Microsoft SQL Server
Customer Solution Case Study
Lockheed Martin Cuts Database Size by 74
Percent While Boosting Performance
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—Aerospace
Customer Profile
Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed
Martin partners with international
organizations to provide globally
oriented security systems, solutions, and
services in the defense of freedom.
Business Situation
The company’s Missiles and Fire Control
business area needed to update its SAP
infrastructure from a UNIX/Oracle stack
to a solution that provided better
scalability, reliability, while cutting costs.
Solution
Missiles and Fire Control migrated from
UNIX and Oracle to Windows Server 2008
R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
Enterprise running on IBM System x
servers with Intel Xeon processors.
Benefits
 Reduces costs and yields a rapid return
on investment.
 Enhances performance and provides
better reliability
 Eases management and cuts database
size by 74 percent
“The cost savings that were projected at the beginning
of the project turned out to be real. Everyone, including
our CFO, was pleased with the move from UNIX and
Oracle to Windows and SQL Server.”
Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems Manager, Lockheed Martin, Missiles and Fire Control
The Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) business area of Lockheed
Martin creates specialized products that range from missile
defense systems and precision engagement weapons to heat
rejection panels that protect those living aboard the
International Space Station. MFC has long used SAP software for
its enterprise resource planning processes. Since migrating its
SAP infrastructure from a UNIX/Oracle solution to Microsoft SQL
Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, the company reports enhanced
performance and reliability as well as lower total cost of
ownership, including a significant savings in software and
maintenance costs. The company’s internal testing has found
that the new data compression features reduce database size by
total 74 percent while enhancing performance of some runs by
more than 80 percent.
Fast Facts
SAP ERP 6.0 database
1 terabyte
SAP Business Intelligence 7.0
1.8 terabytes
ERP loads
500,000 SAP steps per day
Total users (ERP)
3,300 named users
Concurrent users (ERP)
1,400 users
SAN storage reduction
74 percent
Storage reduction - Achieved
with SQL Server 2008 R2
page compression
Situation
enterprise resource operations. A major
customer of SAP, the company was using
the entire SAP R/3 suite as well as SAP
NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI)
systems, with multiple production instances
installed across the United States. In
addition, Lockheed Martin used the SAP
discrete industries and mill products
solution (DIMP) for many customizations
unique to its industry.
Lockheed Martin is well known as one of
the world’s premier global security and
aerospace companies. As such, it is also
one of the world’s largest manufacturers,
producing a broad range of advanced
technology systems, electronic and
integrated systems, aeronautics, and space
systems. Its operations are massive. In
2012, the company reported US$47.2
billion sales, produced by more than
120,000 employees at 939 facilities
worldwide. Based in Bethesda, Maryland,
the company has operations throughout
the United States and 60 other nations and
territories.
MFC has one of the largest SAP production
instances at Lockheed Martin, with nearly 3
terabytes of data and 3,300 named users,
including more than 1,400 concurrent
users. Deployed in 1999, the SAP system
initially ran on Reduced Instruction Set
Computing (RISC) platforms with a UNIX
operating system and an Oracle database.
“UNIX and Oracle had been a logical choice
for us,” says Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical
Systems Manager at Lockheed Martin,
Missiles and Fire Control. “At the time we
felt it was the right platform for the price
and level of performance. And we had a
history with UNIX and Oracle in our
environment.”
The company’s Missiles and Fire Control
(MFC) business area designs, develops, and
builds a wide spectrum of products,
including tactical missiles and combat
maneuver systems, unmanned systems, fire
control and sensor systems, air and missile
defense systems, and provides applied
research. The company also has an
extensive Technical Services component
that provides counter-narcotics and global
threat services, electronic systems support,
global engineering and security services,
logistics and health services, and aviation
logistics support and sustainment for
customers around the world.
But after five years, MFC saw its SAP R/3
environment growing at a rate of 33
percent per year. The company decided to
reconsider its platform choice when it
looked at costs for scaling its UNIX/Oracle
stack. However, reliability remained a
deciding factor for this mission-critical
system and provided further incentive to
look elsewhere for a new solution. “We
wanted maximum reliability,” says Eckhout.
