Best Practices from EMC: Ingest High Availability Performance, Trust and Efficiency in your SAP landscape

Editor's Notes

• #4: A great many businesses depend on SAP. In fact, it is considered the lifeblood of their business, and their organizations achieve high levels of efficiency by leveraging SAP solutions. In a study conducted by CIO Magazine, 75% of responders' cited achieving greater operational efficiency as their reason for implementing ERP. Additional reasons are to reduce IT costs, manage growth globally, and improve business decisions. Because of SAP’s importance, the need to minimize risk to the business is paramount from both an application and infrastructure perspective.
• #5: What are trends are we seeing in information? First, there’s lots of it, and most of it is unstructured and unmanaged. The amount of digital information created in 2009 grew five percent faster, or 40 million gigabytes more, than IDC’s original projection. Looking forward, the Digital Universe is expected to double in size every 18 months. In 2012, five times as much digital information will be created than in 2008. Eighty-five percent of it is managed by organizations, and it’s becoming more and more regulated. More than 30 percent of information created today is “security-intensive,” thus requiring high standards of protection. That 30 percent number will grow to roughly 45 percent by the end of 2012. And the consequences of not properly managing information are severe and likely to get worse.We believe that addressing information growth and complexity by simply applying faster technology will deliver diminishing returns for IT organizations over the medium and longer terms. We believe this inflection point in IT history is more about new models for building, operating and consuming IT. Fully virtualized models lead to Cloud Computing, which leads to true IT-as-a-Service models that will vary somewhat depending on a customer’s business model and level of dependency on information to operate their business.Whether a business model leads to spending a fixed budget on IT to operate and support applications that enable business process…or a business model dictates investing in IT for evolving business strategies faster than would otherwise be possible…we have the technology and know a awful lot about the emerging models that leverage that technology, and we want to help you build with efficiency, choice and control.
• #7: And SAP customers and analysts agree. Virtualization is a top priority for customers ranking #1 in the Top 10 Technology Priorities from Gartner January 2010, and in fact many SAP customers are already partially there –at various stages of the virtualization lifecycle.
• #13: The EMC VNX Unified Storage platform delivers an ideal foundation for unifying your SAP environments consolidated simple & efficient infrastructure.EMC Unified Storage is a highly scalable storage solution optimized for file and block access with wide choice for connectivity protocols (FC/FCoE/iSCSI, NFS, CIFS) for SAP OLTP applicationsJust like VMware vMotion allows you to move things around on the server side, EMC saw the need to allow data to move dynamically across different tiers of drives (from high performance to lower cost/high capacity) according to its business activity. Not only did such data movement make sense, it also had to be fully automated and self-managing.Storage Tiering – Solutions for both file & blockEMC FAST Cache minimizes the invest into flash drives while giving significant benefit to SAP applications by caching all the hot dataEMC FAST improves the TCO by automating the tiering of SAP application data. Combining FAST & FAST Cache can scale user flash tier to any size making short-stroking a thing of the pastVirtual Storage provisioning allows customers to thin provision their storage and enables them to make storage investment based on demandDifferent SAP workloads will have different requirements performance and scalability. One other advancement EMC has made is to be able to bring storage resources closer to the SAP applications they support. This is highly beneficial to deliver more performance in environments where you experience sudden spikes in I/O of applications and going to disk each time would impact performance. EMC has a Proven Solution for VNX Fast Suite for SAP as detailed in white paper below.http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8220-fast-suite-sap-vnx-wp.pdf 
• #15: 30 x 600 GB SAS + 5 x 200 GB Flash in FAST VP, 4 x 200 GB in Flash CacheThe business challenge SAP customers face today is reducing TCO and improving performance and service level delivery. Frequently, responsiveness to sensitive SAP applications has deteriorated over time due to increased data volumes, unbalanced data stores, and changing business requirements. By using EMC’s latest FAST Cache and FAST VP (Fully automated storage tiering for virtual pools) technology on EMC unified storage with block data, SAP deployments under performance pressure can gain a significant performance boost without the need to redesign the applications, adjust the data layouts, or reload significant amounts of data. With automated sub-LUN level tiering and extended cache, customers can properly balance data distribution across the tiers of storage which allows optimization of space utilization and performance improvements.
• #17: Many customers however want to take a step further to simplify and accelerate deployment, using a single, pre-configured platform.Let’s look at one example of standardization with the Vblock Infrastructure Package– it’s designed for ultra-standardization right from the start. Vblock is the converged infrastructure of Cisco servers and network, VMware and EMC from VCE. Vblocks are designed not just to provide predictable SLAs to the business, but also predictable levels of power and cooling, capacity, scalability. You can think of IT in terms of floor tiles or sq meters. This simplifies and brings data center planning up to a strategic business exercise.Infrastructure costs are lower because high utilization rates can be maintained across many applications – provisioned, returned to the pool, and reallocated.Operating costs are lower because of standardization and more complete management, streamlines operations - and many of the tasks your staff is doing today are automated.The real payoff is the speed and ease in responding to new business needs and changes to their requirements.However, the Vblock ends at the application layer. It is not pre-packaged with Oracle, or Microsoft, or SAP. While it is designed to help you standardize, it is also designed to help you maintain flexibility, control and choice to deploy whatever applications you need or have today or in the future.
