Oracle SAP

T E C H N O L O G Y
N E W
Request Exadata V2-Sun Oracle Database Machine for your SAP implementation NOW!
D A T A B A S E

for

U P D A T E

11

Oracle database for SAP is safe, reliable and scalable

No. 19 Oracle for SAP, May 2010 www.oracle.com/sap

Oracle Exadata Storage Servers combine Oracles smart storage software and Oracles industry-standard Sun hardware to deliver the industry's highest database storage performance. To overcome the limitations of conventional storage, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers use a massively parallel architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage. In addition, smart storage software offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The result is faster parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections. This massively parallel architecture also offers linear scalability and mission-critical reliability.

Exadata Smart Flash Cache

Now with the newest release of the Oracle Exadata Storage Server, you can also achieve extreme performance for transaction processing and consolidated mixed application workloads. Exadata Smart Flash Cache addresses the disk random I/O bottleneck problem by transparently moving hot data to Oracles Sun FlashFire cards. You get ten times faster I/O response time and use ten times fewer disks for business applications from Oracle and third-party providers.

Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression

The most advanced data compression technologies are included in Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression can, on average, reduce the size of Data Warehousing tables by 10x, and archive tables by 50x. This offers significant savings on disk space for primary, standby and backup databases, and will improve the performance of Data Warehousing queries.

Benefits for SAP Customers

Extreme Performance for Business WarehousesImproves both query performance and concurrency by offloading intensive query processing and data mining scoring from database servers and bringing it closer to the data. Extreme Performance for OLTP ApplicationsAddresses the disk random I/O bottleneck problem by transparently moving hot data to Sun FlashFire. You get ten times faster I/O response time and use ten times fewer disks for business applications from Oracle as well as third-party providers. Extreme Performance for Mixed WorkloadsAllows you to consolidate data warehousing, transaction processing, and mixed workloads on a massively parallel server grid and eliminate the cost of third-party specialty hardware, security, and management solutions.

UNVEILING

ORACLE EXADATA V2
The Worlds First OLTP Database Machine With Sun FlashFire Technology

ORACLE EXADATA V2
The Worlds First OLTP Database Machine With Sun FlashFire Technology

To: Dr. Christian Graf (SAP AG) and Mr. Gerhard Kuppler (Oracle) Regarding: Exadata V2 Sun Oracle Database Machine Dear Sirs; The purpose of this request is to express our interest in adopting Exadata V2 Sun Oracle Database Machine for our SAP Applications and we are asking you for its immediate release, once the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP is available. Send this request to christian.graf@sap.com and gerhard.kuppler@oracle.com (or fax this page to +49 6227 8398 199) and please answer the following questions about your current Oracle / SAP configurations.

Operating System and version? Database version? Database size? SAP Application Modules and release level? Number and type of application servers running on the existing database server? Number and type of dedicated application servers? Yes / No we are using BI Accelerator?

Name: Company: Address:

Oracle Corporation Oracle DB for SAP GTC Altrottstr. 31 D-69190 Walldorf Germany

E-mail:
Please fill out the Oracle Exadata V2 for SAP request form and send (or fax) it to Faxnr.: +49 6227 8398 199

Oracle database for SAP is safe, reliable and scalable

D A T A B A S E

CONTENTS

11g

3 4 10 14 16 18 20 23 24 28 30 34 36 39 41 42 44 46 50 52 54 58 61 62 64 70 74 77 78 79

Editorial Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) Option certified for SAP Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) at Stadtwerke Munich (SWM) SAP Partitioning Engine Relationship Interview Oracle Database and SAP Benchmark SAP on Oracle with Fujitsu Benchmark SAP on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Fujitsu Benchmark SAP on Oracle-Solaris SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Rpublique Franaise, Ministre de la Dfense SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Southwest Airlines Oracle Database Vault for SAP customers SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Coca-Cola Hellenic Oracle Index Compression at Tyson Foods SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Sodexo Brazil SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Verizon SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Essent Netherlands SAP on Oracle at Steelcase, HP-UX Oracle Partner Connectria SAP on Oracle Database at Dow Corning SAP on Real Application Clusters (RAC) at Bauerfeind Hosting on Oracle at Freudenberg IT Oracle Partner Delta Consulting Oracle Partner All4IT Group Oracle Data Guard Freudenberg ITj Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) for SAP SAP Fast Start with Oracle and HP Oracle Partner IS4IT, SAP on RAC Useful links Oracle Database for SAP customers Imprint

Oracle Database for SAP The #1 Database safe, reliable, scalable, optimized for SAP customers

DEAR SAP CUSTOMER,

For 21 years Oracle Corporation and SAP AG has maintained an ongoing commitment to

our joint customers and have long-standing reseller and customer support agreements in place, which provides enhanced access to Oracle database technology and world class customer support. In this edition, we focus on Oracle Database 11g Release 2, and the most important technologies that benefit SAP customers in terms of return on investment, space savings and performance. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition comes with a wide range of options to extend the worlds #1 database to help grow your business and meet your users performance, security and availability service level expectations. The innovation continues with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 to lower IT costs and deliver a higher quality of service by: Consolidating business applications onto fast, reliable and scalable databases (Real Application Clusters RAC) Maximizing availability and eliminating idle data center redundancy (RAC, Data Guard, online Patching) Compressing data onto low cost storage partitions for faster performance (Oracle Advanced Compression) Securely protecting information and enabling compliance (Oracle Advanced Compression, Oracle Database Vault) Doubling DBA productivity and reducing the risk of change (Diagnostic Pack, integrated in BR* Tools and SAP DBA Cockpit). The Exadata V2 Sun Oracle Database Machine the worlds fastest for any type of database workload and the only database machine that does online transaction processing (OLTP). Oracle Exadata Storage Software runs on each storage server performing data-intensive processing that reduces the volume of data returned to database servers. Smart Scans, Storage Indexes, Data Mining Model Scoring and Hybrid Columnar Compression are all components of Oracle Exadata Storage Software that enable extreme performance. If you would like to adopt Exadata V2 Sun Oracle Database Machine for your SAP Applications please see the Exadata for SAP request form in this edition or on www.oracle.com/sap. Read more about the benefits, why customers moved from single instance to Oracle Real Application Clusters for SAP (Coca Cola Hellenic) and why Oracle database has the best cost of ownership (Tyson Food, Partitioning and Compression). Compliance and security are getting more and more important today, please see the Oracle Database Vault for SAP article. Please read more about the Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) for SAP customers, including: database migrations, Oracle-to-Oracle (O2O), performance tuning, health check and internal training workshops. For more information or to see current and previous editions go to: www.oracle.com/sap. We welcome your comments and questions, please contact us at: saponoracle_de@oracle.com Sincerely

Gerhard Kuppler
Senior Director Corporate SAP Account, Oracle Corporation

S A P C E R T I F I E D O R A C L E D AT A B A S E 11g RELEASE 2 FUNCTIONALITY

Note:

A general release of Oracle Database 11.2 is not provided for earlier SAP releases (SAP R/3 3.1I up to and including SAP R/3 4.6C). Similar to Oracle Database Version 10.2, there will only be a temporary 11.2 release in direct connection with an SAP upgrade project for these older SAP versions. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 provides customers more benefits: saving disk space with lower hardware costs, more performance, higher security, better manageability, exceeding productivity and at least in an outstanding high availability/disaster recovery for SAP applications. The following provides a list of important features available for SAP customers today and many of them are unique to Oracle.
Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2

