I was inspired to write a little something today about my friends at Brown Forman who I have had the pleasure of working with this past year. When I mention the company Brown Forman, not too many people are familiar... I will go out on a limb though and assume all of us have used their products at one time or another. They have been with us through Y2K, SAP Upgrades, Disaster Recovery, Unicode Migrations and Installation and Go-Live 🙂
Brown Forman, specifically Mitch Zebrun, Lead Engineer, presented at SAP SAPPHIRE 2009 along with our fearless SAP Global Technical Account Manager, Christoph Brune, at Sun. Both deliver a great presentation on what "The Sun Eco-Optimized SAP Data Center at Brown Forman" looks like.
Basically Mitch and the IT team wanted to take advantage of virtualization technology to consolidate resources and realize both long-term and immediate cost savings. Instead of using dedicated servers with different environments running different applications, virtualization would enable them to combine environments and consolidate servers.
Some of the design decisions made was to separate application processing and DB processing, not mix production and non-production systems and use Solaris Containers to increase utilization. Learn more via the webcast. It's a great example of how Brown Forman utilizes Sun Technologies for SAP Upgrades - specifically Solaris Containers and ZFS.
The CRM Upgrade went so well that Consolidation through virtualization is the cornerstone of Brown-Forman's long-term strategy for SAP solutions. In the near term, the team plans to virtualize Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000's server to house their SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM) applications. Over time, with upcoming server upgrades and more virtualization, IT plans to consolidate 29 servers down to 9 in order to reduce the datacenter footprint by 50% and increase ROI. The IT department anticipates significant savings in heating, cooling, floorspace, administration, training, and maintenance costs, and greater efficiency and cost savings for non-SAP applications running on the Solaris OS.
Thank you Mitch and the Brown Forman team for your continued support of Sun Technology.