“Clustering would have been one way to
achieve it, but we had several false starts
with UNIX clustering in the SAP
environment.”
Lockheed Martin had used SAP enterprise
resource planning (ERP) software for more
than a decade to run its manufacturing and
Solution
After consulting with other large
manufacturers that had migrated from the
UNIX/Oracle stack to the Microsoft
The migration was
“better, faster, and
smoother than I
anticipated.”
Brent Eckhout, SAP Technical Systems
Manager, Lockheed Martin, Missiles and
Fire Control
platform, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire
Control determined that its best option for
supporting future growth—while
enhancing reliability and high availability—
was to migrate its SAP infrastructure to
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise
Edition software running on the Windows
Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating
system with Intel-based server computers.
The company subsequently upgraded to
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise running on
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.
Reducing Costs
“Our due diligence showed that other
companies that had migrated from
UNIX/Oracle to the Microsoft platform
found that with proper preparation it was
easy to migrate the data, and that
afterward database administrators found it
easier to manage the database
infrastructure,” says Eckhout. “And we
thought that the combination of Windows
Server and SQL Server on open, standardsbased hardware could lead to lower costs.
In a highly competitive marketplace,
running as lean as possible is extremely
important.”
The company’s due diligence also included
a proof-of-concept study conducted at the
Microsoft Technology Center in Dallas,
Texas. The test demonstrated the value of
high-availability clustering in SQL Server
2003 and made the MFC team comfortable
with a clustered database implementation.
For hardware, MFC chose IBM System x
Series servers based on the 64-bit Intel
Xeon processor, which provides enterpriseclass performance and reliability for 32-bit
and 64-bit computing. The external storage
infrastructure backbone is the IBM System
Storage DS4800 disk subsystem with IBM
TotalStorage 3584 Tape Library to
materially reduce daily backup time.
Meeting Support Goals
One concern of the MFC team was whether
it would be able to get the necessary
support for the new solution. “Previously,
we went to a single vendor for our
hardware, operating system, and related
issues,” Eckhout says. “Our major concern
with the Windows-based architecture was
having multiple vendors and the risk of
support issues falling between the gaps.”
The vendors include Microsoft, IBM, and
SAP for the infrastructure, as well as
REALTECH, which handled migration with
support from Intel. Despite earlier concerns,
the new, multi-vendor platform turned out
to be an asset. “All of our vendors worked
extremely well together to achieve excellent
results,” says Eckhout. “Companies that we
once viewed as vendors, we now view as
partners.”
A variety of factors contributed to the
project’s coordination and success. Perhaps
most important was a detailed project plan
that addressed all potential risks in the
migration process. For example, the
partners recommended a three-week
performance testing period, including tests
by business users.
Because the SAP graphical user interface
doesn’t change in a typical migration, many
companies omit user testing. However, the
tests at Lockheed Martin enabled the
partners to not just check how well specific
queries were performing in the new
environment, but also how users perceived
that performance, enabling them to make
any required adjustments.
In addition, MFC and the partners
established a detailed schedule of status
meetings, including weekly internal
meetings, biweekly partner meetings, and
steering committee meetings for team
leaders. The partners worked together
upgrades. For example, recent Unicode
enhancement in SQL Server 2008 R2
provided the opportunity to use page-level
compression, which reduced the size of
SAN storage by almost 58 percent. The
company is currently planning an upgrade
to SQL Server 2012 Enterprise to take
advantage of high-availability features,
including the new AlwaysOn capability.
Radiators - The International
Space Station with a heat
rejection radiator—the blue
and white panels shown
above—created by Lockheed
Martin Missiles and Fire
Control. (Lockheed Martin
photo)
when problems arose, and performanceassurance on the hardware configuration
and a fixed-bid price for the migration
transferred risk from MFC to its partners. As
a result, the migration was “better, faster,
and smoother than I anticipated,” says
Eckhout.
