Microsoft SQL ServerCustomer Solution Case Study

Software Maker Upgrades Database to Achieve 70 Percent Performance Boost

OverviewCountry or Region: ChinaIndustry: Manufacturing—Software publishing

Customer ProfileYonyou is one of the largest providers of management software solutions and services in China and other Asian countries. It has more than 1,500,000 enterprises customers in China and APAC countries.

Business SituationYonyou wants to continuously improve the performance, scalability, and availability of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) application.

SolutionYonyou deployed Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and is using the AlwaysOn availability feature to speed up its ERP application.

Benefits ERP performance improved by 70

percent Transaction response times improved

by 17 percent Increased insight into business health Scalable into the cloud to meet

business needs

“With SQL Server 2012, we have the performance, availability, and cloud expandability we need to compete on a global stage.”

Xiang Qihan, Senior Vice President, Yonyou Software Co. Ltd.

Yonyou is one of the largest software developers in China and the Asia-Pacific region, but it has its sights set on the global stage. Yonyou upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 to take advantage of the new AlwaysOn high-availability feature. After comprehensive tests of the AlwaysOn feature, Yonyou found that the performance of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) application improved by almost 70 percent and that average transaction response times improved by 17 percent. Running its ERP application on SQL Server 2012 will also enhance customers’ business intelligence capabilities by helping them to analyze larger data volumes. In addition, the ability to expand SQL Server 2012 into cloud environments gives Yonyou much greater scalability and a competitive advantage.

SituationYonyou Software Company Ltd. is one of the major providers of management software solutions and services in China and other Asian countries. It offers a wide range of products for enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management, customer relationship management, human resources, business intelligence (BI), and office automation. It also develops vertical industry solutions for manufacturing, e-Government, healthcare, finance, media, and asset management. Yonyou has more than 1,500,000 enterprise customers in China and Asian countries, and more than 60 percent of the China Top 500 enterprises use Yonyou software.

Yonyou has 41 branches in mainland China and oversea branches in Japan, Hong Kong SAR, Thailand, and Singapore. Through this presence, together with partners across Asia, Yonyou has a wide range of service channels for multinational companies that do business in Asia.

The Yonyou ERP application, which runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software and the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, is designed to help enterprises better manage their operations and gain insight into the state of their business. The software also scales in cloud computing environments to support global operations. The Yonyou ERP team wants to help enterprises increase availability, improve performance, and lower operational costs to help customers achieve more efficient business operations.

The primary scenarios for the Yonyou ERP application are online transaction

processing (OLTP) and business intelligence. Transactional applications are often business critical and involve operations such as creating a new sales order, modifying a voucher, or rolling back a transaction, and must be processed as quickly as possible. BI applications involve analyzing historical databases and reporting on them. Although response times are not as critical as for transactional systems, the databases being analyzed are often extremely large and take a great deal of time to process.

To ensure business continuity, enterprises often increase their IT investments to protect business data and provide disaster recovery, such as allocating redundant devices for database mirrors and backups. Many Yonyou customers struggled to take advantage of these resources to improve scalability and performance while maintaining high availability.

To give customers a more productive experience with its ERP application, Yonyou decided to investigate the latest database technologies in an effort to improve performance.

SolutionYonyou became a strategic partner of Microsoft in 1997 and has long used Microsoft SQL Server to provide an enterprise-ready, highly scalable data platform. Yonyou was aware of the development of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and was eager to test its new capabilities.

Of particular interest were the SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn feature for high availability and disaster recovery. AlwaysOn is a comprehensive, flexible, and cost-effective

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high-availability and disaster-recovery solution that Yonyou can use to easily cope with complicated scenarios surrounding business expansion and distributed application deployment.

AlwaysOn focuses on the readability of mirrored databases. For OLTP applications, Yonyou can transfer read-intensive operations, such as reporting, to the read-only secondary database so that the primary database uses far fewer I/O and CPU resources. Because the secondary database runs a single SQL Server instance, operations on the temporary database, such as creating temporary tables, are not affected.

The Yonyou ERP application supports AlwaysOn by configuring the secondary database to be read-only and transferring the reporting workloads to the secondary database. This improves hardware utilization and results in sharing the CPU and I/O burden on the primary database with the secondary database.

