dell enterprise technology center series
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | May 200750
T he Dell supply chain management (SCM) database
systems handle key business functions that support
worldwide manufacturing operations, including the
efficient Dell inventory management model and fast, direct
delivery of computers, accessories, parts, and supplies. These
systems must be designed for reliability and cost-effective scal-
ability: a failure can cost thousands of dollars per minute in
factory downtime, and the SCM systems must be able to
handle increasing workloads as the company grows.
When Dell was a smaller company than it is now, before
the development of powerful, industry-standard servers of
the type that Dell manufactures, the Dell IT group ran its SCM
database applications on large, expensive, proprietary serv-
ers based on the UNIX® OS. However, as the company grew,
servers lacking the necessary capacity had to be replaced
with even larger, more powerful servers. And because the
servers were not redundant, updating a single server often
required shutting down entire systems.
The increased performance of industry-standard Dell
PowerEdge servers, however, has enabled Dell IT to create
cost-effective, highly scalable systems using Oracle Real
Application Clusters (RAC) 10g. By sharing a large database
across multiple PowerEdge servers, Dell IT can easily deploy
additional low-cost servers when necessary to handle
increased workloads rather than buying additional large,
expensive, proprietary UNIX-based servers. Dell IT has
implemented this type of system for Dell operations at mul-
tiple locations around the world. Using the same processes
for disaster recovery, backup, and monitoring across all
Dell operations enables Dell IT to take advantage of a cost-
effective and readily supported deployment model. This
article describes how Dell IT migrated its critical SCM appli-
cations from proprietary UNIX-based servers to industry-
standard Dell hardware.
Dell supply chain management The Dell SCM system must handle an enormous number of
transactions and pieces of information, and includes multi-
ple core components necessary to keep operations running
smoothly:
• Configuration management: The configuration manage-
ment component manages over 1 million Dell part num-
bers per year across approximately 200 product families,
and over 2 million bills of materials (BOMs) per year.
BOMs listing component part numbers are created for
manufacturing facilities to build assemblies and sub-
assemblies for Dell products.
• Procurement: The procurement component manages nearly
1.8 million purchase order lines per year from more than
5,000 suppliers worldwide. To streamline the procurement
process, Dell uses an automated application that includes
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ImplementationStudy: Dell IT Scales Supply Chain Management with Oracle RAC 10gWhen the expensive proprietary servers running the Dell supply chain management systems had reached their limits, the Dell IT group migrated to cost-effective, standards-based Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers running Oracle® Real Application Clusters 10g. This architecture helped enhance database performance while providing scalability for future growth.
By Dave Jaffe, Ph.D.
ToDD MuirheaD
Tiong Tey
raveenDra avuTu
reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, May 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell inc. all rights reserved.
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workflow approvals and vendor communica-
tion and enables services such as defective
part replacement.
• Cost: The cost component runs mostly in
batch mode to calculate the costs to Dell for
all BOMs. These batch jobs run weekly,
monthly, and quarterly, with each job aggre-
gating total material costs.
• Inventory: The inventory component man-
ages more than 3 million inventory move-
ments daily from stock rooms to factory
floors across all Dell sites, along with the
corresponding 3 million messages transmit-
ted to different systems for reporting, analy-
sis, and factory scheduling.
• Accounts payable: The accounts payable
component handles approximately 15,000
items per day, including payments to Dell
suppliers, invoices, and receipts. Vendor
information includes vendor ID number,
location, negotiated terms, and contact
information.
In addition to these order-related transac-
tions, the SCM system also runs several other
batch process jobs to aggregate data each week,
month, or quarter.
In the North America region, the Oracle
Database application for SCM consists of
approximately 3,000 database objects (func-
tions, packages, procedures, triggers, tables,
and views). This SCM system is supported by
six PowerEdge 2650 application servers, five
internally developed Web-based applications,
more than 50 system-to-system integrations,
approximately 125 batch jobs, and approxi-
mately 500 user interfaces.
Previous system: Proprietary UNIX-based serversThe previous Dell SCM system used Sun E6000-
class UNIX-based servers running the Sun
Solaris 8 OS and Sun Cluster 2.2 (see Figure 1).