Successful Migration
MFC carefully prepared for migration,
including working with REALTECH, a
Microsoft Certified Partner and a SAP
Services Partner that specializes in SAPbased migrations. MFC decided to migrate
its SAP NetWeaver BI implementation first
so it could apply knowledge gained from
the experience to its mission-critical R/3
migration.
Both migrations went smoothly, with each
accomplished over a weekend. The new
environment is hosted on 16 IBM System x
servers. The solution uses Dell/Quest
Spotlight for SQL Server for proactive
monitoring.
Post-Migration Upgrades
MFC has been successful with its new SAP
infrastructure and has continued to
implement periodic hardware and SQL
The current solution architecture
includes:
 SAP ERP 6.0. MFC hosts SAP ERP 6.0 on
an active/active two-node cluster, with
one node hosting applications, and the
other hosting the database. SAP ERP
application servers are hosted on 64-bit
IBM System x 3350 computers with 24
Intel CPUs. The 1-terabyte database is
hosted on a 64-bit IBM System x 3850
computer with 24 Intel CPUs and 512
gigabytes of RAM. Storage is on an
Enterprise-class EMC Symmetrix VMAXe
Disk Storage System.
 Disaster Recovery. A second System x
3850 cluster at a remote site supports
disaster recovery through the use of the
log shipping feature of SQL Server 2008
R2. Log shipping increases a SQL Server
database's availability by automatically
copying and restoring the database's
transaction logs to another database on
a standby server. Because the standby
database receives all changes to the
original database, it's an exact duplicate
of the original database—out of date
only by the time it takes for the copyand-load process.
 SAP BI. The company’s SAP NetWeaver
BW 7.0 software and 1.8-terabyte
database are hosted on an IBM System x
3950 computer with 16 Intel CPUs and
64 gigabytes of RAM. Storage is on an
IBM System Storage DS4800 Disk
Storage System.
“We have to integrate
SAP with our email
system, with our wordprocessing system, and
with a range of other
systems that are all
Microsoft products. This
integration improves our
use of both SAP and
Microsoft products.”
Darcy Sety, Director of IT Infrastructure
and Operations, Lockheed Martin,
Missiles and Fire Control
Benefits
By migrating from a RISC–based
UNIX/Oracle stack to a Microsoft platform
running on IBM servers with Intel
processors, Missiles and Fire Control
reduced its SAP infrastructure costs over a
five-year period. The company has also
enjoyed enhanced performance, reliability,
and easier database management. It now
looks forward to new high-availability
features available in SQL Server 2012.
Reduced Costs
The same due diligence that established
that the Microsoft platform provided a
superior foundation for supporting SAP
scalability and high availability, also showed
that the company would enjoy lower TCO.
MFC assembled detailed projections that
showed that the solution would yield
significant savings the first five years,
compared with the cost of continuing on
the UNIX and Oracle platform. The savings
are all “hard dollar” savings for hardware,
software, and maintenance.
One of the greatest savings is in software
maintenance costs, which MFC saw drop as
the business unit reduced its Oracle
licenses and the need for contracted
software maintenance. MFC also reports
lower hardware maintenance agreement
costs by moving from RISC-based to Intelbased hardware. It saw additional savings in
data storage due to the efficiencies and
self-tuning abilities of SQL Server and EMC
data storage hardware, avoiding projected
costs for deploying a UNIX-based
clustering solution.
As a result, MFC projected an internal rate
of return of 29 percent from the migration
with payback in three years, making it a
highly successful investment for the unit.
“The cost savings that were projected at the
beginning of the project turned out to be
real,” says Eckhout. “Everyone, including
our CFO, was pleased with the move from
UNIX and Oracle to Windows and SQL
Server.”
Enhanced Performance
Migrating to the Microsoft platform and
Intel-based hardware provided the
company with enhanced performance,
though Eckhout points out that upgrading
hardware on the UNIX platform would also
have enhanced performance. Still, the
company has been pleased with its gains.
