Success Stories:

Frankfurt Airport’s luggage delivery system is right on target with Maklee

Maklee has continued its success at Frankfurt Airport with outstanding results for its Baggage Reconciliation System (BRS-XP).

Frankfurt Airport is one of the world’s busiest, with thousands of flights serving over 300 destinations worldwide each week and a high percentage of international transfers. 

BRS-XP is an innovative passenger baggage reconciliation system that provides efficient, accurate baggage control, ensuring that only bags belonging to passengers on board are loaded and that each bag has proper authorization. BRS-XP comprises an airport-wide network based on type p520 IBM servers running the IBM AIX operating system. This complex and sophisticated system takes into account the requirements of all airlines while executing the comprehensive collation and reconciliation of passenger and baggage data.

Maklee was consulted to improve the performance of the Oracle database, which is the core of the BRS-XP system. This was achieved by creating changes in the areas of memory management, I/O subsystem and the network subsystem. Maklee tuned numerous database parameters in addition to improving the execution plans of key SQL statements. After implementing all recommendations, elapsed time for key wait events in the database was cut by 50%, and key SQL statements are now executed at a rate 2 to 3 times faster.

Frankfurt Airport is now enjoying a BRS-XP system that shows a substantial increase in throughput, with system performance that is faster and more efficient, offering the capabilities to manage future growth.

If you would like further information about the ways Maklee can improve the performance of your system, please contact info@maklee.com.

MANOR + Maklee=
Successful Migration

MANOR is the largest chain of department stores in Switzerland, with approximately 11,200 employees in 87 different sites. MANOR’s department stores are part of the MANOR department store group, which includes the furniture stores FLY, the sport outfitters Athleticum as well as supermarkets and restaurants. MANOR’s revenue from its department stores in 2007 was 1.8 billion Euros.

OpenVMS & Oracle are at the core of MANOR’s IT environment, satisfying the company’s needs for high performance computing at all department stores (for inventory, sales etc.)

To support the growth of the business, MANOR was looking for a higher level of performance and throughput. In February 2008, MANOR performed an Alpha vs. Itanium benchmark, benchmarking the production environment (OpenVMS AlphaServer GS1280 1.15 Ghz) vs. HP Integrity server rx7640 1.6 Ghz with Oracle 10g.

Maklee was engaged by MANOR to make parts of the current production environment run in the most optimal way possible on the Integrity servers (preferably 20% faster than Alpha). This goal had to be achieved without changing the application itself.

The results were surprisingly positive: after tuning the Itanium server (rx7640) it ran 50% faster than Alpha. Maklee has raised the “performance bar” for MANOR.

MANOR followed Maklee’s recommendations and ordered two Integrity servers rx6600 (for MANOR’s dual site environment). MANOR began final testing in March/April 2008 and before implementing the new servers in production, performed an evaluation installation of Oracle RAC on OpenVMS.

Maklee assisted MANOR with the RAC installation and tuned the RAC environment for optimal performance. Maklee assisted MANOR in tuning the new Itanium servers before they went “live”. MANOR achieved a performance improvement that couldn’t be expressed in percentage but in factors!

After completing testing, MANOR (database administrators and OpenVMS/San team) & Maklee migrated 10 of 50 production Oracle databases to the RX6600. These run in a mixed architecture cluster (Alpha & Itanium) on OpenVMS in a dual site environment (nodes approx. 5km apart).

Thanks to Maklee, MANOR has managed to migrate much faster than initially planned.

Olaf Leonhardt – OpenVMS/SAN Management
Josef Fekete – Senior DBA
Radoslav Vavros – Senior DBA
Jean-Pierre Willer – Senior DBA
Klaus Berger – OpenVMS / SAN Management

For more information about MANOR please contact Olaf.Leonhardt@manor.ch

To find out how Maklee can help you – please contact info@maklee.com.

Maklee help the luggage handling systems at Frankfurt airport fly

Frankfurt airport is one of the largest in Europe, and is experiencing a steady increase in the number of passengers passing through. This kind of demand can tax an IT system. Maklee was called in to work with the technical staff at the airport to improve performance of their luggage handling system. The baggage handling system is an Oracle based application, running on OpenVMS servers. The tuning results showed that typical SQL statements resulted in a 50% increase in throughput, while response time of the application was cut in half.

Contact info@maklee.com to find out how Maklee can help your Oracle based applications fly.

A leading European bank is achieving more - in less time

Maklee Engineering consulted a European bank to improve the performance of their Oracle batch jobs. The bank was considering migrating from Alpha (ES47s) to Integrity-based servers (rx7640). However, a few batch jobs were running more slowly on Itanium than on Alpha. For example, a batch job that was running for 26 minutes on Alpha took 35 minutes to complete on Itanium. Maklee was called in to assist, and achieved a result of 12 minutes for completion of this particular batch job. In addition, a significant increase in performance was noted in all other batch jobs. The bank now has confidence in performance and scaling of the new systems and will be integrating the new servers into their production environment over the next few weeks.

To find out how your Oracle environment can achieve more for you, please contact info@maklee.com