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Engineered Systems
May 20, 2020
Accelerating SAP Deployment and Operations on Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Running Oracle Database on Oracle Exadata Database Machine enables enterprises to increase SAP performance, accelerate deployment, simplify management, and ensure business continuity while meeting ITIL® best practices.
Implementing and maintaining an effective SAP landscape can be complex and time-consuming. All infrastructure components must be integrated and validated to work together, including SAP applications and databases, operating systems, server, networking, and storage hardware, and backup, virtualization, and management software. Tuning, troubleshooting, and maintaining a conventional, piecemeal solution from multiple vendors requires a large IT staff with deep expertise in each infrastructure area, increasing costs and organizational complexity.
Oracle Exadata provides the ideal platform for SAP deployment. Each Oracle Exadata engineered system is a complete hardware and software solution containing all the components of an effective and well-built SAP infrastructure. Oracle’s fully integrated, pre-tested systems are supported as a single hardware/software stack, eliminating the need for tedious component integration, validation, and patching tasks, accelerating deployment and improving data center operations. Oracle Exadata also help enterprises to implement Information Technology Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) best practices for aligning IT services with business needs and creating more efficient and cost-effective business and IT processes.
Keys to Successful SAP Deployment
Successful SAP deployment hinges on three key concepts: simplicity, reliability, and performance.
- Simplicity - The SAP infrastructure must be easy to set up, adapt, operate, and maintain, with minimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Reliability - The SAP infrastructure must provide uninterrupted service delivery and business continuity at all times.
- Performance - The SAP infrastructure must be tuned to minimize user transaction and report generation times and enable new services with exceptional performance levels.
Accelerating SAP Performance with Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Overall SAP system performance depends primarily on two key infrastructure components—the application servers and the database. The number and speed of CPUs, amount and speed of memory, and bandwidth of network connections mainly determine the performance of application servers and database. Balancing these compute, memory, and network characteristics is essential for cost-effective performance. If any one component features higher or lower performance than the rest, bottlenecks will limit the system and costs will increase.
In addition to CPUs, memory, and network connections, database performance is also impacted by the capacity and scalability of the underlying storage system, which has the greatest effect on system response time. With exponential growth in file volumes, storage networks must quickly and efficiently transfer terabytes of data, and conventional solutions rapidly reach capacity limits.
The Oracle Exadata is a fully integrated database platform that delivers on these requirements, making it ideal for Oracle Database consolidation and deployment in SAP infrastructures. SAP and non-SAP Oracle Database instances can be consolidated onto a single Oracle Exadata platform. Additionally, SAP central services can be implemented on Oracle Exadata for high availability solutions. Pre-integration and pre-testing eliminate tedious provisioning work, enabling IT staff to rapidly deploy databases into production while quarterly full-stack patching reduces manual processes and ensures that security is up to date. Pre-engineering ensures that all system components are balanced for maximum performance.
Through a series of tests with customers (PoCs) we confirmed that the SAP-certified Exadata X8M is the best platform for Oracle Database in SAP environments. In many cases, Exadata X8M ran 50% faster on than a do-it-yourself infrastructure due to its innovative new architecture, which delivers millions of IOPS, very short latencies and very high throughput. In other words, a perfect database machine for SAP applications.
For more information on SAP on Oracle, please visit https://www.oracle.com/solutions/sap/ or for more Cloud-specific information https://www.oracle.com/solutions/sap/cloud.html or simply ask your Oracle Representative.
This is part two in a three part series on SAP on Exadata. Part one can be viewed here, part three can be viewed here.
About the Author
Thomas Schuele is a Business Consultant and Program Manager at Oracle’s Oracle-for-SAP Competency Center in Walldorf, Germany. He has over 20 years’ experience with SAP where he has been managing and driving the continuous innovations from Oracle for SAP customers.