INTRODUCTION Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers, running Windows, Linux, and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition comes with a wide range of options to extend the worlds #1 database to help grow your business and meet your users performance, security and availability service level expectations. SAP has certified Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (please see SAP Note 1398634) with the following details: Only SAP products based on SAP Kernel 6.40, 7.x and higher are certified with Oracle Database 11.2. The certification and rollout by SAP happens in three waves: End of March 2010 (wave 1): major UNIX platforms (AIX, HP-UX IA64, Solaris SPARC & x64) and Linux x64 were released (done) End of Q2/2010 (wave 2): Windows x64 and HPUX PA-RISC platforms are planned to be released Windows IA64 tbd

The SAP release of Oracle Database 11.2 RAC occurs at the same time as the general release of Oracle Database 11.2 in the SAP environment. For information about Oracle RAC support, see SAP Note 527843. It contains important details about the released RAC configurations, like the fact that all used software stacks with 10g RAC will continue to stay in place and can be used with 11g RAC, so neither support for raw devices (not supported any more with 11.2) nor ASM is available for 11.2 RAC databases in SAP environments.
OLTP Table Compression

Oracle Database 11g introduced a new feature called OLTP Table Compression that allows data to be compressed during all types of data manipulation operations, including conventional DML such as INSERT and UPDATE. In addition, OLTP Table Compression reduces the associated compression overhead of write operations making it suitable for transactional or OLTP environments as well. OLTP Table Compression, therefore, extends the benefits of compression to all application workloads.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP

D A T A B A S E

11g

Oracles OLTP Table Compression, part of Advanced Compression, uses a unique compression algorithm that eliminates duplicate values within a database block, even across multiple columns. Compressed blocks contain a structure called a symbol table that maintains compression metadata. When a block is compressed, duplicate values are eliminated by first adding a single copy of the duplicate value to the symbol table. When compared with competing compression algorithms that maintain a global database symbol table, Oracles unique approach offers significant performance benefits by not introducing additional I/O when accessing compressed data. The benefits of OLTP Table Compression go beyond just on-disk storage savings. One significant advantage is Oracles ability to read compressed blocks directly without having to first uncompress the block. Therefore, there is no measurable performance degradation for accessing compressed data. In fact, in many cases performance may improve due to the reduction in I/O since Oracle will have to access fewer blocks. Further, the buffer cache will become more efficient by storing more data without having to add memory. Since Oracle 10.2.0.2, SAP has certified the use of Index compression to save disk space for indexes and reduce total database size on disk. Customer experiences show that even after a full database reorganization has taken place, an additional 20% of total disk space reduction for the whole database can be achieved using index compression.
SecureFile Data Compression

RMAN Backup Compression

The continuous growth in enterprise databases creates an enormous challenge to database administrators. The storage requirements for maintaining database backups and the performance of the backup procedures are directly impacted by database size. Oracle Advanced Compression includes compression technology that can dramatically reduce the storage requirements for backup data. Due to RMANs tight integration with Oracle Database, RMAN backup (widely used by SAP customers) data is compressed before it is written to disk or tape and doesnt need to be uncompressed before recovery providing an enormous reduction in storage costs.
Data Pump Compression

The ability to compress the metadata associated with a Data Pump job was first provided in Oracle Database 10g Release 2. In Oracle Database 11g, this compression capability has been extended so that table data can be compressed on export. Data Pump compression is an inline operation, so the reduced dump file size means a significant savings in disk space. Unlike operating system or file system compression utilities, Data Pump compression is fully inline on the import side as well, so there is no need to uncompress a dump file before importing it. The compressed dump file sets are automatically decompressed during import without any additional steps by the Database Administrator.
Data Guard Network Compression

SecureFiles is a new feature in Oracle Database 11g that introduces a completely re-engineered large object (LOB) data type to dramatically improve performance, manageability, and ease of application development. SecureFiles data is compressed using industry standard compression algorithms. Compression not only results in significant savings in storage but also improved performance by reducing IO, buffer cache requirements, redo generation and encryption overhead. SecureFile compression provides significant storage and handles in-line and out-of-line LOB data which are getting more and more important in SAP applications and are widely used in SAP products such as SAP CRM, SAP XI, SAP NetWeaver Portal, and even in SAP ERP. Almost all non-cluster tables in SAP ERP use out-ofline LOBs that are unique to the Oracle database.

Data Guard provides the management, monitoring, and automation software infrastructure to create, maintain, and monitor one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and data corruptions. Data Guard maintains synchronization of primary and standby databases using redo data (the information required to recover a transaction). As transactions occur in the primary database, redo data is generated and written to the local redo log files. Data Guard Redo Transport Services are used to transfer this redo data to the standby site(s).

D A T A B A S E

11g
With Advanced Compression, redo data may be transmitted in a compressed format to reduce the network bandwith in an efficient way. Redo transport compression is no longer limited to compressing redo data only when a redo gap is being resolved. When compression is enabled for a destination, all redo data sent to that destination is compressed.
Deferred Segment Creation

Now in Oracle 11g the database can optimize the resource usage and storage requirements for this operation, default values of columns are maintained in the data dictionary for columns specified as NOT NULL. Adding new columns with DEFAULT values and NOT NULL constraint no longer requires the default value to be stored in all existing records. This not only enables a schema modification in subseconds and independent of the existing data volume, it also consumes no space. Especially for large tables, updating table column results in reduced execution time and space saving. Because add column is very common within SAP BW applications and SAP upgrades, enhanced ADD Column Functionality leads to: factor 10-20 performance improvement for SAP BW during add column process saving large amount of disk space
Bitmap Indexes

Beginning in Oracle Database 11g Release 2, when creating a table in a locally managed tablespace, table segment creation is deferred until the first row is inserted. In addition, creation of segments is deferred for any LOB columns of the table, any indexes created implicitly as part of table creation, and any indexes subsequently explicitly created on the table. The advantages of this space allocation method for customers running Oracle database underneath their SAP applications are the following: Empty database objects will not consume any disk space Very important for SAP environments as 60-70% of all tables, lobs, indexes and partitions in an SAP installation are empty Makes database installation for SAP a lot faster because creation of empty tables, LOBs, and indexes are dramatically faster. Oracle Data Dictionary Space queries run substantially faster
Enhanced Add COLUMN Functionality

Especially SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse customers now can use Bitmap Indexes. Bitmap Indexes are high densed indexes which need minimal disk space. This reduces the size of a database very effectively. Oracle is the only database vendor who offers disk-based Bitmap Indexes.
Variable Length Datatype Representation

Before Oracle 11g adding new columns with DEFAULT values and NOT NULL constraint required both an exclusive lock on the table and the default value to be stored in all existing records.

Also Oracle is the only vendor to provide a comprehensive Variable Length Datatype Representation. With Variable Length Datatype Representation minimum disk space is allocated. Bitmap Indexes and Variable Length Datatype Representation are the main reasons why the Oracle database is smaller than databases from other vendors. Compared to Oracle Database 10g the listed Oracle Database 11g features give the following results: First the size of the 11.2 database will be 3 times smaller. So a 10.2 database with a size of 3 Terabytes will only consume 1 TB in disk space with 11.2. Second backups will also be smaller up to 10 times smaller.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP

SecureFile Performance

SecureFiles offer the best solution for storing file content, such as images, audio, video, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Traditionally, relational data is stored in a database, while unstructured contentboth semi-structured and unstructuredis stored as files in file systems. SecureFiles is a major paradigm shift in the choice of files storage. SecureFiles is specifically engineered to deliver high performance for file data comparable to that of traditional file systems, while retaining the advantages of the Oracle Database. SecureFiles offers the best database and file system architecture attributes for storing unstructured content. SAP customers benefit from SecureFiles because of

SAP VBDATA Throughput (Insert/Read/Delete) Performance Improvement Factor

row size in KB

LONGs (9.2,10.2)

