The amount of historical master and transactional data, most often not used in ongoing work, grows as you use SAP systems.
The consequence is a drop in system performance. Another result is a real increase in the costs of maintaining and using systems: from increased server power requirements to hard-to- estimate costs of a longer time that end users have to wait for system response. In addition, we are often unaware of the rising administrative costs resulting from increased backup space requirements, and the longer time it takes to restore the system from a backup in case of a disaster.
The natural direction we usually follow to solve the problem described is to invest in newer technology solutions: faster servers with more memory and more powerful processors, bigger disk devices, backup devices and tapes supporting newer, faster standards.
All for One Poland proposes to approach solving this problem by focusing on causes rather than effects – to transfer some of the data that is no longer changed in the system to external media and thereby to free up space in systems. In SAP systems, such a process is called historical data archiving.
The effects of the historical data archiving project in SAP include:
- Immediate increase in system performance in the context of queries to the tables whose content was archived
- Reduced database size
- Shorter backup and disaster recovery times
- Reduced costs of the hardware platform development