Deutsche Post Pilot Highlights Grid Computing Benefits

By Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research for the technology consultant IDC

Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN) is a German-based multinational group providing comprehensive logistics and financial services. The company's three main divisions include a postal service (the privately run German postal service), express shipping and logistics services (DHL which was acquired 100 percent earlier in the decade), and a finance/banking (Postbank) division. Deutsche Post WorldNet employs over 380,000 employees worldwide.

Deutsche Post ITSolutions GmbH is DPWN's independently run information technology (IT) services subsidiary that supports Deutsche Post World Net with custom-developed solutions and custom-packaged deployments. Deutsche Post ITSolutions employs 1,300 people and has approximately 450 major applications running on over 1,000 servers with an emphasis on Deutsche Post World Net's mail and logistics applications.

Robert Leaman is the director of system architects at Deutsche Post ITSolutions and is responsible for a pilot deployment involving Oracle Grid technology for key applications. According to Leaman, his organization chose to deploy Oracle Grid technology primarily to better manage its portfolio of applications that featured dramatic peaks and troughs in capacity requirements. Oracle Grid technology has provided the ability to better manage these applications and has also provided other key benefits, including increased application availability (downtime avoidance) and the ability to provide "virtual server consolidation" for newly developed applications.

To ensure that critical applications were supported with the required capacity levels (including CPU, storage, and database server requirements), performance, and availability levels, Deutsche Post ITSolutions could have deployed new and enhanced hardware rather than grid. In addition to the significant cost, this approach had the drawback of delivering capacity excess during the "troughs," or periods of lowest capacity requirements.

As an alternative, Deutsche Post ITSolutions chose a grid approach, which met the capacity challenges and provided other benefits as well. The initial pilot was developed to test the grid concept for a handful of applications and also to provide a live demonstration system for internal audiences interested in the grid approach for critical applications. The pilot was developed with a Linux, five-server blade configuration with two processors on each blade, Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g with Grid Control, and Oracle Application Server 10g.

To assess which applications were best suited for deployment on the grid, Leaman and his team established an application profiling process where applications were measured for dramatic variations in capacity and performance requirements. While most applications did not have these dramatic variations, the ones that did were associated in the grid so that complementary peaks and troughs occurred during opposite periods of operation.

The organization achieved its goal of approximately 70 percent overall grid utilization, which assured that no application would receive less than the required server capacity at critical periods. This cost-effective approach to server management became a key selling point to the grid architecture at Deutsche Post WorldNet.

The initial application profiling process resulted in a handful of applications running on the pilot grid, including:

An organization/telephone directory supporting over 200,000 employees
A problem management reporting application (for German post offices)
A corporate security application

Leaman expects to match these initial applications with more pilot applications and ultimately with a full portfolio of production applications supporting each of Deutsche Post's three main divisions.

According to Leaman, a critical component of the Oracle grid implementation is Oracle Grid Control, which allows administrators to view and compare multiple server instances at once. Workloads can be evaluated to make sure all applications are running at acceptable performance levels, and adjustments can be made if any applications are falling short. Using Oracle Grid Control, Deutsche Post ITSolutions has a powerful way to manage the most critical applications and communicate value to internal customers, he says. "What we are doing is basically giving each application a service level agreement," Leaman explains. This level of application control is another important selling point.

In addition to Oracle Grid Control, Oracle Database 10g manageability features are an important part of the environment, he adds. Deutsche PostITSolutions has been using the new management features available with Oracle Database 10g since last June, when it participated in Oracle's beta program for these tools, and finds them important elements to the grid pilot as well.

Other vendors and grid products were considered for Deutsche Post's grid pilot, but The organization selected Oracle's Grid solution because Oracle was perceived as further along in developing a commercially viable solution than other products. Now that the pilot is up and running, Deutsche Post ITSolutions has found the capabilities of Oracle Grid living up to expectations. In Leaman's opinion, Deutsche Post ITSolutions will continue to move forward with its investment in Oracle Grid technology because internal customers will be naturally drawn to the performance assurance, availability, and cost benefits it provides.

Although still a long way from a full production grid rollout, the only drawback cited by Deutsche Post ITSolutions thus far is the requirement to run identical operating system versions on each node of the grid. Leaman would prefer the current system to support heterogeneous servers, allowing use of disparate systems in the grid. Leaman also noted that Oracle planned to release shortly support for heterogeneous servers. Deutsche Post ITSolutions' advice for other organizations considering a grid deployment is to do a good job profiling applications and determining which applications are most appropriate to deploy. In addition, starting small and expanding as applications are profiled provides a manageable process for selecting complementary applications most appropriate for grid deployment, Leaman believes.

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