LOBs (10.2,11.2)

Securefiles 11.2

Significantly faster access times compared to LOBs in SAP environments Increased transaction throughput on SAP cluster tables especially with RAC Prerequisite for compression of SAP tables containing LOBs (e.g. cluster tables)

Additional Encryption

Advanced Encryption within 11g includes RMAN Backup Encryption, so no one can read data from a (stolen) backup. In addition customers can easily encrypt export file with Oracle Data Pump unstructured LOB data with SecureFile Encryption.
DG Secure Network Transport

Overall transaction throughput increases when LOB data is stored in SecureFiles (see figure below). LOB data stored in SecureFiles delivers equal or better performance compared with LOB data stored in LONG or BasicFiles (LOB implementation prior to 11g). SecureFiles improve dramatically the scalability of SAP applications running against Oracle Database 11g RAC but also Oracle Database 11g Single Instance benefits substantially from SecureFiles. Therefore a clear recommendation is given to migrate all existing LONG and Basicfile LOB data to SecureFiles.Hi
Tablespace Encryption

Data Guard provides a secure environment and prevents tampering with redo data as it is being transferred to the standby database. To enable secure transmission of redo data, set up every database in the Data Guard configuration to use a password file, and set the password for the SYS user identically on every system.
More Security Database Vault

On many agendas security is in the forefront and for customers becoming much more important. Oracle has a lot of features in the area of security. Especially for SAP customers it is now very easy to encrypt sensitive data. Included within the Advanced Encryption is the technology to encrypt all data in a tablespace. Prior to 11g, Oracle provided security features such as Column Encryption through Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Client Server (SAP Application Server) Network Encryption.g

Oracle Database Vault is also certified for use with SAP applications. With Oracle Database Vault, protective realms around SAP application database objects can be established to prevent privileged database users from accessing sensitive data and to enforce separation of duties among privileged database users.

D A T A B A S E

11g
Real Application Testing (RAT)

Database Replay provides DBAs and system administrators with the ability to faithfully, accurately and realistically rerun actual production workloads, including online user and batch workloads, in test environments. By capturing the full database workload from production systems, including all concurrency, dependencies and timing, Database Replay enables you to realistically test system changes by essentially recreating production workloads on the test system, something that a set of scripts can never duplicate. With Database Replay, DBAs and system administrators can test: Database upgrades, patches, parameter, schema changes, etc. Configuration changes such as conversion from a single instance to RAC, ASM, etc. Storage, network, interconnect changes Operating system, hardware migrations, patches, upgrades, parameter changes SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) can predict and prevent SQL execution performance problems caused by environment changes. SQL Performance Analyzer provides a granular view of the impact of environment changes on SQL execution plans and statistics by running the SQL statements serially before and after the changes

SAP customers can benefit from Direct NFS in the following way:

Improves throughput of NAS solutions such as NetApp Up to 50% more database throughput in NAS environments with multiple NICs Up to 20% CPU savings on database server Works for Single Instance and Real Application Clusters (RAC) Works for UNIX/Linux and Windows Platforms Highly Available Network Solution Faster, easier and more available than any OS or NAS based bonding or trunking solution Direct NFS with NAS may provide higher throughput than traditional, more complex SAN solutions Superior to any bonding solution faster and easier Better throughput than most SAN solutions

Online Patching

Direct NFS

With Oracle Database 11g Release 2, you can configure Oracle Database to access NAS devices directly using Oracle Direct NFS Client, rather than using the operating system kernel NFS client. Oracle Database will access files stored on the NFS server directly through the integrated Direct NFS Client eliminating the overhead imposed by the operating system kernel NFS. These files are also accessible via the operating system kernel NFS client thereby allowing seamless administration.

A regular RDBMS patch is comprised of one or more object files and/or libraries. Installing a regular patch requires shutting down the RDBMS instance, relinking the oracle binary, and restarting the instance; uninstalling a regular patch requires the same steps. With Oracle Database 11g, it is possible to install single or bundle patches completely online, without requiring the database instance to be shut down, and without requiring RAC or Data Guard configurations. With online patching, which is integrated with OPatch, each process associated with the instance checks for patched code at a safe execution point, and then copies the code into its process space.
Snapshot Standby

Easy conversion of a physical standby database to a reporting database A physical standby database can be opened read/write for reporting purposes, and then flashed back to a point in the past to be easily converted back to a physical standby database. At this point, Data Guard automatically synchronizes the standby database with the primary database. This allows the physical standby database to be utilized for read/write reporting activities for SAP applications e.g. NetWeaver BI.

Only Oracle Database 1 1g Release 2 provides for SAP customers

Best Performance & Scalability
Oracle other DBs

Fully integrated, platform independent active-active clustering solution

for both SAP and database through RAC and Clusterware/SAPCTL

Dictionary only add column with default High Performance NAS Storage through Direct NFS
Best Deployment Flexibility

Online Patching Real Application Testing Option

Best Availability & Reliability

Updatable Standby Database Fully integrated, platform independent active-active clustering solution
for both SAP and database through RAC and Clusterware/SAPCTL Best Support for Very Large Databases

RMAN Backup Compression SecureFile out-of-line LOB data compression Deferred Segments Creation Disk-Based Bitmap Indexes Dictionary only add column with default High Performance NAS Storage through Direct NFS

Best Database Security

Tablespace Encryption RMAN Backup Encryption Data Guard Secure Network Transport Database Vault

Best Manageability & Self-Management

Real Application Testing Option Online Patching Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)

Oracle the # 1 Database for Deploying SAP Applications

oracle.com/sap saponoracle_de@oracle.com
Copyright 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its a affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

10

R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N T E S T I N G C E RT I F I E D F O R S A P

Making a change to the SAP database can represent a significant risk to an organization. The effects of an unexpected problem could be widely felt and have serious consequences. For this reason, testing of changes prior to production deployment is considered critical. The cost involved in testing using traditional methods can be very high both in time and money. Even after testing, many problems will only be discovered in production, and as a result end-users will suffer from poor performance or possibly even outages. Oracle now has a new and unique testing tool for the Oracle Database called Real Application Testing. This Database option is comprised of two complementary features, SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) and Database Replay. Together, these features can help ensure that database changes do not negatively impact SAP availability and performance. They significantly improve the quality and lower the cost of testing changes to the SAP database system.
SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA)

upgrades, and patches) can cause the performance of previously well tuned SQL statements to regress, which can dramatically impact system performance for endusers. Until now, it was difficult if not impossible to predict how day to day operational changes to the database will impact application SQL performance. With SQL Performance Analyzer, or SPA, you can now know exactly how SQL will behave after routine system changes. SPA automatically captures production SQL statements from your SAP database and re-executes them following a change to measure the impact. The statements are executed serially, in isolation from each other and regressed statements are automatically highlighted. Integration with SQL Plan Management and SQL Tuning Advisor enables automatic tuning of these statements to address any regressions prior to a change being implemented in production. Orchestration of the entire SPA process can be done using Enterprise Manager, which provides a number of workflows for testing common operations such as Database Upgrades. There is also a Guided Workflow which enables custom experiments to be conducted.

