MANOR + Maklee= Successful Migration

MANOR is the largest chain of department stores in Switzerland, with approximately 11,200 employees in 87 different sites. MANOR’s department stores are part of the MANOR department store group, which includes the furniture stores FLY, the sport outfitters Athleticum as well as supermarkets and restaurants. MANOR’s revenue from its department stores in 2007 was 1.8 billion Euros.

OpenVMS & Oracle are at the core of MANOR’s IT environment, satisfying the company’s needs for high performance computing at all department stores (for inventory, sales etc.)

To support the growth of the business, MANOR was looking for a higher level of performance and throughput. In February 2008, MANOR performed an Alpha vs. Itanium benchmark, benchmarking the production environment (OpenVMS AlphaServer GS1280 1.15 Ghz) vs. HP Integrity server rx7640 1.6 Ghz with Oracle 10g.

Maklee was engaged by MANOR to make parts of the current production environment run in the most optimal way possible on the Integrity servers (preferably 20% faster than Alpha). This goal had to be achieved without changing the application itself.

The results were surprisingly positive: after tuning the Itanium server (rx7640) it ran 50% faster than Alpha. Maklee has raised the “performance bar” for MANOR.

MANOR followed Maklee’s recommendations and ordered two Integrity servers rx6600 (for MANOR’s dual site environment). MANOR began final testing in March/April 2008 and before implementing the new servers in production, performed an evaluation installation of Oracle RAC on OpenVMS.

Maklee assisted MANOR with the RAC installation and tuned the RAC environment for optimal performance. Maklee assisted MANOR in tuning the new Itanium servers before they went “live”. MANOR achieved a performance improvement that couldn’t be expressed in percentage but in factors!

After completing testing, MANOR (database administrators and OpenVMS/San team) & Maklee migrated 10 of 50 production Oracle databases to the RX6600. These run in a mixed architecture cluster (Alpha & Itanium) on OpenVMS in a dual site environment (nodes approx. 5km apart).

Thanks to Maklee, MANOR has managed to migrate much faster than initially planned.

Olaf Leonhardt – OpenVMS/SAN Management

Josef Fekete – Senior DBA

Radoslav Vavros – Senior DBA

Jean-Pierre Willer – Senior DBA

Klaus Berger – OpenVMS / SAN Management

For more information about MANOR please contact Olaf.Leonhardt@manor.ch

To find out how Maklee can help you – please contact info@maklee.com.