The primary and secondary servers, each with
16 processors at 336 MHz and 11 GB of memory,
managed the production database on Oracle
Database 8.0.6. The disaster recovery server
had 12 processors at 336 MHz and 6 GB of
memory. Arrays running the EMC® Symmetrix®
platform provided disk storage.
To make the system highly available, Dell IT
used Sun Cluster to cluster the primary and sec-
ondary servers in an active/passive configura-
tion connected to shared disk storage, enabling
the database to fail over to the passive node if
the active one failed. The failover was initiated
when the passive node no longer detected a
heartbeat signal from the active node. The
failover disconnected all users, who would then
have to reconnect to the newly active server.
Current system: Oracle RAC on Dell PowerEdge serversBy 2005, the performance of the proprietary
system was becoming a concern, with many of
the batch processes taking a long time to
complete—the end-of-quarter batch process
job, for example, could take up to 31 hours. In
addition, the Oracle Database version was out-
dated and unsupported, and because it did not
support Oracle RAC, Dell IT could not add capac-
ity by horizontal scaling. To continue using this
system would have required a large investment
in upgrading these large, expensive servers.
Instead, Dell decided to migrate to a cost-
effective, industry standards–based platform,
Figure 1. Previous Dell supply chain management system based on proprietary UNIX-based servers
reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, May 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell inc. all rights reserved.
Disaster recoverySun E���� EMC Symmetrix
Disaster recovery data center
PrimarySun E����
SecondarySun E���� EMC Symmetrix
Sun Cluster
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dell enterprise technology center series
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | May 200752
replacing the Sun servers with Oracle RAC 10g
clusters of Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers, each
with four Intel® Xeon® processors (see Figure 2).
The environment includes a primary cluster and
two disaster recovery clusters. While the previ-
ous system could not scale beyond one physical
server, the current system allows Dell IT to easily
add servers to the clusters to handle increased
workloads. The multi-node Oracle RAC architec-
ture can also provide higher I/O throughput
than the previous system because of the
increased number of available interfaces.
The Oracle RAC 10g architecture includes
built-in high-availability features. All Oracle RAC
nodes and instances share the same physical
database; if any of these experience problems,
the users and connections can fail over to the
other nodes or instances. Because this failover
is seamless and transparent to users, users do
not have to reconnect, as they did in the previ-
ous system.
One of the disaster recovery clusters uses
Oracle Data Guard software, and the other uses
EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF®)
software. The first cluster uses the Data Guard
Broker component to ship logs in real time from
the primary site to the disaster recovery site and
apply them, which allows the database to stay
in sync and helps prevent physical corruptions
from being copied to the disaster recovery data-
base. The second cluster uses SRDF to ship
changed blocks at the storage level in real time
from the primary site to the disaster recovery
site. This method is fast but does not guard
against data corruption. The combination of
Data Guard and SRDF provides both fast and
secure data replication.
Dell IT also uses several other programs to
provide key backup, load balancing, and admin-
istration capabilities:
• OracleRecoveryManager:Dell IT uses this
program to back up the primary database
and archive logs. Two full (hot) backups are
made to tape weekly through the EMC
NetWorker™ interface; archive logs are
backed up hourly to enable Dell IT to recover
the database to a specific point in time if
necessary. Dell IT can also back up the data-
base from the disaster recovery site rather
than taxing the primary nodes.
• OracleDatabase10gServices:This software
provides load balancing for each cluster—for
example, Dell IT can have three nodes
handle online users and three nodes handle
batch processing.
• OracleGridControl: This software provides
monitoring and management capabilities
and helps simplify many day-to-day data-
base administration tasks; it also allows
administrators to set thresholds for different
events to create trouble tickets through the
problem management system.
Dell IT has implemented these clusters at mul-
tiple locations around the world (see Figure 3).
Figure 2. Current Dell supply chain management system based on Oracle RAC 10g and Dell PowerEdge servers
“Standardizing on cost-effective oracle raC 10g clusters of Poweredge servers with Dell/eMC stor-age helped Dell iT deploy the systems globally in just eight months.”
reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, May 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell inc. all rights reserved.
