Powering Next-Generation Operations
The Andersen Group companies sell quality breads through 450 stores across Japan, as
well as locations in Denmark and the US. Within the group, each company essentially
managed its own operations with its own systems. But to keep up with order volumes,
the company decided to move to what it calls “Next Generation Total SCM,” based on
a group-wide technology platform. “Until now, each group company has been optimizing
its systems separately. However, for TCO reduction and efficient administration on a
group-wide scale, these systems must all inter-work harmoniously,” says Toshiaki Horio,
manager of the company’s System Support Department. The company tackled that
problem with a single platform that could support applications for ordering, procurement, manufacturing, inventory control and shipment—and ensure that they all
work together.
Certified No. 1 in the world
To create this platform, the Andersen Group implemented two clustered Fujitsu SPARC
Enterprise M3000 servers and Fujitsu ETERNUS 2000 storage systems. “From my long
experience with UNIX servers, I consider the latest [SPARC Enterprise] model with the sophistication of multi-core processors and virtualization to be dependable, because we know
many companies worldwide are using it,” says Horio. “In addition, SPARC Enterprise M3000
can provide high performance with low cost.”
The new group-wide system has indeed delivered a number of such benefits. The Andersen
Group has seen application server performance improve by a factor of 2. 3, while database
server performance has improved 3. 5 times. With the clustered approach, both hardware and
operating system reliability have improved as well, and maintenance is easier. “Data backup time
was reduced to around one hour and forty minutes from over three hours,” says Horio.
Meanwhile, the company has been able to consolidate applications, including inventory
control and data warehouse applications, and reduce the number of servers it needs from
three to two. This has helped reduce server administration, space and power requirements,
and contributes to a low TCO for the platform.
Overall, the Fujitsu technology is helping the company meet the needs of today and tomorrow, says Horio: “The new system keeps response times constant even when handling multiple transactions. The new system will also be able to handle application workloads which
will be added in the future.”
The SPARC
Journey Continues
Fujitsu and Oracle have a long history
of working together on a variety of
fronts, and that includes tightly coupled development plans for SPARC
and Oracle Solaris. Earlier this year,
the two companies extended their
SPARC development relationship with
a new product distribution agreement and a commitment to further
joint engineering, marketing and sales
promotion efforts.
Meanwhile, both companies have
engineering centers focusing on SPARC
and Oracle Solaris technologies, with
the engineers in their respective cen-
ters working and collaborating closely
together. The two companies have also
established virtual teams that focus on
various aspects of the SPARC Enter-
prise server effort, such as data center
server teams, mid-range server teams,
service processor software teams,
Oracle Solaris teams and documenta-
tion teams. In addition, Fujitsu and
Oracle Japan have established a SPARC
Enterprise-Oracle Database Solution
Development Center that works on
creating solutions for next-generation
standard IT infrastructures.
For more information on Fujitsu and SPARC technology,
please visit www.fujitsu.com/oracle
and www.fujitsu.com/sparcenterprise.