One of the key tasks for a DBA is to tune SQL statements for optimal performance. Changes to database systems (such as optimizer statistics refresh, database

O r a c l e R e a l A p p l i c a t i o n Te s t i n g ( R AT ) O p t i o n c e r t i f i e d f o r S A P

11

Real Application Testing was introduced in the 11g release of the Oracle Database, however, SQL Performance Analyzer is also available for previous releases of the Oracle Database. Consequently, SQL Performance Analyzer can be used to test changes in SAP environments even if there are no immediate plans to move to Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Some examples of changes that could be assessed using SQL Performance Analyzer in SAP environments are: Upgrade SAP Database from Oracle Database 10g Release 2 to 11g Release 2 Install Database Patchset Migration from single instance to RAC Implement Partitioning Implement Advanced Compression Changes to FIX_CONTROLS parameter settings Creation of Histograms on SAP tables Some of these changes can actually be tested safely on the production system, therefore removing the need for establishing a separate test environment. There are no SAP specific patches required to use SQL Performance Analyzer. Further general information on using SQL Performance Analyzer can be found in the following documents: Technical White Paper: SQL Performance Analyzer Viewlet: SQL Performance Analyzer in Oracle Database 11g Oracle Database Real Application Testing Users Guide
Database Replay

Creating the synthetic workload can take a considerable time and requires programming expertise User behaviour is not well understood, so many possible workflows are often missed in the synthetic tests Production scale database concurrency is near impossible to simulate with these tools A full application stack is required for testing as these tools simulate end users Database Replay makes it possible to capture a workload on a production system with negligible performance overhead and replay it on a test system with the exact timing, concurrency, and transaction characteristics of the original workload. Database Replay is suitable for testing changes to the database tier and anything below it, such as storage or OS platform. This also means that tiers such as the Web and Application Server tier are not required in the test environment. The Database Replay capture process has been backported and certified for SAP databases running on Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.4). Changes that Database Replay could be used to validate include: SAP Database upgrade from 10gR2 (10.2.0.4) to 11gR2 Platform migration such as from Windows to Oracle Solaris Database Patchset install Changes to FIX_CONTROLS parameter settings Schema changes

Load testing today is generally done using tools that allow testing teams to generate synthetic workloads based on what they expect users to do on a system. These workloads can then be replayed by application virtual users, which simulate the end users by submitting requests to the application. Although widely used, this approach has a number of shortcomings when it comes to testing database level changes:

Migration from single instance to RAC Implement Partitioning Implement Advanced Compression Database storage changes (e.g. Direct NFS) Tablespace encryption Object Reorganization

12

Database Replay is included with Oracle Database 11g. In addition, Database Replay capture can be run against Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 and higher version. To use Database Replay in SAP environments, Patch 9233285 is required on the Replay database. For more technical information on using Database Replay please refer to the following whitepaper: Technical White Paper: Database Replay Viewlet: Database Replay in Oracle Database 11g Oracle Database Real Application Testing Users Guide

Results of Testing

The Oracle/SAP Development Team recently concluded comprehensive testing of SAP applications using both SQL Performance Analyzer and Database Replay. The testing consisted of SAP ERP and BW workloads running in-house on the ABAP stack. Further testing was undertaken at a large utilities customer running the SAP IS-U (Industry Specific Utilities) module. The objective was to use Real Application Testing to measure the effects of Advanced Compression for OLTP and SecureFiles on DML operations for SAP ERP. The testing activity consisted of using Database Replay to capture a production workload from a 10.2.0.4 SAP database. This workload was then replayed multiple times against both compressed and non-compressed Oracle Database 11g Release 2 databases. Key AWR metrics from the replays are shown below.

DB size after normal reorg: DB size after reorg and OLTP + SecureFiles (med) + Index compression: Space saved (~ 55%) KEY AWR Metrics Load Profile Redo size/s Logical reads/s Block changes/s Physical reads/s Physical writes/s User calls/s Parses/s Hard parses/s W/A MB processed/s Executes/s Transactions/s Instance Efficiency Percentages (Target 100%) Buffer Hit % Library Hit % Host CPU (CPUs: 8 Cores: 8 Sockets: 4) %User %System %WIO %Idle 12,30 4,40 12,30 81,80 81,91 95,08 Replay without Compression 1) 153456,80 18748,80 459,70 3820,60 74,60 1806,50 247,20 32,70 12,50 2572,10 4,50

3562,00 GB 1589,00 GB 1973,00 GB Replay with Compression Diff%

203407,00 18210,00 595,20 1635,80 72,00 2042,10 254,10 33,60 12,70 2834,60 4,80 91,79 95,52 12,80 4,20 11,20 81,80

32,55 -2,87 29,48 -57,18 -3,49 13,04 2,79 2,75 1,60 10,21 6,67 12,06 0,46 4,07 -4,55 -8,94 0,00

1) normalized redo (+6,67%) is 163692/s for uncompressed run

O r a c l e R e a l A p p l i c a t i o n Te s t i n g ( R AT ) O p t i o n c e r t i f i e d f o r S A P

13

Compression
N Y N Y N Y N Y

SQL ID
g9makkh1cnq94 g9makkh1cnq94 6kxdz6nknay0m 6kxdz6nknay0m c42810chs804v c42810chs804v 8wz2ywwcrh7c7 8wz2ywwcrh7c7

SQL Text
INSERT INTO ALCLASTOOL VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALCLASTOOL VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSGE VALUES( :A0 , :A1 ,:A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSGE VALUES( :A0 , :A1 ,:A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSPF VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSPF VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSMC VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4... INSERT INTO ALGRPCUSMC VALUES( :A0 , :A1 , :A2 , :A3 , :A4...

Executions
37648 40434 18257 18889 4100 4202 2144 1820

Elapsed Time
180,29 215,54 80,88 92,12 20,51 24,07 12,48 13,18

CPU Time
152,97 164,10 71,32 74,99 16,67 17,32 9,08 7,94

Buffer Gets
1136194 1118975 518407 532217 134523 137029 77571 65849

Disk Reads
32901 33911 9978 9615 3652 3493 2758 2289

Module
SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU SAPLSALU

Sample SQL Tuning Set Comparison

In order to further analyze the effects of Advanced Compression on DML operations, SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) was used concurrently with Database Replay. As the workload was being replayed, SPAs automatic cursor cache capture feature was used to capture the SQL statements into a SQL Tuning Set. SQL Tuning Set contains the text of the SQL statements along with their bind values, execution plans and statistics. This was done for both replays, with compression enabled and without compression. In all over 5000 SQL statements were analyzed. The table below shows the SQL Tuning Set comparison of some the most frequently executed DML operations in the SAP workload. Overall the test results were very instructive. Key findings are described as follows (note: results will vary according to your workload): No significant overhead observed during capture process Advanced Compression reduced database size by 50% Redo generated increased by ~25% Physical reads reduced by 60% CPU usage stayed flat Problems encountered: During the testing bug # 9233285 was encountered. Patch for this bug must be applied before using Real Application Testing with SAP systems.

Conclusion Real Application Testing proved a vital tool for validating upgrade from Oracle Database 10g Release 2 to 11g Release 2. The ability to test with production workloads and SQL statements is essential for testing business critical applications like SAP and this feature will significantly mitigate upgrade and change risk when used by experienced DBAs.

