Petro-Canada Goes Parallel

Implements SAP's R/3 on RS/6000 SP server

---

By Barbara DePompa
Issue date: April 8, 1996

IBM's RS/6000 SP server will reach a milestone this spring as it becomes the first parallel processing platform to run SAP's popular R/3 suite of business applications. The implementation is at Petro-Canada, an oil refiner in Calgary, Alberta, that is installing Oracle's parallel relational database to work with SAP.

Petro-Canada also announced on March 28 that it's outsourcing much of its information technology operation to ISM, a Canadian computer services provider affiliated with IBM's Integrated Systems Solutions Corp. The five-year contract is valued at $100 million.

Petro-Canada, established by governmental action in 1975, has run its computer operations, including homegrown back-office applications, on a variety of departmental and mainframe systems running IBM's VM and MVS operating systems. Peter Brown, manager of the technology management team at Petro-Canada, says the decision to stay with IBM was easy. "From the standpoint of scalability, we view IBM's technology like a game of Lego," he says. "We knew IBM could upgrade our configuration with little effort as [our] business requirements change.''

The rollout is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. The system will run an Oracle7.3.2 database and IBM's AIX 4.1.4 operating system.

As of March, Petro-Canada had implemented the SP server system in two refineries in eastern Alberta. The company will add two western refineries and its natural gas exploration and production activities by year's end.

Ultimately, 2,000 users running Windows 95 on PC clients will be attached to the system via PC servers, mostly from Compaq. The PC servers will handle E-mail, fax, and print services and will link to the SP server via LAN and WAN connections. The SP will contain up to six processing units, each with 512 Mbytes of memory and a total of 300 Gbytes of disk storage.

Petro-Canada will use IBM's 7133 Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk drives, which are faster than the parallel SCSI drives traditionally used for parallel processing systems. IBM has been selling SSA architecture drives since last August, and has sold 150 terabytes of SSA storage so far, IBM officials say.

The sheer volume of data to be stored is what led Petro-Canada, which has $3.5 billion in annual revenue, to seek a parallel platform that could provide the company with a single database view. No single database running on a uniprocessor or symmetric multiprocessing system would be large enough for the suite of SAP applications, says Anu Gupta, a member of the IBM Canada Ltd. marketing team working on the project.

"What Petro-Canada wanted, and what makes this contract unique, is the company's desire for integration, including a single database for all of its applications,'' Gupta says. It will take up to six database nodes, all running in parallel while providing users with a single view of the database, to yield the capacity Petro-Canada needs.

Teamwork
As the first implementation of SAP on any parallel processing platform, the project required special cooperation. "We had to have a team of players from IBM, Oracle, and SAP who were willing to work closely together to make this system work,'' Brown says. "All three companies worked to ensure that we were able to build an integrated parallel processing system.'' The main obstacle-the fact that R/3 had no parallel processing capability-was overcome when SAP developed an extension to its current version, 2.2E, that lets the applications run in parallel on the RS/6000 SP. SAP plans to incorporate that parallel capability in version 3.0 of R/3, due later this year.

Petro-Canada won't discuss specifics related to the cost of the system-or its potential savings benefit-"since those savings have yet to be realized,'' Brown says. But the effort, he adds, is expected to have "a significant impact on our bottom line. That's why we're doing it.''

With so much change on its agenda, the company decided outsourcing its IS operation would clarify matters, not complicate them. "We have got a great deal going on here all at once,'' Brown says. "We needed a strategic partner who would help us move technology to our front lines and enable us to concentrate more on our primary businesses.''

Comments on this story?

InformationWeek http://techweb.cm p.com/iw

---

---