Implementation Study:

Dell IT Scales Supply

Chain Management with
Oracle 10g RAC

By Dave Jaffe and Todd Muirhead

Dell Enterprise Technology Center
Tiong Tey and Raveendra Avutu
Dell Information Technology

Dell | Enterprise Technology Center

dell.com/techcenter

January 2007
 Contents
Executive Summary .......................................................................................................3
Introduction ....................................................................................................................4
Dell’s Supply Chain Management.................................................................................6
The Old Solution – Proprietary Unix-based Servers...................................................7
The New Solution – Oracle 10g RAC on Dell Power Edge Servers ...........................9
Measured Performance Improvement........................................................................12
Conclusions..................................................................................................................13

Tables
Table 1: Supply Chain Management components at Dell ............................................................... 4
Table 2: Global Dell Supply Chain Management Deployments .................................................... 11
Table 3: Performance Gains of Ten Longest Running Database Transactions............................ 12

Figures
Figure 1: The Proprietary Unix-based Solution ............................................................................... 7
Figure 2: The Dell-on-Dell Solution ............................................................................................... 10

January 2007 Page 2 Dell Enterprise Technology Center

Section 1
Executive Summary
In 2005, Dell’s Information Technology group was faced with a supply chain
management system that had reached its limits on expensive, proprietary servers
running the Unix operating system. The group undertook the complete migration
of the system to Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters running on low-cost
industry standards-based Dell Power Edge servers. By moving the application to
Dell servers when it did, Dell IT avoided significant new expenditures in
proprietary Unix-based servers, achieved increased server uptime, and provided
an easy path for growing the systems as needed by adding additional servers to
the cluster. This paper documents in detail the scope of the supply chain
management system, and the advantages of migrating it from Unix-based
servers to Dell PowerEdge servers.

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Section 2
Introduction
At Dell, the supply-chain management database systems manage key business
functions that support Dell’s worldwide manufacturing operations. Table 1 shows
the major components of Dell’s efficient inventory management model and fast,
direct-to-the customer delivery of computers, accessories, parts and supplies. If
these systems are down, Dell’s factories are down, at the cost of thousands of
dollars per minute.

Component Description
Configuration Manages part numbers and Bills of Material
Management
Procurement Manages Purchase Orders and communicates Dell production materials
requirements to the suppliers
Cost Manages key areas of materials cost processes that calculates Bill of
Materials cost and cost of good sold for Dell Orders
Inventory Manages Dell and Hub inventories. Within each facility, it manages
inventory stock room locations/bins and on-hand quantity.
Accounts Payable Manages Dell to suppliers’ payment processing. It also deals with
invoices, receipts, and EDI processing.

Table 1: Supply Chain Management components at Dell

When Dell was a smaller company, before the development of powerful, industry-
standard servers of the type that Dell manufactures and sells, the Dell
Information Technology (IT) unit ran these database applications on large,
expensive, proprietary Unix-based servers. However, as the company grew,
these systems could not scale with the workload. Instead they were the cause of
frequent downtime. Since they were not redundant it was necessary to bring
down entire systems to update a single server. And when a server could not
handle the required capacity it needed to be replaced by a larger server.
In recent years, the increased performance of x86-based industry standard Dell
PowerEdge servers has enabled the deployment of such database software as
Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters. By sharing a large database across
multiple PowerEdge servers, Oracle 10g RAC provides for very cost-effective
scaling, high reliability, and the ability to add capacity by adding additional low-
cost servers rather than buying larger, more expensive proprietary Unix-based
servers.
Dell IT has successfully implemented this solution for Dell’s Americas, Brazil,
Europe, and Asia Pacific/Japan regions. By using the same processes for
disaster recovery, backup, and monitoring across all Dell operations, Dell IT has
achieved a cost-effective and readily supported deployment model.

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 This article describes in depth how Dell IT made the transition from proprietary
Unix-based servers to running mission critical supply chain management
applications on Dell’s own hardware. The problem being solved by these
database applications is described in detail in Section 3. The old solution and the
Dell-on-Dell solution are described in Section 4 and Section 5. Finally, measured
performance improvements are shown in Section 6.