14

The positive results from using the RAT option for the first time enable us to look to the future and the upcoming changes in a much calmer manner than before.
CHRISTIAN DUSCHL, Teamleader System Operations Management

S U C C E S S F U L T E S T O F O R A C L E D ATA B A S E 1 1 g R E L E A S E 2 R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N T E S T I N G O P T I O N AT STADTW E R K E M U N I C H ( S W M )
Stadtwerke Munich Services GmbH
Industry:
Utility/Public Sector

Annual Revenue:
4.2 billion

Employees:
Around 6,800

Im

Making a change to the SAP database can represent a significant risk to an organization. The effects of an unexpected problem could be widely felt and have serious consequences. For this reason, testing of changes prior to production deployment is considered critical. The cost involved in testing using traditional methods can be very high both in time and money. Even after testing, many problems will only be discovered in production, and as a result end-users will suffer from poor performance or possibly even outages. The Real Application Testing (RAT) Option is comprised of two complementary features, SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) and Database Replay. Together, these features can help ensure that database changes do not negatively impact SAP availability and performance. They significantly improve the quality and lower the cost of testing changes to the SAP database system.
Facts instead of surprises

For Christian Duschl, SAP Team-Leader System Operations Management, the risks and contingencies associated with making changes to the SAP environment were always a high-cost challenge: Previously, we were not able to determine the dialog load with sufficient precision before commissioning new systems. Surprises were part of our day-to-day work. Having used RAT for the first time and gained some experience with it, we believe that this will finally become a thing of the past. The test scenario was compressing the database using the Advanced Compression option and to examine the effects on system performance. The production load of two RAC nodes was recorded over two working days and the database was transferred to a test server along with the data volume for this period. In a first step, the database was reorganized in a conventional manner, without being compressed. A representative 12 hour section of the recorded production load was then replayed. The replay contained the SAP ERP user load only. Other applications, such as those from the call center area (non-SAP), were not taken into account and were filtered out during replay. The results from the replay were later used as a basis for further analysis. In the next step, all tables and indexes were compressed using OLTP Table, SecureFiles and Index compression.

The IT specialists at SWM, are among the pioneers who are using the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Real Application Testing option together with the SAP application. SWM Stadtwerke Mnchen, a public utility and service company based in the mega city of Munich that offers a wide range of products, has data volumes of more than 3 Terabyte which are being accessed by 1500 to 1800 SAP users. The CPU utilization of the production systems is therefore extremely high.

O r a c l e R e a l A p p l i c a t i o n Te s t i n g ( R AT ) a t S t a d t w e r k e M u n i c h ( S W M )

15

A second run, which included exactly the same dataset as the first run, was then tested against the compressed database and the results were compared with the first run.
No additional costs and less disk space

Manfred Fischer, Manager of SAP system maintenance in information and process technology and general coordinator of the RAT project, summarizes the results as follows: When we were recording the basic data over two days for the test, we couldnt find any negative effects on the CPU or I/O load of the production system and the dialog response times didnt change. The compression result was quite impressive. The amount of disk space shrunk from almost 3.6 TB to around 1.6 TB, resulting in a space saving of 55%. What was even more interesting was the effect on the CPU load when using compression. The result was amazing. Thanks to the enormous reduction in I/O of almost 60% and considerably better utilization of the main memory, the additional costs expected for compression were compensated in full for the CPU load. Another positive side-effect was a slight increase in transaction throughput. Because the hit rate of the database buffer cache improved considerably, there was less physical I/O to the disk subsystem. As the solution does not show any performance impacts, the Advanced Compression option can be used on the SAP ERP production systems at Stadtwerke Mnchen if necessary. According to Manfred Fischer, SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) also proved to be a key functionality. It was particularly helpful in evaluating the performance of important queries at statement level, which must not be negatively impacted.
Calculated risks and cost savings

In the future, the SAP environment at Stadtwerke Mnchen is to be split into three units (Network, Delivery and Coresystem) which will be designed to mirror the data volumes in the production system and various test and security systems, among other things. Because each one of these segments should have the capacity of the current system, the data volumes will triple in the final expansion stage. Given such complex tasks, Christian Duschl is giving an extremely positive conclusion from the test results with RAT: The positive results from using the RAT option for the first time enable us to look to the future and the upcoming changes in a much calmer manner than before. Unknown risks when making release changes, growing data volumes or deregulating an entire SAP system, as was the case here, loose their fears for many users at least for the database level. Using RAT will enable IT departments to demonstrate extremely positive cost-value results to the controlling departments.

16

S A P PA RT I T I O N I N G E N G I N E R E L E A S E D B Y S A P
The SAP Partitioning Engine provides a solution for SAP on Oracle database systems that can use a predefined set of about 30 large application tables for partitioning, based on a technology concept from Oracle. SAP Partitioning Engine was released for customers in January 2010. The solution offers full integration of range partitioning into SAP OLTP products (e.g. ERP).

Fully integrated

The principle of partitioning is splitting a large table in smaller parts, called partitions, grouping and separating the rows of the table based on the content of one or more columns. Rows fulfilling the same criteria are placed in the same partition. This also allows queries of a table to execute faster because the data will now be grouped, instead of being distributed across the whole table.
Dr. Christian Graf, Development Manager, DB Platforms Oracle & Informix, OS Platforms HPUX, Solaris, Tru64 SAP AG

Unlike SAP BI, partitioning is not used by default in the SAP ERP system, for mainly historical reasons. Today, SAP installations typically have database sizes of around 1TB, whereas SAP customers using special functionalities such as the SAP retail module are running databases of 10TB and greater. Such large databases have several challenges: Old data must be archived, but archiving can have a negative impact on database performance. Deleting data from the database generates a huge transaction load, affecting normal data processing. Archiving very large tables can be a never-ending job. Once archiving is complete, follow-up tasks are needed either to rebuild fragmented indexes and/or to free up space in the tablespaces. These additional tasks occupy maintenance windows for the system, reducing overall availability. Response times to user queries and batch processing must be guaranteed. This becomes more and more difficult because the tables are constantly growing in size. Processing larger tables uses up much more time and resources on the database as well as on the application servers. Because of the longer runtime, work processes take longer which means that more powerful application servers are needed.

Complex analysis and maintenance jobs of partitioning can be automated. Therefore, Oracle in the initial phase of the project had developed a set of tools that was based on Oracles own technologies, mainly PL/SQL procedures. This worked fine for a few installations but, it was a consulting based solution which is useful for non-standard SAP requirements, it should not be necessary for standard environments. To make the innovative method available to more customers SAP has developed their own solution, based on the concept provided by Oracle. The SAP Partitioning Engine is fully integrated in the SAP system. It offers a predefined set of about 30 application tables to be partitioned based on time based criteria. So existing non-partitioned tables will be converted through ABAP/SAP brtools task. Also partition maintanance is fully automated through the internal SAP SM37 job, requiring no DBA intervention. A partitioning service for non-BI SAP systems has been available from Oracle for several years but, until now was not integrated into SAPs DB admin tools. The Partitioning Engine will be available with WEB AS 6.20, SAP ECC 5.0/6.0, Business Suite 7, brtools 7.10 and running Oracle 10.2.0.4 or higher. For other prerequisits please see SAP Note 1333328. For partitioning without the Partitioning Engine, please see SAP Note Oracle Partitioning 742243 and SAP note 722188 FAQ.

SAP Partitioning Engine

17

The bulding concept of the SAP Partitioning Engine is based on the following three main parts:
Analysis and Statement Creation

Advantages and Benefits

First part is an ABAP program, which analyzes the content of the document column of an application table and creates as output a DDL (Data Definition Language) statement for the table and indexes with suitable partition ranges. This kind of transaction initially generates non-partitioned tables into partitioned ones. This includes built-in functionality. Such as well-known SAP tables, their partitioning key as well as an automatic adjustment for partition sizes. Analysis task can be done even on very large tables in short time with the help of the underlaying number-ranges object defined in table NRIV (NRIV Partitioning).
Partition Transformation

The SAP Partitioning Engine avoids negative sideeffects when archiving by seperating historic and current application data using range partitioning (Oracle offers several other types of partitioning including: list and hash partitioning, which are normally not suitable for SAP ERP systems). Range Partitioning has a couple of advantages or benefits: Index and table formatting is restricted to the partition with the data records to be archieved. Archiving transactions and running application transactions access different partitions of the table. Block usage is improved by avoiding mixing old data and new data. Further advantage, disk space is reclaimed by merging the partitions that are empty after archiving and partitioning can also improve query performance. Using the SAP Partitioning Engine allows SAP customers to make use of the Oracle partitioning technology, without the need to be familiar with Oracle programming. The predefinition of the most common candidate tables for partitioning allows less experienced Oracle users to benefit from this innovative approach.