• #18: An independent TCO analysis published jointly by SAP, Cisco, EMC and VMware illustrated that SAP solutions running on the Vblock architecture can dramatically increase efficiency and reduce capital and operating expenses. Vblock packages integrate best of breed technology from industry leaders Cisco, EMC, and VMware, backed by VCE's seamless world class support. Each Vblock is pre-built and ready for deployment. The modular design is highly scalable to meet growth needs, provide investment protection, and lower total cost of ownership.Using the results of the TCO study and percentage improvements by each value driver, we estimate SAP on Vblock can realize up to 13% TCO savings. This can mean as much as $5-6M in annual savings in some cases.
• #20: In order to make that transition a reality EMC Consulting can help you through the three steps required for virtualization.Step one – we assess your current SAP Landscape and develop a detailed migration plan.Step two – EMC designs and deploys a new Private Cloud SAP environment.Step three – EMC consultants will migrate your data to the new SAP landscape using an efficient and cost effective onshore/offshore factory model.
• #25: NetWorker addresses SAP challenges in a number of ways depending on the solution in use. For SAP with Oracle, NetWorker is integrated with BR*Tools—which we’ll discuss in more detail shortly—to simplify protection and recovery of the SAP system. If you’re running a DB2 database beneath SAP, you can use the NetWorker Module for Databases and Applications to protect SAP data. If you’re running SQL server beneath SAP, you can use NetWorker Module for Microsoft SQL Serverto protect the databases housing SAP data.
• #26: As I mentioned in the previous slide, NetWorker delivers full integration and is fully compliant with SAP’s BR*Tools. Through this integration, NetWorker delivers complete backup and recovery for SAP, including the ability to capture and protect databases, individual data files, table spaces, and logs—all of the things that make up an SAP installation. NetWorker is able to provide backup for SAP whether SAP is online or offline. SAP and Oracle, through the Oracle RMAN interface, is able to deliver block-level incremental backups, which helps ensure that backups are fast, capturing the unique changes to the data. Also through the integrated solution, there is automated verification of backup media readability and backup consistency, in other words, checking is done to make sure that the copy you get is a clean, recoverable copy. All of these capabilities help ensure recovery, which is the primary goal. By providing automatic log management, NetWorker is able to bring the SAP database back to a point in time—restoring all data and replaying any needed logs to provide a complete restore. And finally, not only can you restore back to where the data came from, but in cases where there is other or new hardware in place, NetWorker will restore the data to an alternate location.
• #35: In fact, we at EMC are doing it ourselves. EMC Global IT is also on this journey. We have progressively moved our IT applications and business production applications to the private cloud over the past few years. Today we have virtualized over 80% of our mission critical application environments, including SAP, with 100% of Test/Dev fully virtualized. This has resulted in millions of dollars in savings both operational and in physical infrastructure and has made EMC’s data center more green computing friendly through reduction of carbon footprint and power and cooling. We are now able to deploy our SAP applications in a shortened time and with less dedicated resources. As an example when we deployed a physical server in the datacenter a few years back it took 31 steps and about 5-10 business days to rack, stack, zone, allocate, install, configure the system. Now leveraging the integrated infrastructure of Vblock and VMware we're building servers in 1.5 hours. By next year, we will be one of the largest virtualized SAP deployments in the world. http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h7298-it-journey-private-cloud-wp.pdf (EMC IT white paper)http://www.emc.com/collateral/emc-perspective/h8755-durham-vision-ep.pdf
• #36: EMC Consulting Services has SAP knowledge and expertise to help you take a first step on the journey to your cloud. Specifically we can help you break down your SAP software technologies and infrastructure into targeted discussion areas to focus on the priorities for your IT organization today. SAP planning and implementation services for:Analyzing current performance levels and evaluating the use of automated tiered storageUnderstanding where and how virtualization of your SAP Landscape makes senseBusiness Continuity & Disaster Recovery for SAPSAP Resource ManagementAutomated System CopySizing, Landscape Design and ImplementationFinally, how to re-evaluate your infrastructure to be cloud ready migrating your SAP landscape so it is optimized on an x86 virtual infrastructure. EMC Services also provides:Technology deployment services to help plan, design, implement, and optimize our customer’s EMC information infrastructure. Training and certification to help our customer’s staff develop the most up-to-date skills to implement and manage new and more complex IT infrastructures and increasing storage demandManaged Services to fill knowledge, expertise, and resource gaps, and Support services to ensure business continuity and a highly available data environment.Our ecosystem of highly qualified partners extends the breadth and depth of these services across the globehttp://www.emc.com/collateral/services/consulting/h8524-emc-sap-svo.pdf (EMCC Overview for SAP)http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/solution-overview/h8788-sap-flm-so.pdf