Fujitsu M10 delivered significant improvements in response times without increasing the number of processor cores

The customer

Kanamoto, based in Sapporo, has been in the construction equipment rental business for half a century. Almost 60% of construction equipment used in disaster prevention and social infrastructure development across Japan is Rented.The Company offers a wide range of construction equipment, including hydraulic excavators and dump trucks, to meet diverse needs.

[Video] Customer Interview

The challenge

With rapid business growth, Kanamoto was experiencing significantly deteriorating database server response times. Online operations were unbearably slow and business user productivity was suffering. The data processed consisted of approximately 500,000 records of 460 types. As processing volume rapidly increased with the strong growth of the construction equipment rental demand, the server infrastructure needed to urgently grow to provide more capacity.

A major challenge was to improve the performance of store-wide online systems used for stock inquiry and sales management applications. With the Japanese government's growth strategy and a revival of public investments in recent years, the demand for construction equipment rentals has dramatically increased. Kanamoto has been receiving a flood of stock inquiries and orders leading to a rapid increase in the load on their systems. Circumstances of slower response at peak-demand times, such as in the mornings and early-evenings at the end of the month, were happening much too frequently.
Mr. Kumagai says, "Our system is used by 1,600 employees at 170 sites nationwide every day. Although efforts had been made to prevent slower response by installing more processors and memory, it was clear that the existing system would soon reach its limits. We came to the conclusion that the deployment of higher performance servers was necessary to achieve drastic improvements."

The solution

Kanamoto decided to replace all database servers used for stock inquiries and sales management applications. Fujitsu M10 was selected as the replacement. Configured with large memory capacity, Fujitsu M10 successfully delivered significant improvements in response times without increasing the number of processor cores. This server refresh lead to a drastic reduction in operating costs.

With excellent results obtained in advance testing using actual business data, Kanamoto launched a full-scale production database system deployment with Fujitsu M10. The system successfully went into operation in May 2014.
The new system uses Fujitsu M10-4 as primary production servers and the compact Fujitsu M10-1 as standby servers. Fujitsu M10-4 based production servers are configured with 2TB of memory and a Flash Accelerator F80 card. Large memory capacity and the Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache feature reduced disk I/O access and achieved the goal of accelerating database performance.
Support provided by Fujitsu for this project was also highly valued. Mr. Kumagai says proudly, "Even with the complete renewal of important core database servers, the establishment of the system, including system migration, only took about one month. This is attributed to significant improvements in performance with no need for tuning, enabled by large memory capacity on the servers and utmost efforts made by Fujitsu system engineers towards early completion. We have once again appreciated Fujitsu's high technology expertise."

The benefit

• Complete confidence in Fujitsu SPARC server's reliability and availability from past experience
• Capable of high-speed and stable parallel processing compared to x86 servers
• Suitable for database operations due to SPARC/Solaris server's capablity of high-speed and stable parallel processing
• Equipped with various functions that can be used for performance acceleration
• Perform database processing in memory for the fastest response possible
• Configures large-capacity memory plus a Flash Accelerator F80 card
• Faster processing with less disk I/Os
• Performance growth with CPU Activation can respond to sudden and unexpected performance enhancement requests
• System expansion is possible without interrupting business operations