Second part of partitioning engine is a new function in the brspace tool, which reads the previously created DDL statement and performs the online redefinition. It includes LOB migration if the table contains long field. The new online table generation can be done without downtime, because brspace use Oracle Technology (DBMS_REDEFINITION-Package).
Partitioning Care Process

Third part is also an ABAP program, specifically for maintaining the partitioning schema. One maintaining task done by this program is that if new transaction data are inserted in the partitioned table automatically additional partitions are created if needed. If the table is archived, the number of rows stored in the oldest partitions will decrease. The transaction of the SAP Partitioning Engine is responsible for freeing up the space no longer used in these partitions. The space is freed by executing a merge operation on the old partitions. The result is one small partition containing the remaining rows and a lot of free space within the tablespace, which can be used for creating new partitions. This transaction can also be executed while SAP is up and running.

Starting Partitioning to select a table with SAP Partitioning Engine (Source: SAP)

18

R E L AT I O N S H I P I N T E RV I E W O R A C L E D ATA B A S E A N D S A P
Horst Udo Schulte, Vice President Global Partner Programs, SAP AG Gerhard Kuppler, Senior Director Corporate SAP Account, Oracle Corporation Listen to the Oracle webcast at www.oracle.com/sap

2.) Mr. Kuppler, what importance does Oracle attach to the database technology partnership with SAP? Kuppler:

Satisfied mutual customers ! Gerhard Kuppler Horst Udo Schulte For more than 20 years Oracle has been the safe, reliable, and scalable database of choice for SAP customers. The Oracle database is constantly optimized for SAP Business Suite Applications and around the world more than two thirds of all mid-size to high-end SAP customers in every industry, entrust their application deployments to Oracle databases. Customers are running SAP applications with Oracle databases on the same code base on Unix, Linux and Windows operating systems. Oracle was one of the technology partners involved in developing SAP R/3, when SAP began developing R/3 in 1988. Oracles database technologies and SAPs solutions are very closely linked and perfectly integrated with one another. We managed to establish our Oracle database technologies as the number one database amongst SAP customers around the globe. The very large and growing customer base expects a cost benefit from our two companies technologies in the long term and also to receive first-class database support from both of us. Oracle is deploying a significant amount of resources at SAP HQ Walldorf Germany, Palo Alto and Tokyo to deliver safe, reliable and scalable DB technology and round the clock services with a great long term commitment to the mutual customer base.

1.) Mr. Schulte, the database partnership with Oracle has thrived for more than 20 years. Can you summarize this for us in a few key words? Schulte:

Firstly, our intent is to continue to satisfy the tens of thousands mutual SAP on Oracle database customers. Our joint work has always been characterized by a constant desire to provide mutual customers with efficient service and support solutions for their application needs in order to bring additional benefit to their business and to offer optimum protection of their investments. Secondly, continually accelerating and optimizing the use of safe, reliable and scalable database technology in a mission-critical application environment, something we have achieved time and again. And thirdly, we have enjoyed a very successful service and support partnership with Oracle Corporation. For the benefit of our mutual customers, we have a long term contractual frame work and resources in place driving this forward. The Oracle team supporting our joint relationship has been in place for more than 10 years, this stability in personnel has been very benefical to both SAP and our mutual customers. The Oracle SAP resources include database development engineers and 24 by 7 follow the sun customer support.

Relationship Interview Oracle Database and SAP

19

3.) Mr. Schulte, Mr. Kuppler, for you what are the main objectives for both parties continuing to successfully drive this relationship forwards in the future? Schulte:

We are committed to maintain a productive Database relationship with SAP to keep the mutual base and also new SAP on Oracle customers satified and provide them with the latest Database innovations like: Real Applications Clusters, Database Vault and new Oracle Database 11g functionality. Resulting in scalable performance, cost savings, better service levels and easy system administration.
4.) Mr. Schulte, Mr. Kuppler, how frequently does SAP and Oracle renew their partnership agreements? Schulte:

We are committed to the success of our mutual customers. Since 1988, SAP AG has been using Oracle as a Tier 1 development database, on which SAP develops, ports and migrates its products to function optimally with Oracles database technologies. This will once again be underlined with the new Oracle Database 11g Release 2. It will contain various specific functionality designed and implemented for the needs of the SAP Business Suite.
Kuppler:

We have renewed our agreement approximately every 3 years and we plan to continue this process for the benefit of our joint customers.
Kuppler:

Let me add, the release strategy of SAP AG for Oracle Database versions is to certify only the terminal release of a new database version. This strategy is based on the overall requests of the SAP customer community to minimize the number of version upgrades in complex SAP environments. It has been proven a successful roll out process with previous terminal releases.

With 2/3 of all mid-size to high-end SAP customers running on Oracle databases we have a mutual interest in doing what is best for our joint install base.

20

PERFORMANCE MEETS SOLUTIONS EXPERTISE

Oracle Database on Fujitsu PRIMERGY Cluster Delivers World Record Results with SAP Business Intelligence Data Mart Standard Application Benchmark

In October and December 2009 Oracle and Fujitsu strikingly demonstrated the success of their longstanding partnership with joint press announcements about two world record results in a row with the SAP Business Intelligence Data Mart Standard Application Benchmark. The SAP BI Data Mart Standard Application Benchmark provides a real-world indication of enterprise database performance by measuring system performance in handling high-volume queries to a business warehouse system database. The key figure is the number of query navigation steps per hour against an enormous amount of data. The first announcement was made during Oracle Open World about a two-tier world record result achieved on a system comprised of a single-node Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S5 server (1), Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Linux. The test was also executed on a two-node Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S5 cluster. The one-node result (320, 363 navigation steps per hour) and two-node result (2) (609,349 navigation steps per hour) not only indicated excellent scalability, but also delivered more than 67% higher performance per core and 3.3 times more performance-perprocessor than the highest IBM DB2 results (3) on the SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark. Performance is an important factor when handling a huge amount of data and in ensuring the acceptance of data warehouse application users. However, it is not the only aspect to keep in mind when deciding on a data warehouse environment. The option of starting small and increasing step-by-step as demands grow can be a decisive factor as well as the high availability of the application.

Such demands urged Fujitsu and Oracle specialists to think about an advanced concept that aligns performance with scalability and high availability. The one and two-node benchmark results already revealed the excellent scalability of our PRIMERGY servers in combination with the Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters, says Joachim Witte, Senior Director, Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center. Thus it was almost a logical next step to continue tests with more server nodes. The following test series underlined the positive results of the first sequence and has resulted in a new world record. On the three-node Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX 300 S5 cluster throughput was increased to 900,309 query navigation steps (3), while a further all-time high of 1,165,742 query navigation steps (4) was achieved by the four-node server cluster. So Fujitsu and Oracle were once again happily able to jointly announce a new world record on December 1, says Joachim Witte. The extremely successful benchmark series is much more than a performance boost. In fact, it is a perfect example of outstanding performance that is obtained and embedded in using an intelligent concept. In comparison to traditional clusters, the dynamic solution designed by experts from the Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center in Walldorf (Germany) also offers high system availability because Oracle RACs monitor the environment and automatically migrate affected processes to other nodes should a particular server fail. Furthermore, customers have the option of starting small with just one server node and growing step-by-step as demands and data volumes increase.

