James Hardie Building Products - EMC

JAMES HARDIE BUILDING PRODUCTS Building materials manufacturer drives greater business agility with virtualized SAP OVERVIEW James Hardie Building Products is the largest manufacturer of fiber cement products and systems for internal and external building construction applications in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The company’s products are used in residential, commercial, and industrial environments.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES James Hardie’s critical SAP environment was experiencing performance issues as data volumes were growing rapidly, but its colocation facility didn't have the power resources to support additional servers. The company's storage environment also

ESSENTIALS

was nearly 100 percent utilized. In addition, the company's lean IT staff was struggling to keep up with IT administration and disaster recovery support across its

Industry

sprawling physical infrastructure.

Construction Materials

Steve Killan, James Hardie's enterprise server manager, explains, “EMC was well

Company Size

integrated with VMware and had a great replication solution with RecoverPoint.

$1.2 billion in annual revenues

EMC’s strong partnership with SAP also weighed heavily in our decision.”

Business Challenges

SOLUTIONS

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Rapid data growth affecting

James Hardie’s virtualized SAP environment is supported by EMC® VNX® unified

performance

storage for production and VNXe® unified storage for development. The VNX is

Sprawling physical infrastructure

configured with the EMC FAST™ Suite (consisting of FAST Cache and FAST VP),

overwhelming lean IT team

along with Flash and high-capacity disk drives. This FLASH 1st strategy ensures that

Solutions

hot or active data is automatically stored on Flash for optimal performance, while less active data is tiered to high capacity drives for the lowest overall cost per

•

EMC VNX and EMC VNXe

•

EMC FAST Suite

•

EMC RecoverPoint

•

VMware vSphere

recovery site 2,000 miles away in Chicago.

•

VMware View

Nearly 100 percent of James Hardie’s global server infrastructure is virtualized with

•

SAP ERP, Advanced Planner and

VMware® vSphere™, creating more than 600 virtual machines (VMs) running on 40

Optimizer, Business Information

physical hosts. In addition, the company is using VMware View to virtualize its

Warehouse, and NetWeaver BW

desktop infrastructure.

Wonderware manufacturing

The EMC and VMware infrastructure runs a full suite of SAP applications, including

execution systems; MP2

SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Advanced Planner and Optimizer, Business

maintenance software; Microsoft

Information Warehouse, and NetWeaver BW; as well as Wonderware manufacturing

Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server

execution systems, MP2 maintenance software, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft

•

gigabyte. James Hardie also uses EMC RecoverPoint™ remote data protection to replicate the VNX systems between its production data center in Irvine, California and disaster

SharePoint, and Microsoft SQL Server. CUSTOMER PROFILE

Results •

• •

•

James Hardie also uses software from EMC Select Partner, Metalogix, to optimize its

Reduced response times from more

SharePoint environment. The company plans to reduce management overhead,

than 20 milliseconds to less than a

infrastructure costs, and recovery times by storing Binary Large Objects on VNX

millisecond

unified storage as opposed to the SQL Content Database itself.

Accelerated SAP server deployment

James Hardie’s comprehensive EMC storage, backup, and recovery environment also

from months to days

includes EMC Avamar® deduplication backup software and system and EMC SourceOne™ Email Management for Microsoft Exchange.

Enabled four-hour RTO and onehour RPO with streamlined disaster

SUB-MILLISECOND RESPONSE TIMES

recovery planning

With EMC and VMware, James Hardie now has the integrated technologies critical to

Enhanced IT efficiency and avoided

advancing the company’s SAP virtualization strategy and business transformation. In

hiring additional staff

fact, since virtualizing SAP and running the VMs on VNX, James Hardie’s previous performance problems disappeared. “We’re running at about 25 percent utilization in our storage infrastructure instead of nearly 99 percent like before,” says Killan. “This allows us to continue growing our virtualized infrastructure without hitting performance roadblocks. We now get submillisecond response times compared to more than 20 milliseconds previously. SAP's performance has been great in our virtualized environment.”

“EMC and VMware have revolutionized the way we do business. Standing up new VMs and provisioning storage quickly means that we can accelerate SAP projects and enable the business to realize value much faster.” Steve Killan Enterprise Server Manager at James Hardie Building Products

VIRTUALIZED SAP TRANSFORMS BUSINESS Virtualizing SAP has transformed James Hardie, enabling much greater agility to pursue strategic initiatives. For example, when the company launched four new initiatives, each requiring its own quality assurance environment consisting of 20 SAP virtual servers, IT delivered virtual servers in days, rather than the months it would have needed in the past to procure 80 physical servers. “EMC and VMware have revolutionized the way we do business,” remarks Killan. "Standing up new VMs and provisioning storage quickly means that we can accelerate SAP projects and enable the business to realize value much faster. And when we're done with a project, we just throw the servers back into the pool for the next group of users."

ENABLING DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING Virtualizing SAP has also enabled more effective disaster recovery planning and, with the implementation of RecoverPoint, enhanced protection for SAP. “We were not able to perform proper disaster recovery planning procedures prior to virtualizing SAP,” explains Killan. “There were numerous scripts to maintain and it was very difficult to keep up."

“RecoverPoint's automation has simplified the entire process while providing us with a recovery time objective of four hours and a recovery point objective of one hour for SAP, which was not possible before. RecoverPoint and VMware are both key solutions enabling successful disaster recovery planning.”

ENHANCING IT EFFICIENCY With the EMC and VMware solutions, James Hardie’s IT organization has been transformed as well. Instead of being over-stressed and facing the cost of hiring additional staff, the team continues to run lean while achieving even more. In fact, just two people manage more than 600 VMs. In addition, day-to-day administration is easier, and SAP updates are faster and more efficient. “We can manage far more servers per person than would ever be possible in a physical environment,” says Killan. “Virtualizing SAP makes it much easier to apply patches and be sure they’re in synch across both production and development platforms. And we can perform server maintenance faster without affecting users, so downtime has been reduced significantly. We’ve saved a lot of time, which allows us to work on other projects to help the business.”

LEVERAGING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES WITH IT AGILITY As Killan points out, a dynamic company like James Hardie can’t afford delays or inefficiencies when it comes to an environment as critical as SAP. “The key is giving business users what they need, when they need it,” he says. “By virtualizing SAP with EMC and VMware, we’ve transformed to a point where it’s now the norm for IT to deliver resources for SAP projects in a day or two—enabling the company to operate in a much more agile and opportunistic way.”

CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller—or visit us at www.EMC.com.

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