecting critical infrastructure. Even when options are available, it can be confusing to assemble
the right solution and be assured of a smooth integration among all these complex moving parts.
Fortunately, for those enterprises that set out to realize end-to-end business visibility by rolling out SAP
Business Suite 7, the combination of Sybase ASE on IBM Power Systems delivers an easily maintained, highperformance
foundation. In recognition of the broad collection of enterprise-grade benefits supplied by ASE,
SAP has chosen this platform as the preferred database for transactional environments. Let’s look at a few of
these advantages:
• Better performance. ASE is designed to leverage hardware’s parallel processing capabilities, thereby
making both scale-up and scale-out more effective. Independent tests have shown that ASE is a solid
competitor to most leading databases on the IBM POWER7® platform. In fact, for typical database sizes
and transaction profiles, ASE supplied significantly better performance than competitive databases.
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• Reduced risk. The tandem of ASE and SAP offers streamlined, integrated administration, along with
comprehensive, holistic security. To further enhance the customer experience, Sybase’s entire product lifecycle
is coordinated with SAP.
• Cost control. ASE is not only less expensive to acquire, but more importantly is less costly to maintain on an
ongoing basis. Data compression, enhanced text management, and easier administration are all part of this
equation.
As described earlier, thanks to its performance and reliability, IBM has been increasing its share of the UNIX
marketplace. Consistent with this momentum, IBM has also won nearly 4,000 SAP migrations from other
hardware platforms in the past five years. IBM supports these transformations with proven expertise and readyto-go
infrastructure, including assets such as the IBM Migration Factory and IBM HP/Sun/Dell x86 Consolidation
Factory. Specially trained professional services experts — working together with their counterparts from
Sybase — help ensure successful migration experiences.
Summary
Global, round-the-clock operations, growing business continuity pressures, and increasing data volumes are
just three of the many diverse influences that are complicating the challenges faced by IT management as they
seek to support their customers with reliable yet affordable infrastructure.
At the same time, technology industry consolidation is increasing risk, lock-in, and costs for these enterprises.
Rather than putting all your eggs into a single basket and entrusting everything to a single
vendor, it’s much smarter to use a best-of-breed approach when choosing critical enterprise technology.
This is especially true when these solutions have been certified to work well together.
The combination of SAP Business Suite supported by Sybase ASE information management software running
on IBM Power Systems delivers:
• Simplified and streamlined IT infrastructure
• Superior business continuity support
• Faster and more reliable foundations for key applications such as SAP Business Suite
For more information such as public resources for joint initiatives — including solution brochures, whitepapers,
and case studies — visit sybase.com/ibm, or ibm.com/power (search “Sybase”). You can also contact the following
people from each organization:
• IBM Sybase Alliance Manager – Carl Cappolino, carlc@us.ibm.com
• IBM Sybase Technical Enablement Manager – vicknair@us.ibm.com
• Sybase Vice President, Platform Alliance, Charlie Chen – charlie@sybase.com
For information on our comprehensive
Consulting and Education Services to
support your Sybase technology initiatives,
visit us at www.sybase.com/consulting.
Sybase, Inc.
Worldwide Headquarters
One Sybase Drive
Dublin, CA 94568-7902
U.S.A
1 800 8 sybase
www.sybase.com
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