In order to improve the performance and operational efficiency of businesses worldwide, a customer using SAP® wanted to establish a global business program to define and implement a standardized, group-wide business process architecture and associated master data for the parameterization of the group of software tools. The expected growth of the number of users and the size of the database would be at a level never reached by other customers, however, so IBM® was asked to undertake the following tasks: * Test the application to be sure that it can sustain such growth. This project illustrates the new near real time business intelligence (BI) context approached by customers who want the ability to rapidly analyze their business data to gain market shares. Data today comes from many diverse global sources and needs to be merged into an intelligent data warehouse. This IBM Redbooks® publication describes the testing that was done in terms of performance and manageability in an SAP NetWeaver® BI and DB2® environment on IBM System p™ when scaling a client's solution to a data warehouse of 60 terabytes (TB). This book resulted from a joint cooperative effort that included the PSSC, the IBM/SAP International Competency Center, the DB2-SAP Center of Excellence, SAP AG, and a customer. The customer involved in this project is a worldwide company employing more than 250,000 employees with factories and logistics operations in almost every country in the world. This project involved multiple technical skills and multiple products, as described here: * Chapter 1, "Project overview: business objectives, architecture, infrastructure, and results" on page 1, summarizes the entire project, starting from the business needs through the description of the environment and options used, to the results achieved. This chapter can be viewed as an executive summary from an IT specialist perspective. * Chapter 2, "The SAP NetWeaver BI perspective" on page 47; Chapter 3, "The DB2 perspective" on page 127; and Chapter 4, "The IBM System p perspective" on page 287, provide detailed views of the project from the perspectives of SAP specialists, DB2 specialists, and System p and AIX® specialists, respectively. * Chapter 5, "The system storage perspective" on page 319, and Chapter 6, "The Tivoli Storage Manager perspective" on page 349, describe the storage environment and the manageability issues in such a large environment. * Finally Appendix A, "The scripts used" on page 395, provides the scripts that we needed to develop for this project.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the most important topics on the agenda of any IT person. SOA involves a new vision of how to design, develop, and manage applications. It also has new requirements when building an architecture for the underlying infrastructure. This IBM Redbooks publication is the result of a project managed in the IBM European Design Center, based in Montpellier, France. The scope of the project involved helping a major worldwide customer in the automotive industry to validate and justify an SOA implementation. In particular, the customer wanted to add new business values to work with its partners, by adding new data models. It also wanted to modernize an infrastructure, by adding new Internet interfaces. The customer faced the need to eradicate an obsolete programming language. Furthermore, it wanted to build a smooth migration path, with as few risks and costs as possible. The thought, planning, and architecture of the new system, which included integration of the SOA concepts, was built by the customer with the participation of Atos Origin, a leading international IT services provider. The existing customer IT infrastructure was already built around UNIX systems, IBM System z, non-IBM clusters, SAP solutions, 3270 screens, IMS-DL/I databases, and specific code. SOA was the right solution to connect this existing environment to new components using Java, Web services, and DB2 in particular. This book explores the business needs and the architectural choices that were faced by the customer. It describes the mock-ups and prototypes, provides performance numbers that were used to validate the decisions, and explains how they were implemented. It also suggests a generic and riskless solution to eradicate the obsolete programming language.