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Section 3
Dell’s Supply Chain Management
The sheer number of transactions and pieces of information that the supply chain
management system needs to handle is impressive. Each of the core
components of the supply chain management (SCM) system are heavily used
and relied on to keep Dell’s operations running smoothly.
Configuration Management: The Configuration Management system manages
over 1 million Dell part numbers across approximately 200 product families, and
over 2 million Bills of Materials (BOMs) per year. BOMs listing component part
numbers are created for manufacturing to build assemblies and sub-assemblies
to produce Dell’s products.
Procurement: The Procurement system 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 which includes
workflow approvals and vendor communication, and provides for services such
as defective part warranty replacement.
Cost: The Cost component of the system runs mostly in batch mode to calculate
the costs to Dell for all Bills of Materials. These batch jobs run weekly, monthly
and quarterly, with each run rolling up total material costs.
Inventory: Between all sites there are more than 3 million inventory movements
daily from stock rooms to the factory floor. A corresponding 3 million messages
are transmitted to various systems for reporting, analysis and factory scheduling.
Accounts Payable: Accounts Payable handles approximately 15,000 items per
day including payments to Dell suppliers, invoices and receipts. Vendor
information includes number, location, negotiated terms and contact information.
On top of these order-related transactions, there are several batch process jobs
that need to be run to rollup data every week, month or quarter. The longest of
these, the end-of-quarter (EOQ) rollup, took 31 hours under the Unix-based
solution.
In Dell's Americas region the SCM Oracle database application consists of
approximately 3,000 database objects (functions, packages, procedures,
triggers, tables, and views). The same SCM system is also supported by 6 Dell
PowerEdge 2650 application servers, 5 internally developed web-based
applications, more than 50 system-to-system integrations, approximately 125
batch jobs, and about 500 user interfaces deployed to support the entire SCM
application.

January 2007 Page 6 Dell Enterprise Technology Center

Section 4
The Old Solution – Proprietary Unix-based
Servers
The Dell supply chain management solution was built out on Sun E6000-class
Unix-based servers (see Figure 1). By 2005 performance was becoming an
issue.

Figure 1: The Proprietary Unix-based Solution

January 2007 Page 7 Dell Enterprise Technology Center

 Many of the batch processes were taking too long. The version of Oracle that
was running on the Sun servers was outdated and unsupported, and did not
support Real Application Clusters so adding more capacity by horizontally scaling
out by adding more servers was not an option.
The servers in the old solution shown in Figure 1 are Sun Enterprise E6000
servers running Sun Solaris 8 with Sun Cluster 2.2. The Primary and Secondary
servers, each with 16 336MHz processors and 11GB of memory, managed the
production database on Oracle 8.0.6. The Disaster Recovery system, with 12
336 MHz processors and 6GB of memory, was the backup. The disk storage was
provided by EMC Symmetric arrays.
High Availability on the Sun systems was achieved by clustering two servers
connected to a shared disk. In this Sun Cluster configuration one server was
active while the other server was in a standby or passive state. The database
would fail over to the passive node from the active when there was a hardware or
OS issue with the active server. The failover would be initiated when the passive
node no longer detected a heartbeat signal coming from the active system. To
accomplish this the Sun cluster would shut down Oracle on the active node and
move the Oracle resources to the passive node. All users were disconnected
during this failover and would have to reconnect.

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Section 5
The New Solution – Oracle 10g RAC on Dell
Power Edge Servers
With Dell’s rapid growth and the resulting increase in load on the supply chain
management system it became apparent in 2005 that the proprietary Unix-based
solution on Sun servers was quickly running out of capacity. A very large
investment in even larger proprietary servers would be needed to stay with the
Unix-based solution or a much lower cost and more scalable solution could be
implemented on Dell PowerEdge servers with Oracle 10g Real Application
Clusters (RAC).
It was decided that the best approach to provide long term scalability was to
switch platforms and implement an industry-standards based platform. It was
necessary to act quickly to move to an Oracle10g RAC solution in a short period
of time to avoid the need for any further investment in the Unix-based platform.
As shown in Figure 2, the Sun systems were replaced with 6-node Oracle 10g
RAC clusters running on PowerEdge 6650s, 4-way Xeon based servers.
The new environment consists of three 6-node RACs. The Primary system is a 6-
node RAC environment. The Disaster Recovery (DR) site has two 6-node RACs
– one using Oracle Dataguard and another using EMC’s Symmetrix® Remote
Data Facility software (SRDF) to provide DR to the primary database.
Oracle10g RAC architecture has built-in High Availability features. All RAC
nodes/instances share the same physical database. If there is an issue with any
of the physical nodes or instance, the users and connections are failed over to
the other surviving instances in the RAC cluster. This is a seamless operation
and is transparent to the users, meaning that the users do not have to reconnect
as they did with the previous solution.
Disaster Recovery is achieved through Oracle Dataguard and also using EMC®
SRDF. A six node RAC was set up using the Dataguard Broker component of
Dataguard to ship logs in real time from the Primary system to the DR system
(located across town) and apply them. Using Dataguard allows the database to
keep in synch and also prevents any physical corruptions from being copied to
the DR database (from the Primary). SRDF is used to ship the changed blocks at
the storage level from the primary site to the DR site. This is an EMC Symmetrix
feature that allows the transfer of changed blocks in real time. This method is fast
but doesn’t guard against data corruption. The combination of Dataguard and
SRDF provides fast and secure replication of data to the DR site.
The Oracle RMAN program is used to backup the database and archivelogs from
the primary database. Two full (hot) backups per week are sent to tape directly
through Legato Networker interface. Archivelogs are backed up hourly to provide
the ability to recover the database to a point-in-time, if needed. It is also possible
to backup the database from the DR site instead of taxing the primary nodes.
Dell IT employs Oracle 10g’s Services to load balance within each cluster. In the
6-node cluster, for example, nodes 1-3 handle online users while nodes 4-6
handle batch processing.