“SAP on Windows software, Intel
processors, and IBM hardware meets or
exceeds all of our performance criteria,”
says Eckhout. “Our ERP system supports
more than 500,000 SAP steps per day and
has enabled us to easily accommodate an
increase in the number of users.”
Gained Better Reliability
SQL Server and the rest of the Microsoft
platform have helped MFC achieve the
reliability and uptime required for its
mission-critical SAP systems. “In the more
than six years since we migrated the first
R/3 database to SQL Server, I don’t believe
we’ve had a single event of unplanned
downtime, or at least an event that was
caused by either the database or operating
system,” says Chris Church, NetWeaver
Administrator at Lockheed Martin, MFC.
For MFC, the integration of SAP and
Microsoft software extends beyond SQL
Server. “We have to integrate SAP with our
email system, with our word-processing
system, and with a range of other systems
that are all Microsoft products,” says Darcy
Sety, Director of IT Infrastructure and
Operations at Lockheed Martin, MFC. “This
integration improves our use of both SAP
and Microsoft products.”
Eased Database Management
Database management is also easier with
SQL Server than it was with Oracle. “We
Critical Processing Times—Benefits of SQL Server 2008 R2 Row Compression
Response Time Without
Compression
Response Time with
Change notifications
30,610 milliseconds
5,610 milliseconds
Change operations
248,234 milliseconds
38,891 milliseconds
Settle projects and
networks
8 minutes
1.5 minutes
Collective planned order
conversion
34 minutes
25 minutes
Manual MRP run
16 minutes
11 minutes
Job Description
Performance gains – Benefits of
SQL Server 2008 R2 row
compression
Compression
seemed to have required a lot more
intervention by database administrators on
Oracle,” says Eckhout. “We were told by
people in other companies that our DBA
maintenance needs would drop after
moving to SQL Server. This turned out to
be true and we are enjoying the results.”
Easier database management contributes
to a lower TCO and to overall satisfaction.
“The reduced need for DBA interventions
has freed up this talent so they can focus
on other support areas,” Eckhout says. “This
has made our DBAs more available to our
user community, which provides a higher
value to our business.”
Cut Database Size by 74 Percent
Row compression reduces database size by
removing unneeded bytes from column
values and storing them in variable length
format. The technology can significantly
reduce overall database size, as MFC found
in its own testing, which also showed faster
performance of critical jobs (see the table
above).
“When we applied row compression to a
copy of our ERP database, we found a 37
percent reduction in total data size,” says
Church. “We also found that all of our
benchmarks of critical jobs ran faster after
using row compression. For example,
processing times for one of our jobs went
from 8 minutes to 1.5 minutes, and another
critical job went from 34 to 25 minutes.”
Page-level compression in SQL Server 2008
R2 is also cutting database size. Together
row and page-level compression reduce
database size by a total of 74 percent.
“Reducing disk-size requirements definitely
contributes to lower TCO, because we are
constantly getting user requests for more
disk space,” says Eckhout. “We don’t do a
lot of archiving because our analysts and
user community like having immediate
access to all the data they might ever need.
With demand like that, data compression is
attractive.”
Summary
In summary, Lockheed Martin Missiles and
Fire Control reports a lower total cost of
ownership, enhanced performance, better
reliability, and easier database
management since moving its multiterabyte SAP infrastructure from a
UNIX/Oracle stack to a Microsoft platform.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
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go to:
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Microsoft Server Product
Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft
server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers
For more information about IBM
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.ibm.com
For more information about Intel
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.intel.com
For more information about REALTECH
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.realtech.com
For more information about Lockheed
Martin products and services, visit the
website at:
www.lockheedmartin.com
Software and Services

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
Enterprise
Hardware

This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2013
EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Disk Storage
System
IBM System Storage DS4800 Disk
Storage System
 IBM System x 3850 and 3950 server
computers
 Intel Xeon processors

Partners
IBM
Intel
 REALTECH