Benchmark SAP on Oracle with Fujitsu

21

The successful combination of cost-efficient server technology and innovative database and cluster technology from Oracle also underlines that Fujitsu PRIMERGY x86 servers today are starting to match the high performance of enterprise servers and are thus also suitable as a migration path for enterprise warehousing applications from end-of-life Unix-based systems.
Note:

Operating system all servers: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. RDBMS: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). Technology platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (non-Unicode). Configuration: 2 servers (2 active nodes): Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300-S5, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 96 GB main memory. (3) The SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark performed on October 17, 2008 by IBM in Rochester, MN, USA was certified on October 31, 2008 (certification number 2008063) with the following data: Throughput/hour: 182,112 query navigation steps. Operating system, Central server: i 6.1. RDBMS: DB2 for i 6.1. Platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (non- Unicode). Configuration: Central server: IBM Power System 570, 4 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, POWER6, 5 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 4 MB L2 cache per core, 32 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory. (4) The SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark performed on October 14, 2009 by Fujitsu in Walldorf, Germany has been certified (certification number 2009044) with the following data: Throughput/hour (query navigation steps): 900,309. Operating system, all servers: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. RDBMS: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). Technology platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (non-Unicode). Configuration: 3 servers (3 active nodes): Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300-S5, 2 processors/8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 96 GB main memory.

The latest Fujitsu results on the SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark have been certified under the following certification numbers: 2009036 (1) (single node), 2009037 (2) (two nodes) and 2009045 (5) (four nodes). Results as of October 14, 2009. For more details, see http://www.sap.com/benchmark (1) The SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark performed on August 8, 2009 by Fujitsu in Walldorf, Germany has been certified (certification number 2009036) with the following data: Throughput/hour (query navigation steps): 320,363. Operating system, central server: SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10. RDBMS: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). Technology platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (nonUnicode). Configuration: Central server: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300-S5, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 96 GB main memory. (2) The SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark performed on August 11, 2009 by Fujitsu in Walldorf, Germany has been certified (certification number 2009037) with the following data: Throughput/hour (query navigation steps): 609,349.

So Fujitsu and Oracle were once again happily able to jointly announce a new world record.

Joachim Witte, Senior Director, Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center.

22

Benchmark SAP on Oracle with Fujitsuu j

(5) The SAP BI-D Standard Application Benchmark performed on October 13, 2009 by Fujitsu in Walldorf, Germany has been certified (certification number 2009045) with the following data: Through-put/hour (query navigation steps): 1,165,742. Operating system all servers: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. RDBMS: Oracle Dtabase 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). Technology platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (non-Unicode). Configuration: 4 servers (4 active nodes): Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300-S5, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 96 GB main memory.

About Fujitsu

Fujitsu is a leading provider of IT-based business solutions for the global marketplace. With approximately 175,000 employees supporting customers in 70 countries, Fujitsu combines a worldwide corps of systems and services experts with highly reliable computing and communications products and advanced microelectronics to deliver added value to customers. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.6 trillion yen (US$47 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009. For more information, please see:
http://www.fujitsu.com

About Fujitsu Technology Solution

Fujitsu Technology Solutions is the leading European IT infrastructure provider with a presence in all key markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, plus India, serving large-, medium- and small-sized companies as well as consumers. With its Dynamic Infrastructures approach, the company offers a full portfolio of IT products, solutions and services, ranging from clients to datacenter solutions, Managed Infrastructure and Infrastructure-asa-Service. Fujitsu Technology Solutions employs more than 10,000 people and is part of the global Fujitsu Group. For more information, please see: ts.fujitsu.com/aboutus SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

Benchmark SAP on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Fujitsu

23

Oracle Press Release

O R A C L E D ATA B A S E 1 1 g D E L I V E R S W O R L D R E C O R D R E S U LT F O R A T W O - T I E R C O N F I G U R AT I O N O N S A P B U S I N E S S I N T E L L I G E N C E - D ATA M A RT S TA N D A R D A P P L I C AT I O N B E N C H M A R K
Oracle Database 11g Running on New Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX600 S5 Server Raises the Performance Bar for Business Intelligence Application Workloads

Trademarks

Redwood Shores, Calif. March 30, 2010

News Facts

Oracle Database 11g set a world-record result for a two-tier configuration on the SAP Business Intelligence-Data Mart (BI-D) standard application benchmark(1). On a system comprised of one Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX600 S5 server, equipped with the new Intel Xeon X7560 2.26 GHZ processor, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on Linux delivered a world-record result of 854,649 query navigation steps per hour on the two-tier SAP BI-D standard application benchmark.
Supporting Quotes

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of March 30, 2010. For more information, please visit
http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

The SAP BI Data Mart (BI-D) Standard Application Benchmark performed on March 07, 2010 by Fujitsu in Walldorf, Germany, has been certified with the following data: (1) Throughput/hour (query navigation steps): 854,649 CPU utilization of central server: 96% (1 node active: 96%) Operating system, central server: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 RDBMS: Oracle Database 11g Technology platform release: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 technology platform (non-Unicode) Configuration: 1 server (1 active node): Fujitsu Primergy RX600-S5, 4 processors/32 cores/64 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560, 2.26 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory Certification number: 2010011.
Contact Info:

With this benchmark result, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 demonstrates performance leadership on two-tier SAP BI-D standard application benchmark and provides a solid proof-point for customers seeking the best foundation for their business intelligence applications, said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle.
Supporting Resources

Oracle Database Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle Benchmarks About the SAP BI-Data Mart Standard Application Benchmark
About Oracle

Teri Whitaker Oracle +1.650.506.9914

teri.whitaker@oracle.com

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the worlds most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

Kristin Reeves Blanc & Otus +1.415.856.5145

kreeves@blancandotus.com

24

ORACLE ON SOLARIS: BREAKING SAP BENCHMARK RECORDS

In multiple SAP benchmark tests, Oracle Database on the Solaris operating system has once again demonstrated its outstanding performance and scaling capabilities.

The key results are discussed below

How does the combination of SAP and Oracle running on Sun compare with the competition? For comparison purposes we can use the benchmark results for a 2-CPU Intel system and an 8-CPU AMD system. For these we have recent results for Windows with SQL Server, Linux with MaxDB, and Solaris with Oracle, which can be used for comparison.

The difference becomes more apparent in larger systems. This demonstrates Suns and Oracles considerable experience in the operation of large systems. The available results for the 8processor AMD systems show a speed increase for Oracle/Sun in the range of 21%-25%. With 48 cores and 48 threads, these tested systems have three times as many threads as the 2-processor systems. The combination of Oracle and the Solaris operating system is the best combination for large SAP systems. It offers the best load distribution over the many threads. If we analyze the current processor roadmaps, we notice a trend towards more threads for all manufacturers. Because future 2-processor systems will also have more threads, customers will benefit from this combination even with smaller systems.
High-End Results

(Add each relevant database to diagram) First, lets take a look at the 2-CPU results. All results in the above diagram were measured with servers that each had 2 Intel Xeon x5570 CPUs with 8 cores and 16 threads. The speed increase over SQL Server is 11% when compared with Windows/SQL Server and 20% for Linux/MaxDB.

Since July 2008 the list of 2-tier SAP SD benchmarks has been headed by a Sun M9000 system. Naturally, this benchmark used Oracle Database 10g for the database as this ensures optimum use of the large processing power of the 64 CPUs with 256 cores and 512 threads. The figure of 39,100 SAP SD users is based on the SAP non-Unicode character set.