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 Figure 2: The Dell-on-Dell Solution

Oracle Grid Control was implemented to monitor and manage the RAC
environments. Thresholds for various events were set in the Grid control to

January 2007 Page 10 Dell Enterprise Technology Center

 create trouble tickets through the problem management system. Grid Control
makes the administration of the database very easy and intuitive. Database
administrators use Grid Control extensively to perform day to day administration
tasks.
The old environment could not scale beyond the capacity of one physical server,
while in the new architecture additional servers (nodes) can be added to the
cluster on demand to meet business requirements and growth. The multi-node
RAC architecture provides higher input/output throughput due to the increased
number of available interfaces. The old Sun cluster was active/passive which
meant the database was only running on a single node at any given time. In case
of any failure the database had to be restarted on the passive node which
required all users to reconnect. In the new architecture the failover is transparent
and the database instances run on all nodes at all times. The failure of any node
does not require any users to reconnect because they are automatically and
transparently moved to another node in the cluster.
As seen in Table 2, this same architecture has been extended to Dell facilities
around the world. By standardizing on cost effective Oracle 10g RAC running on
Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell/EMC storage, with similar processes for
deployment, disaster recovery and backup, the new solution was rolled out
around the world in a very short 8 months

Region Primary Disaster Recovery

Americas 6-node Oracle 10g RAC Two 6-node Oracle 10g RAC clusters
China 3-node Oracle 10g RAC 3-node Oracle 10g RAC
Brazil 2-node Oracle 10g RAC 2-node Oracle 10g RAC
Europe 2-node Oracle 10g RAC 2-node Oracle 10g RAC
Malaysia/Asia 2 sets of 2-node Oracle 10g RAC 2 sets of 2-node Oracle 10g RAC

Table 2: Global Dell Supply Chain Management Deployments

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Section 6
Measured Performance Improvement
Detailed measurements were made of database performance with the old system
and the new system. The ten longest running end-of-month and end-of quarter
transactions are shown in
Table 3. The best gain was seen in a material movement extraction step, which
dropped from almost 5 hours to 35 minutes, an 88% improvement. The end-of-
quarter rollup mentioned in the Introduction dropped from 31 hours to 23 hours.

Job Description Old Time New Time Perf-

(min) (min) ormance
Gain
Entire end-of-quarter jobs processing 1860 1380 26%
Compute cost per order 532 340 36%
Quarterly BOM calculation 450 116 74%
Entire end-of-month jobs processing 360 240 33%
Compute new product material costs 356 137 62%
Summarize data for all levels of order details 333 118 65%
Extract data for all material movements transactions 289 35 88%
Roll up all costs (material, royalty, transportation) 198 192 3%
Create material management transactions based on 180 43 76%
inventory transactions
Create financial journal entries 157 40 75%

Table 3: Performance Gains of Ten Longest Running Database Transactions

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 Section 7
Conclusions
Dell’s Oracle-based supply chain management (SCM) is the heart of each
region’s operations. Not only are Dell’s factory operations totally dependent on
the health of these systems but Dell internal systems are dependent on this SCM
system to provide information and visibility to key business functions. With the
implementation on Oracle10g Real Applications Clusters running on industry-
standard Dell PowerEdge servers, the SCM database systems have enabled
Dell's Direct Model to scale efficiently. This scaling has resulted in lower material
costs, near real-time visibility to inventory level, and tighter integration with
suppliers.
By moving the application to Dell servers when it did, Dell IT avoided significant
new expenditures for proprietary Unix-based servers, increased server uptime,
and provided an easy path for growing the systems as needed. The move to a
Dell-on-Dell solution has been a big win for the company.

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January 2007 Page 13 Dell Enterprise Technology Center