Private Cloud, Data Deduplication, SAP HANA

Therefore, we know all the pros and cons of maintaining, updating, consolidating and all the other “-ings” of hardware foundation, through day-to-day Basis work up to architecture planning. What appears simple in the end can be quite complicated along the way. Even the best solutions, if implemented inappropriately or inefficiently maintained (even after successful implementation), can give you sleepless nights. The good news is that there are many ways to ensure you have a good night’s sleep: size your hardware properly; follow proven patterns; adopt new solutions while keeping in mind proven patterns and best practices; use prototyping; and… well, this list could fill the page.

As SAP Basis consultants with over ten years of experience, we have made a number of prototypes while working on various projects. If well planned and prepared, they definitely save time – and time is money. However, there is one condition: the prototyping must be clever.

Let us look together at some example solutions that can bring us closer to landscape simplicity. One remark: never put the equal sign between homogeneous and simple; as we know, they do not always mean the same thing.

“Big Data” in a Private Cloud – Virtualization of Large SAP Systems

Most of us transferred our SAP systems to virtualized environments years ago. Nevertheless, some people still have their doubts:

• Will our system be stable?
• We have one million dialog steps processed daily; will the performance be good enough?
• We have a ten-terabyte database and only eight hours to move it to a new platform – is it feasible?
• What if the hardware does not keep up in a year?

SNP’s technology consultants have set up and migrated to a virtual environment over a hundred SAP systems. In most scenarios, the systems were different due to various technologies. I would like to talk about three of these scenarios.

Scenario One — a long distance migration: Your company decided to integrate its SAP systems in a primary data center. Your source system is in a different city or even country. In the case of standard migration, a limitation appears when a business agrees to shut down the SAP production system maintenance-window for only two hours. This restriction implies a scenario in which you set up a standby database and swap the locations where the systems are running in the maintenance window. With such an approach, moving even a multi-terabyte database can be completed in a two-hour maintenance window or less. Never give up carrying out the required tests.

Scenario Two – a hardware platform change: Due to the high cost of platform maintenance (e.g. Itanium servers), you would like to migrate your seven-terabyte database SAP ERP system to an open platform, Intel for example. The database is Oracle and migration must be completed in less than 24 hours. A reliable solution is to utilize the transportable tablespaces method for migration. Based on our experience, it can be done in less than 24 hours.

Scenario Three – you consider the classical heterogeneous OS/DB migration: The total time for exporting, copying the dump and importing data to new databases is not acceptable for your business. Do not hesitate to optimize the process and reduce the required time by half. Go for parallel export and import over TCP/IP sockets. We have employed this method, and if it is well planned and performed, there is nothing to be afraid of… well, there is one thing – more time available during the migration weekend for system check-ups.

In all the above scenarios, a virtual environment is put to use. Our consultants either designed and fine-tuned the virtual environment or advised the customers on how it should be configured. Currently, we support SAP systems in virtual environments on all legacy databases (Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, MSSQL, Sybase) with systems used by hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of users.

What is the most important aspect you should consider in regards to landscape transformation to a private cloud? Do not choose your partner only by company name, but by real people who are going to perform the operations; they must be people who have run similar projects before. Nowadays, the name of a major IT company does not always ensure experienced staff. After all, the people who undertake the transformation process are the most essential component for a successful completion of a project.

If you want to have a technology architecture audit and a blueprint for your technology landscape transformation, ask experienced practitioners to prepare it.

Data Deduplication

How should SAP/IT systems be backed up? This question is raised by anyone who has ever administered a SAP system . The market offers a variety of solutions. Which one should we choose; a good but expensive offer or a cheaper one with some limitations? The price often plays the most significant role when we choose our solution. Does lower price invariably mean sacrificing efficiency? As it turns out, not really..

Thanks to data deduplication, we can put forward a better solution for the same price. Deduplication is a form of well-known data compression; stored data requires less space on media than source data. Backups with classic compression are nothing new, and it is a standard solution for tapes with an assumed compression ratio of 1:2. However, such compression can only optimize chunks of data of a limited size – it can only work within data blocks in one tape area or compress blocks in a data stream. In a standard backup, when the next backup comes and we have repeated data, they need to be copied over again.

Deduplication algorithms make use of a hard drive backup, which gives direct and nearly immediate access to all the data at any time, even to all the data across the whole organization. Therefore, the deduplication algorithm can optimize compression in the whole set of data, regardless of its size. Thus, we do not have the next overwrite of an identical compressed block, as with the standard compression; every portion of data is written only once. The next time a backup of the same data is done, only a pointer to the existing backup is created. In the case of backups with that kind of compression, the average compression ratio is between 7 and 30. We can imagine that we have even as few as seven tapes instead of a hundred tapes and therefore less work maintaining them.

EMC Data Domain is a solution in which deduplicated backups are utilized to a great extent. It has been used in the SNP Data Center for over a year as, well as in our customers’ environments, giving them a chance to take a big step forward with backup technology. It brings significant optimization in media management; instead of having hundreds of tapes and multiple tape libraries, we can have just one small disk device that performs backups and stores deduplicated data on internal hard drives, which can then be added to as data size grows. Additionally, it supports CIFS, NFS, DDBOOST protocols and Virtual Tape Libraries, which allows it to integrate them with other backup systems. Moreover, in small environments, we could integrate it with native database or operating system backup tools without paying for any extra backup system functions.

Due to deduplication, Data Domain can compete with traditional tape solutions in terms of price. In addition to providing ease of management and better backup performance, it lowers the TCO of our environment. Most importantly, this solution has been proven stable and safe. If you still have any doubts about the “cheap or good” principle, choose the EMC Data Domain. We will be happy to help you implement it.

A Glimpse at the SAP HANA Platform

There is a lot of marketing fuzz around, and most of us have already heard it. However, this is more than just fuzz — SAP is underpinned by stable technological foundations. We were encouraged to buy the HANA appliance for our Data Center as a SAP Partner (and currently a SAP HANA Partner) by what we had seen. Why? Our tests confirmed a significant performance boost in comparison to classical solutions. Being experts, we want to extend our hands-on experience and stay on top with our consultants’ expertise, taking advantage of the modern lab with state-of-the-art technologies.

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade?

People responsible for aging SAP systems often ask themselves these questions: Should we stay with a relatively stable 4.6 or go for the new one? Should we leave it all on the outdated bare-metal hardware platform for the time being, while it works… or not?

Keep the underperforming database or go for a later version?

SNP has extensive experience in SAP upgrade projects, including SAP ERP version 6.x. On this basis, we have created an original method for these types of projects. It is based on the recommendations of SAP, and enhanced by our best practices. Such a scenario – rehearsed and repeated in different system configurations – is a guarantee of security and a smooth project implementation for our customers. We have over 20 SAP Basis consultants who have extensive experience and are highly qualified, certified by SAP, in the field of databases and operating systems used in the implementation of SAP systems. An upgrade is a technical step, as well as an application project. We offer over 200 SAP business consultants, specializing in all SAP modules and technologies.

We see ourselves as “SAP-Upgrade men”, working with any SAP platform, on any database, and capable of upgrading it in place or moving it to any other, even if a customer’s requirement is a near-zero downtime. We believe that in terms of gaining experience “a month without at least one SAP system upgrade is a lost month.” Sharing this experience with our customers is a pleasure.