Whitepaper

Innovation without DisruptionTransformation to Real Real-Time Computing based on holistic support powered by SAP® Solution Manager

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Identifying New Value Potentials • Managing the Transition • Running the Complete Solution

SAP Active Global SupportJuly, 2012

INNOVATION WITHOUT DISRUPTION

SAP ® StreamWork TM

Cloud Solutions

Social MediaEnterprise Mobility

SourcesSourcesSources

SAP Extractors andETL Data Services

= OLTP Operations = Delta Load Operations = OLAP Operations = Planning OperationsMoving data intensive operations down to HANA

SAP Business Suite SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

SAP BusinessObjects

SAP HANA

Sybase Unwired Platform

Web Access

PushReal-time

Enterprise Software

All existing investments is fully secured

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SAP and non-SAP Systems

Platform for Real Real-Time Computing

SAP NetWeaver Gateway

SAP provides along with technological innovations for real real-time computing a comprehensive lifecycle and support method-ology for the full end-to-end solution. This document demonstrates how to discover and realize the value of transforming to SAP HANA while securing the current investments.

Current application architectures create different application-specific silos with redundant data that reduce real-time behavior and increase complexity. Future application architectures create one single source of truth database with a minimum of redun-dant data which enables real real-time computing. SAP® In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA™) is the platform to optimize all en-terprise application characteristics i.e. transactional, analytical, planning and structured or unstructured data.

With SAP Business Warehouse powered by HANA, it is possible to build custom applications. SAP BusinessObjects software fits on top as the presentation layer, and the SAP NetWeaver Gateway and Sybase Unwired Platform completes the stack. This verti-cally-integrated platform is the target architecture for future custom-deployments, custom development, and SAP Business Suite and applications deployments.

With SAP HANA you can move data intense operations into the in-memory database layer. These data intense operations might be data loading operations, OLAP operations, complete planning operations or even OLTP operations.

Along with the shipment for the vertically-integrated technology stack, SAP ships integrated development workbenches to build modern customer solutions on top of this platform. SAP can provide an out-of-the box development platform and guidance for your development organization for developing your own modern solutions.

With this platform powered by SAP HANA there are many ways of adding additional value to existing customer solutions. How-ever, there are questions to answer before you can realize them:

• Which opportunities are best for my company? • How shall I realize the identified improvement potential without disrupting my ongoing business? • How can I integrate the new technology in my existing operations concept?

This document describes how SAP Solution Manager helps you to answer these questions and integrate the new innovative powered by HANA technology into your existing IT solution without disrupting your ongoing business or jeopardizing existing investment.

IDENTIFYING NEW VALUE POTENTIALSSAP HANA can improve your business in many ways, from accelerating processes via faster data access, to providing more flexi-bility and even enabling new ways of planning, processing, and analytics. However, you need to understand how your processes currently run on your business applications, to be able to bring most value to your company. This is where SAP Solution Manag-er makes its contribution. SAP Solution Manager is the SAP application management platform. You may already use it to manage your existing SAP busi-ness applications. The platform supports best practices in all phases of the application management lifecycle, helping you to manage SAP and non-SAP applications in the most efficient and structured way. Besides traditional SAP applications, SAP Solu-tion Manager also supports new technologies, like SAP HANA.

A good way to identify value potentials of SAP HANA for your company is to analyze your SAP Business Suite applications and focus on those programs and database tables first that consume much database performance or have a high number of data-base accesses. This analysis can be done with the Reverse Business Process Documentation (RBPD) in SAP Solution Manager. RBPD has been developed originally to check which transactions and reports are used in a productive SAP ERP system and to compare the result with the business process documentation (or to generate such documentation if it is not available yet). Meanwhile, RBPD has been enhanced in a way that it now analysis the database consumption of the transactions and reports. The resulting list of candidates with high database utilization just needs to be matched against a list of available SAP HANA ac-celerators to identify optimization potentials that have been used successfully at other customers of SAP and can be imple-mented with relatively little efforts.

SAP HANA can not only be used to accelerate and optimize processes, it can also reduce complexity and improve the flexibility of planning and reporting. In traditional analytics, high data volumes require assumptions to be made during modeling, to re-strict the data set to a manageable size. Such simplified models do not accurately reflect the multi-faceted nature of operational data, and often result in suboptimal forecasts, planning, or trend analysis. Since data aggregation can be avoided in memory, real real-time computing reduces resource consumption. And working with data directly where it is located (in memory) enables analytics on the fly. In addition, this reduces complexity and increases reporting flexibility. Similarly to the analysis of business processes with RBPD, SAP is currently developing analysis functions for BW systems in SAP Solution Manager, to also detect such improvement potential.

