Tests of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise showed that the solution will provide the high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities required for the company’s mission-critical financial services and production applications.

BMW Group is one of the most successful manufacturers of automobiles and motorcycles in the world. As it prepares to move to a private cloud infrastructure, the company wanted to ensure high availability and performance for its mission-critical applications. The firm tested a new Microsoft high-availability solution, which the company expects will provide the 100 percent uptime it needs. As a result, BMW Group will be more competitive. Also, the solution will improve automation and customer satisfaction, and it will help the company save money on storage costs.

Business NeedsBMW Group, headquartered in Munich, Germany, is one of the most successful manufacturers of automobiles and motorcycles in the world. In addition to producing vehicles under its own brand, BMW Group also owns and produces the MINI brand of cars and is the parent company of luxury auto maker Rolls-Royce.

BMW Group maintains a large, growing IT infrastructure that supports hundreds of mission-critical business applications, many of which are based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software. The company currently has 70 terabytes of data in its databases and is experiencing a growth in data of 30 percent annually.

These databases support customer-facing e-commerce applications containing customers’ transaction and other financial data. The firm also supports many applications used in automobile manufacturing plants around the world. These applications are used by thousands of production workers each day. For BMW

Group to stay competitive and continue growing, it is absolutely essential that these applications are highly available.

For instance, legal requirements stipulate that if customer-facing financial services applications are down for more than three days in a specific region, the company could lose its license to provide financial services in that area. In the firm’s manufacturing plants, downtime means cars aren’t being produced, which makes sales goals challenging.

Assuring high uptime was especially important because the company wants to implement a private cloud infrastructure late in 2012.

In late 2010, the automaker chose to upgrade to a new database management solution in order to achieve higher availability.

SolutionAlthough it looked at Oracle and other vendors, choosing Microsoft was easy for BMW Group, because Microsoft

Customer: BMW GroupWebsite: www.bmw.comCustomer Size: 95,000 employees Country or Region: GermanyIndustry: Manufacturing—Automotive and industrial manufacturing

Customer ProfileBMW Group is a global automobile manufacturer with 25 production facilities in 14 countries. Founded in 1916, BMW Group sold 1.67 million cars and more than 113,000 motorcycles globally in 2011.

Solution Spotlight 100 percent uptime expected for

mission-critical applications. Will better help business units meet

automobile production goals. Will improve performance by 5

percent. Will provide strong performance from

cost-effective NAS storage system, helping BMW save money.

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Microsoft SQL ServerCustomer Solution Case Study

Automaker Will Be More Competitive with Faster Performance and Higher Availability

technology had proven to be reliable for the company in the past.

The company specifically wanted to test the high-availability features in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise, focusing on SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, which customers can use to query data in database replicas and perform backup operations from the replicas. AlwaysOn also provides readable database mirroring, with replicas offering read-only access for backup and reporting.

AlwaysOn also includes availability groups, which supports failover for multiple user databases. An availability group supports a set of primary databases and up to four sets of secondary databases. In October 2011, the company, working with Microsoft Services consultants, conducted lab tests to see if SQL Server 2012 would work in the company’s private cloud. The performance tests compared SQL Server 2008 R2 database mirroring with SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn availability groups. The tests also compared SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 on storage area network (SAN) systems versus lower-cost network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

BenefitsOnce it implements the Microsoft solution, the company expects that it will ensure 100 percent uptime for its critical applications, leading to a better ability to compete with other manufacturers. The firm also anticipates higher performance and cost savings.

Will Provide 100 Percent Uptime for Critical ApplicationsTests of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise showed that the solution will provide the high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities required for the company’s mission-critical financial services and production applications.

As a result, the company is expecting 100 percent uptime for its applications, and anticipates no application timeouts when it performs upgrades on the databases.

Will Help BMW Become More CompetitiveBy providing more highly available mission-critical business applications, the company can compete better with other automakers. For example, the organization’s business

units must produce a certain number of new vehicles each year, and SQL Server 2012 will provide the highly available infrastructure needed to support those goals.

Will Improve Performance and Save MoneyThe company also hopes to realize improved performance once it upgrades to SQL Server 2012. In its tests using the same hardware and storage, the firm saw 102 transactions per second (TPS) using SQL Server 2012, compared with 98 TPS using SQL Server 2008 R2. The input/output performance was clearly faster using availability groups in SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn.

The company’s tests also indicated that an NAS system performs as well as a comparable SAN solution, which will contribute to cost savings while providing equal or better performance once BMW implements SQL Server 2012.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Enterprise− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise

Services− Microsoft Services