Enterprise users can run SQL Server 2012 on stand-alone database servers and clusters, or in public or private cloud environments. The one-time compilation of applications to run in any of these environments is implemented by using SQL Server 2012 developer tools. This makes compiling, distributing, and deploying applications very convenient.

SQL Server 2012 also provides new self-service BI, IT dashboards, and collaboration capabilities in connection with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The embedded SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Semantic Model and SQL Server 2012 Data

Quality Services ensure high data reliability and consistency. With these tools, ERP users can provide comprehensive views for SharePoint-based reports and dashboards across heterogeneous data sources. SQL Server 2012 also provides a comprehensive data warehouse solution, which enterprise users can use to create a large-scale data warehouse that can support terabytes of data, more than 15,000 extended partitions, and a work scene with a maximum of 256 kernels. Through the massively parallel structure of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse, Yonyou can expand data capacity to several hundred terabytes while maintaining high performance.

The cloud-ready features of SQL Server 2012 give enterprise users more flexibility in deploying and maintaining its data management platform. Organizations can use the Windows Azure platform to deploy database services as needed and pay only for the services used. Among those services are Microsoft SQL Azure, a cloud database service, and Microsoft SQL Azure Data Sync, which provides bidirectional data synchronization across data-center and cloud databases.

In April 2012, the Yonyou ERP team participated in a number of architecture design review sessions with Microsoft and also conducted performance testing of its ERP application running on SQL Server 2012.

The test environment consisted of two Intel Xeon E7 processor-based database servers used as an AlwaysOn cluster and two Intel Xeon E5 processor-based application

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servers. The environment also included three test servers for hosting a gigabit local area network domain controller and a storage device with connectivity between the database server and an EMC disk array.

By using AlwaysOn, Yonyou can use a cluster deployment, with the primary database server running the primary database and the secondary database server running the read-only database.

The size of the database was about 600 gigabytes (after compression), and data distribution covered all application modules of the Yonyou ERP application.

BenefitsBy upgrading to SQL Server 2012, Yonyou can help its customers achieve dramatic performance improvements in using its ERP application. With increased performance, they can achieve lower costs for more efficient business operations. In addition, easy-to-use BI tools and easy cloud expandability give enterprises a cost-effective way to expand their businesses and quickly add IT infrastructure on demand.

ERP Performance Improved by 70 PercentBy using SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, the Yonyou ERP can greatly improve hardware utilization and system throughput. This helps customers make full use of existing IT investments for disaster recovery and gain the best TCO and secure business continuity.

In its testing of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, Yonyou saw the number of transactions per second increase from 4.8 to 8.2, with an

improvement of 70 percent and system throughput improved substantially. Based on a comparison of Average Transaction Response Times for both business transactions and reporting scenarios, Yonyou observed a 17.32 percent improvement.

Increased Insight into Business HealthWith SQL Server 2012, Yonyou has also enhanced its ability to help customers acquire data from branch offices and subsidiary companies and disseminate data to them.

By using Yonyou ERP analysis and reporting capabilities developed with SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services, enterprise users will be able to access business reports and conduct analysis and predictions easily, so that they can quickly respond to changes and be more agile in their marketplaces and on a global stage.

Scalable into the Cloud to Meet Business NeedsThe ability to expand SQL Server 2012 into cloud environments gives enterprises more freedom and flexibility to increase data storage and processing resources as business needs demand. With the cloud computing features of SQL Server 2012, Yonyou can stay one step ahead of the competition in the process of becoming a world-class management software and service provider.

“With SQL Server 2012, we have the performance, availability, and cloud expandability we need to compete on a global stage,” says Xiang Qihan, Senior Vice President at Yonyou.

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By taking advantage of cloud computing services, enterprises can quickly scale IT infrastructure resources to supply business needs, increase the availability of data services, and reduce IT costs by eliminating the need to build out on-premises infrastructure.

Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to: www.microsoft.com/servers

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Yonyou products and services, visit the website at: www.yonyou.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published May 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010− Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Windows Azure platform− Microsoft SQL Azure

Technologies− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data

Quality Services− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis

Services− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master

Data Services− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting

Services