INNOVATION WITHOUT DISRUPTION

SAP HANA Potential Analysis

SAP Solution Manager

RBPD Content*

SAP system Usage analysis

Re-documentation

Customer Process Reference

SAP HANA Potential Analysis

INNOVATION WITHOUT DISRUPTION

MANAGING THE TRANSITIONAfter you have selected an SAP HANA accelerator for your SAP Solution, you will run an implementation/upgrade project (in-cluding DB migration). SAP Solution Manager supports you here as well. Roadmaps in SAP Solution Manager provide proven, reusable, and successful methods for implementing SAP solutions. A roadmap is divided into phases, and is a result-oriented method that streamlines implementation projects, minimizes risks, and reduces overall implementation costs. This provides a consistent approach for project management, organizational change management, solution management, and for other activi-ties performed when implementing SAP solutions.

One example is the rapid prototyping roadmap for SAP HANA. This roadmap helps you set up a first version of SAP HANA accel-erators in your existing landscape, while ensuring business continuity and securing existing investments. The roadmap runs from the Project Preparation phase until Orchestration & Transition, where the implemented solution is handed over to opera-tions. Each phase contains the work packages and tasks required. Best practice documentation, accelerators, and related ser-vices for the different activities speed up execution.

Additional roadmaps in SAP Solution Manager are already available or in development. They may also be relevant for SAP HANA projects, like the roadmaps for database migrations and upgrades, the Run SAP roadmaps for setting up solution operations, or even the generic Accelerated SAP roadmap.

SAP Solution Manager provides various capabilities that your implementation team might already know from other projects, to run the SAP HANA project. For example, you can document the specifications of your project, manage project documentation, plan and execute tests, or tell business users how to use the improved solution.

RUNNING THE COMPLETE SOLUTIONAt the end of the implementation project, you hand over your new SAP HANA solution to production. Your operations team has to run the new technology while still being responsible for your other business applications running on traditional disk-based da-tabase technologies. The best way of tackling the additional complexity is to have one common, holistic operations concept. This is another advantage of SAP Solution Manager. It provides holistic support for business applications based on various tech-nologies, throughout the entire life cycle.

For SAP HANA, the difference between the traditional and new technology is the database (disk-based or in-memory), let’s start with database administration. SAP Solution Manager contains the DBACockpit. This has already been available for some time, to monitor and administer databases from different vendors, centrally. With SAP HANA, the DBACockpit has been enhanced to also support the SAP In-Memory Appliance, so your database administrators can use the same tool to monitor different data-base technologies. If they have already used the cockpit, they do not even need to learn to use a new tool.

INNOVATION WITHOUT DISRUPTION

A central database administration tool would not be a holistic operations concept. All support standards of SAP apply for SAP HANA too. SAP HANA is integrated with many other SAP Solution Manager functions. Whenever monitoring values become crit-ical, alerts are sent to the monitoring and alerting infrastructure, from where they are distributed to the administrators responsi-ble, or displayed in alert inboxes. Besides typical system monitoring alerts, the operations of SAP HANA takes advantage of a re-cent enhancement of SAP Solution Manager, special Business Intelligence Monitoring alerts, which also support the in-memory database. BI objects (process chains, queries and templates in SAP BW system; jobs in BO system) and systems are monitored across the complete landscape.

A unique feature of the combination of SAP HANA and SAP Solution Manager is the end-to-end trace in root cause analysis. If a user identifies a performance problem, your administrator has the chance to follow the complete flow of the individual user re-quest from the frontend via network, server … down to the individual database query. This accelerates both the localization and the resolution of problems significantly.

For many companies, it is important that all changes of productive applications are controlled and can be traced later. SAP HANA uses the same technology in SAP Solution Manager as other SAP applications. The enhanced change and transport sys-tem (CTS+) transports all changes of data models from the development system, via quality assurance, into the production sys-tem. This covers the entire solution, even including components like BusinessObjects Enterprise or SAP BW. Besides the physi-cal transport, CTS+ ensures the traceability of the changes and the integration of quality measures for quality assurance.

Finally, SAP Solution Manager is not only a tool for deploying and operating SAP HANA. It offers additional best practices to op-timize your solution. They are available as continuous quality checks throughout all phases of the lifecycle. Examples are the guided self service Sizing for HANA, an Implementation Check for HANA, or SAP EarlyWatch Alert. You can use these checks as self services in your SAP Solution Manager, without needing experts from SAP.

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