EMC Symmetrix
Disaster recovery data center
EMC Symmetrix
Ora
cle
Dat
a G
uard
redo
log
ship
ping
Production data center
EMC
SRD
F
Primary Oracle RAC 10g cluster
EMC SRDF disaster recovery Oracle RAC 10g cluster
EMC Symmetrix
Oracle Data Guard disaster recovery Oracle RAC 10g cluster
53www.dell.com/powersolutions
Standardizing on cost-effective Oracle RAC 10g
clusters of PowerEdge servers with Dell/EMC stor-
age, with similar processes for deployment, disas-
ter recovery, and backup, helped Dell IT deploy
the systems globally in just eight months.
Performance increases Dell engineers measured database perfor-
mance for both the previous and current SCM
systems. Figure 4 shows the 10 longest end-
of-month and end-of-quarter transactions. The
most significant time savings occurred in the
data extraction for all material movements
transactions, which dropped from almost
5 hours to just 35 minutes for an 88 percent
improvement, while the time for the entire
end-of-quarter jobs processing decreased
from 31 hours to 23 hours.
Cost-effective, scalable supply chain management Supply chain management is essential to Dell
operations around the world, with both factory
operations and internal systems dependent on
SCM systems to provide real-time information
about key business functions. Running these sys-
tems on Oracle RAC 10g clusters of industry-
standard Dell PowerEdge servers enables Dell IT
to scale them efficiently and cost-effectively to
handle increased workloads. By moving the sys-
tems to Dell servers when it did, Dell IT avoided
significant additional expenditures for proprietary
UNIX-based servers, enhanced performance, and
provided a clear path for future growth.
Dave Jaffe, Ph.D., is a senior consultant on the
Dell Enterprise Technology Center team. He has
a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University and a
Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of
California, San Diego.
Todd Muirhead is a senior engineering consultant
on the Dell Enterprise Technology Center team.
Todd has a B.A. in Computer Science from the
University of North Texas and is Microsoft Certified
Systems Engineer + Internet (MCSE+I) certified.
Tiong Tey is an IT strategist on the Dell World
Wide Procurement IT team. Tiong has a B.S. and
a master’s degree in Computer Science from
Wichita State University.
Raveendra Avutu is an IT manager in the Global
Data Management group supporting databases
for Dell IT. Raveendra has a master’s degree in
Computer Science from Oklahoma State University.
Figure 3. Global deployment of Dell supply chain management systems
region primary site disaster recovery site
north America Six-node oracle raC 10g cluster Two sets of six-node oracle raC 10g clusters
china Three-node oracle raC 10g cluster Three-node oracle raC 10g cluster
Brazil Two-node oracle raC 10g cluster Two-node oracle raC 10g cluster
europe Two-node oracle raC 10g cluster Two-node oracle raC 10g cluster
Malaysia Two sets of two-node oracle raC 10g clusters Two sets of two-node oracle raC 10g clusters
Figure 4. Performance gains for 10 longest database transactions in Dell supply chain management systems
transaction time on previous system
(hours:minutes)
time on current system
(hours:minutes)
performance gain
entire end-of-quarter jobs processing
31:00 23:00 26%
cost-per-order calculation 8:52 5:40 36%
Quarterly BoM calculation 7:30 1:56 74%
entire end-of-month jobs processing
6:00 4:00 33%
new product material costs calculation
5:56 2:17 62%
data summary for all levels of order details
5:33 1:58 65%
data extraction for all material movements transactions
4:49 0:35 88%
costs roll-up (materials, royalties, and transportation)
3:18 3:12 3%
Material management transac-tions creation based on inventory transactions
3:00 0:43 76%
Financial journal entries creation 2:37 0:40 75%
QUICKLINKS
DellEnterpriseTechnologyCenter:www.dell.com/techcenter
DellandOracleDatabase10g:www.dell.com/oracle10g
OracleandDell:www.dell.com/oracle
reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, May 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell inc. all rights reserved.
