DPD Dynamic Parcel Distribution GmbH is one of the leading international parcel and express service providers, transporting more than 2 million parcels every day. DPD offers customers in over 40 countries everything from standard and express parcels to services and individual customer solutions and is the market leader in B2B parcel shipping in Germany.
In 2010, the most successful year in the company's history to date, DPD set a new course for its IT: with the huge volumes of data to be processed on a daily basis, it was foreseeable that the flexibility and scalability of the IT infrastructure would reach its limits. DPD therefore commissioned the IT service provider DATAGROUP to host and operate its IBM Power System, VMware and storage environment.
At the end of 2013, the infrastructure for the central database was upgraded to the latest technological standard. The central database (ZDB) is the heart of DPD's IT infrastructure. All the information for the daily transportation of parcels comes together in this database. Each parcel is scanned on average seven times on its way from the sender to the consignee. This essential data comes together in the ZDB. But clearing, the settlement of transport costs within DPD, is also a complex process that is largely processed in the ZDB. These applications are just a few of the many tasks performed by the system, which at peak times has to handle over 50,000 input/output operations per second. The technical basis for this is an application landscape developed by DPD itself, which has been running on IBM AS/400 systems from the outset.
The objective for the new environment was to cover the high performance requirements with the latest technology while significantly reducing the required data center resources, in particular power and space.
With the move to the DATAGROUP data centers in 2010, the infrastructure was converted to two IBM Power 780 servers, each with 24 active cores and, for the first time, external storage in the form of IBM DS8700 storage systems — and the entire infrastructure was moved more than 10 km apart as the crow flies using metro mirroring. Around 600 Fibre Channel hard disks were provided in the DS8700 for the productive IBM i partition in order to be able to reliably cover peak loads.
The upgrade to POWER 7+ servers with higher performance per core and significantly expanded main memory ensures that the requirements on the computer side are covered. For storage, the decision was made to use a pure SSD infrastructure based on the DS8870.
The 600 hard disks per side were replaced by 80 SSDs in the new environment.
Thanks to the significant reduction from 600 disks to 80 SSDs, 2 complete DS8000 frames could be saved per data center side. Power consumption was reduced by more than 10 KW of continuous load per data center.
Thanks to the Metro mirroring, the migration to the new environment could be carried out without an unload-reload procedure. The downtimes during the changeover were thus reduced to a few switching operations and the impact on DPD's business operations was minimized.
After several months in operation, Martin Straub is certain: "DATAGROUP has fulfilled all the tasks we set them. The performance of our central database has been significantly increased and the resources saved have freed us up for new projects."
"The performance of our central database has increased considerably and the resources saved have freed us up for new projects."