Manufacturing
Case Study:
Enhanced IT platform for Citizen
22 May 2008
Citizen Watch Europe has taken the opportunity to introduce Fujitsu Siemens Computers servers, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and consolidated storage. The service cycle for the HP-UX environment that supported the IT infrastructure expired at the end of 2006. Together with the technology company antauris, Citizen investigated several strategy options for the future, eventually deciding to fully replace the hardware in an attempt to achieve reductions in both system maintenance and license costs.
Citizen Watch Europe was founded in 1969 as a subsidiary of Citizen Trading, one of the world’s largest watchmakers. From its European headquarters in Hamburg, sales and marketing for the Citizen and Vagary brands are managed for a variety of regions across the European continent.
The platform that supports Citizen Watch’s commercial success is an SAP landscape with solutions for materials management, sales and distribution, finances, controlling and data warehousing. In addition, the company uses various SAP-based developments of its own – for customer relationship management, for example, and for its repair service and the sale of spare parts.
Citizen chose a Fujitsu Siemens Computers 19 inches Primecenter rack with three Primergy RX300 servers and a FibreCAT CX300 storage system. Two Brocade SAN Fibre Channel switches, and two APC UPS systems were selected to round out the environment. The solution also involved a platform change from HP-UX to Microsoft Windows Server 2003, with the powerful storage system introduced at the same time.
The FibreCAT CX300 storage system achieves a higher data throughput and, together with the SAN, is a real performance booster. A Primergy RX300 S3 DC is used as the productive system for the SAP environment. A second Primergy server is deployed for testing solutions before they are put into productive operation. The third Primergy server acts as a platform for the virtualisation environment for further applications. The server is also used as a development server for future business processes and as a test environment for disasters.
“Switching our technology to the Fujitsu Siemens Computers platforms helped us cut our IT costs significantly. And the improvements in administration – thanks to the FibreCAT CX300 – have had an extremely positive and cost-efficient effect on our work,” says Peter Hey, who heads up IT at Citizen Watch.
“Indeed, all of the company’s goals have been met: lower power consumption, higher performance, better administration and improved availability of the entire IT environment,” Hey concludes. “The solution met with enthusiasm not just from the people in charge of IT, but from the employees as well, since the new IT environment offers a noticeable increase in performance.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of Prime magazine.