Improve use of infrastructure and reduce TCO
Technology is central to business today. Over the past few years, SAP technology and the technology of underlying infrastructure has evolved to the extent that there is a bewildering array of options that can be combined to deliver an SAP landscape that supports ever increasing business demands and changing requirements.
Many organisations that implemented SAP looked no further than the project at hand and the following BAU support operation. Consequentially, the SAP landscape of ‘development’, ‘testing’ and ‘production’, each residing on separate physical servers, is still prevalent today.
However, with increasing expectations and demands from the business along with cost constraints and the cliché of “delivering more for less”, today’s IT Directors can no longer afford to simply maintain the status-quo. IT departments must embrace concepts such as agility and sustainability in their strategies to reduce business exposure and risk.
Organisations now want to build on the base of core-SAP and deliver new and improved functionality to the user community, using core or edge technologies, allowing true benefit to be derived from IT.
Why do I need an SAP landscape strategy?
In today’s business environment there is growing emphasis on the speed and ability with which to respond to short-term requirements. However in doing so, it is essential to ensure that existing production systems remain protected as these are critical to the business at all times. Change is essential, but it can’t be allowed to compromise the ability of the business to deliver its core product.
An effective SAP landscape strategy is crucial to enabling IT to support business growth and increase competitive advantage by exploiting new functionality and technologies, whilst retaining the integrity of business-as-usual. Governance of change must be strong enough not to let compromising code through to production, yet agile enough to manage change without stifling it.
Reduce cost and increase efficiency
Managing SAP landscapes efficiently is becoming more complex due to the growing number of software components available and increasing demands from the business - “can you fast-track the urgent change to the finance report?”, “can you set up a new system to train the new users in Japan?” Furthermore, the traditional ‘3-system landscape’ implemented by many organisations is, in many cases, no longer effective in today’s rapidly changing IT ecosystem.
There are a myriad of tools, technologies and hardware available to enable IT to deliver business requirements in an agile and cost-effective way. If we consider the technology stack from the bottom up, then the majority of hardware and software vendors in the SAP marketplace offer solutions that can benefit an IT organisation operationally. For example:
Storage
- Reduce required disk space: Decrease the footprint of allocated storage through thin-provisioning
- Improve efficiency: Automate and reduce requirements of test systems and copybacks via cloning and renaming databases at the storage level rather than re-installing and manually copying terabytes of data.
- Improve the effectiveness of business continuity: Mirror and automate replication to provide stand-by copies of data.
Servers
- Reduce power and cooling costs by utilising blade and small form factor hardware as opposed to traditional server form factors.
- Improve utilisation of new infrastructure by buying servers designed for virtualisation. Memory is usually the limiting factor in virtualisation and many manufacturers now offer hardware that can be configured with additional memory.
- Respond to peaks and troughs in demand by using the right management tools to allocate processing power dynamically to where it’s needed most.
Networks
- Reduce the number of cables to deploy by managing multiple virtual networks through the same physical cable.
- Ensure response times of critical applications by implementing Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritise production traffic.
- Consolidate storage and network traffic over a single cable via Fibrer-over-IP technologies
Software
- Maximise the utilisation of existing infrastructure by using virtualisation technologies to consolidate workloads onto under-user hardware
- Reduce Production Server numbers by providing high availability and disaster recovery utilising under-used non-production hardware
Orchestration of operations
- Reduce power and cooling costs by shutting down SAP instances and their underlying infrastructure when they're not being used. Does Pre-Prod always need to be running or only for testing cycles?
- Respond to business demand by deploying additional application instances at peak times e.g. month-end processing or new product launches.
- Fulfil last minute request for ad hoc systems by rapidly deploying new instances from templates.
- Reduce management costs by Orchestration of the whole technology stack
This technology rarely comes for free so organisations should factor in the ROI of any chosen combination vs. the landscape in which it will be implemented. Often significant non-SAP parts of the IT estate can also benefit thus providing a stronger business case.
Organisations need to find the right balance of technology vs. Skills. Orchestration and automation will always improve efficiency but are less successful at fixing things when they go wrong.
Sustainability and green IT
Green IT can be related to a SAP Landscape in by simply reducing the overall carbon footprint - it is said that during the lifetime of a server, the cost of the electricity to power & cool it will be three times its original purchase price – a highly visible and measurable target. Some would say that this can be achieved (as with any other IT landscape) by some of the technology described above, however, taking a step back and looking at how your SAP landscape has developed will also bear fruit.
Many IT infrastructures have grown organically – a mix of old and new, new servers added as new requirements arrive. Some implemented on UNIX because it was the best mission critical platform at the time and have stayed there ever since. When planning a hardware upgrade & migration, rather than adding/replacing ‘more of the same’, look at the new technologies from the hardware vendors, consider mixed operating systems & migrating to alternate platforms – a single Intel Blade can deliver 25,000 SAPS these days – do you really need to sun Solution Manager on a dedicated UNIX server? It is now virtually impossible to buy a server small enough to run some SAP components and as such virtualisation and cloud technologies in some form become appropriate for most organisations.
Minimise business exposure and risk
In today’s business environment there is growing emphasis on the speed and ability with which to respond to short-term requirements. However in doing so, it is essential to ensure that existing production systems remain protected as these are critical to the Business at all times. Change is essential, but it can’t be allowed to compromise the ability of the Business to deliver its core product.
The appropriate technical implementation of an SAP landscape does not, in itself, provide the entire solution answer to management of change and delivery of a productive service - effective governance is critical.
In conjunction with the Technical Architecture, organisations need to define rules and processes around how the environment will be operated and agree them with stakeholders.
Governance process should include, but are not limited to the following:
- Change control boards
- Release strategy
- SAP client strategy
- Test strategy
- Patching strategy
By integrating process with technology, IT can deliver an agile, secure platform to the business.
Bluefin Solutions can...
- Help you define an architecture to deliver your business objectives
- Help you select the right tools and technology
- Build implementation plans and assist in the execution of those plans
- Support a great IT strategy