Benchmark SAP on Oracle-Solaris

25

New Benchmark Version

Since 1, January 2009, there was a new two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 4 (Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark. This new release has higher CPU requirements and fewer users compared to the previous two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 (non-Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark. For example: The new version of the benchmark requires Unicode and the Application layer uses a new encoding; the response time was cut in half, form 2 seconds to 1 second. Please refer to: http://www12.sap.com/solutions/benchmark /pdf/January2009newsfaq.pdf for more information. So far Oracle has performed two benchmarks on Enterprise Servers with the new SAP SD benchmark based on SAP Enhancement Package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode). These two results jointly top the list of best results. A Sun M9000 system with 32 CPUs (128 cores and 256 threads) was measured first, achieving 17,430 SAP SD users. A good month later Oracle outperformed this result. A Sun M9000 system with twice the number of CPUs achieved 32,000 SAP SD users. This result highlights the SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers performance leadership at the high-end of SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark and underscores the optimal performance of SAP ERP running on SPARC64 systems with the Solaris OS regardless of the encoding methodology used in the application.
SAP with Oracle RAC

Running the Solaris 10 operating system on a cluster of four Sun Blade X6270 server modules, each with two Intel Xeon x5570 quad-core 2.93 GHz processors (8 cores, 16 threads), Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters achieved 13,718 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users, outperforming by 66 percent the previous best eight processor two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark result with the SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) held by Microsoft SQL Server (2). This result also delivered exceptional one-, two- and four-node results on the Sun Blade X6270, demonstrating the outstanding scalability of Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters. When measured from one-, two- and four-node configurations, as documented and certified by SAP, Oracle Database with Oracle Real Application Clusters demonstrated near-linear scalability, achieving 3,800(3), 7,220(4) and 13,718(1) SAP SDParallel Benchmark users, respectively, while providing a high level of performance and availability. No other vendor has delivered results showing this level of performance or scalability on the Intel Xeon x5570 platform. Additionally, the single-node result with Oracle Real Application Clusters delivers more performance-per-processor and per-core on the SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark running SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) and outperforms the best SAP SD two-tier results from IBM DB2(5) and Microsoft SQL Server(6) with this benchmark result, utilizing the same number of cores.
Oracle Database continues to outpace the competition in performance and scalability. This benchmark demonstrates once again that Real Application Clusters scales performance for real-world complex business applications. Together, Oracle and Sun are a winning combination.
Juan Loaiza, Senior Vice President, Systems Technology, Oracle.

Many SAP customers are looking for a way of migrating expensive hardware to low-cost standard servers. At the same time they expect the same system availability. With Oracle RAC it is possible to increase availability and use low-cost Intel servers.

26

AP Virtualization? Yes with Solaris Containers

On September 10, SAP Standard Application Benchmark certification was also achieved with a virtualized system landscape using Oracle Database 10g and a Sun Fire X4270 including the virtualization solution Oracle Solaris Container (7). The SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, achieved on the Solaris 10 operating system with Oracle Solaris Container (using 8 vCPUs), was supported by the out-standing performance and scaling capabilities of the Oracle and Sun combination running SAP. In comparison with another benchmark (8) on the similar hardware with the same CPU type (2 processors/8 cores/16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor x5570, 2.93 GHz) from Fujitsu, which included the virtualization solution VMware and database MaxDB 7.8, the Sun Container virtualization solution was 36 percent better than VMware. The other major advantages of the Solaris Containers virtualization technology are, firstly, the price Solaris Containers is included in Solaris like the advanced new file system ZFS and, secondly, the superior support model. Oracle Solaris Containers have been supported by SAP productive systems for over four years and complete support, from hardware to database, is now available from a single source Hardware. Software. Complete!
http://fixunix.com/

(0) The SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: Sun M9000, 32 processors / 128 cores / 256 threads, SPARC64 VII, 2.88 GHz, 17,430 SAP SD Benchmark users. 95,480 SAPS. SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10; SPARC Enterprise Server SAP certification number: 2009038. (01) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: IBM System 550, 4 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Power6, 5GHz, 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark users; ; 20,520 SAPS SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), DB2 9.5; AIX 6.1; SAP certification number: 2009023. (02) The SAP Standard Application SD (Sales and Distribution) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that is indicative of full business workloads of complete order processing and invoice processing, and demonstrates the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments. (1) The SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel (SDParallel) Standard Application Benchmark: 4 active nodes: Sun Blade X6270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 13,718 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users. 75,770 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC), Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009041. (2) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: HP ProLiant DL785 G6, 8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads, Six-Core AMD Opteron 8439 SE, 2.8 GHz,8,280 SAP SD Benchmark, 45,350 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition; Certification number: 2009035. (3) The SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel (SDParallel) Standard Application Benchmark: 1 active nodes: Sun Blade X6270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 3,800 SAP SDParallel, 20,750 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC), Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009039. (4) The SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel (SDParallel) Standard Application Benchmark: 2 active nodes: Sun Blade X6270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 7,220 SAP SDParallel, 39,420 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC), Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009040.

Results as of February 1, 2010. Source: SAP,

www.sap.com/benchmark.

Benchmark SAP on Oracle-Solaris

27

(5) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: IBM System 550, 4 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Power6, 5GHz, 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark, 20,520 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), DB2 9.5; AIX 6.1; IBM System 550, 4 processors/8 cores/16 threads, POWER6, 5.0GH Certification number: 2009023. (6) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: ProLiant BL460c G6, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor x5570, 2.93 GHz, 3,415 SAP SD Benchmark, 18,670 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition; IBM System 550, 4 processors/8 cores/16 threads, POWER6, 5.0GHz Certification number: 2009031. (7) The SAP two-tier Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: Sun Fire X4270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 2,800 SAP SDParallel, 15,320 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10, Segmentation/CPU utilization in non-global zones: 1 non-global zone using 8 virtual CPUs SAP certification number: 2009034. (8) The SAP two-tier Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: Fujitsu PRIMERGY Model RX300 S5, 2 processors/8 cores/16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor x5570, 2.93 GHz 2,056 SAP SDParallel, 11,230 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), MaxDB 7.8, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX Server4.0, Segmentation/CPU utilization in virtual machines: 1 virtual machine (VM) using 8 virtual CPUs Segmentation/CPU utilization in non-global zones: 1 non-global zone using 8 virtual CPUs SAP certification number: 2009029. (xx High End Result) The SAP two-tier Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: M9000, 64 processors / 256 cores / 512 threads, SPARC64 VII, 2.52 GHz, 39,100 SAP SD Benchmark users. 196,570 SAPS. SAP ERP 6.0, Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10; SPARC Enterprise Server SAP certification number: 2008042. (xx High End Result) The SAP two-tier Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: SPARC Enterprise Server M9000, 64 processors / 256 cores / 512 threads, SPARC64 VII, 2.88 GHz, 32,000 SAP SD Benchmark users. 175,600 SAPS. SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009046. (xx Picure1) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: Sun Fire X4270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 3,800 SAP SDParallel, 20,750 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009033. HP ProLiant DL380 G6, 2 Processors / 8 Cores / 16 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 Ghz 3,171 SAP SD Benchmark users, 17,380 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), MaxDB 7.8, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10; SAP certification number: 2009006. ProLiant BL460c G6, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor x5570, 2.93 GHz, 3,415 SAP SD Benchmark, 18,670 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition; Certification number: 2009031. (xx Picure2) The two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark: Sun Fire X4640, 8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads, AMD Opteron 8435, 2.6 GHz, 10,000 SAP SD Benchmark users, 77,070 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Database 10g, Solaris 10; SAP certification number: 2009049. HP ProLiant DL785 G6, 8 Processors / 48 Cores / 48 Threads, Six-Core AMD Opteron 8439 SE, 2.8 Ghz 8,022 SAP SD Benchmark users, 43,800 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), MaxDB 7.8, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10; SAP certification number: 2009052. HP ProLiant DL785 G6, 8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads, Six-Core AMD Opteron 8439 SE, 2.8 GHz, 8,280 SAP SD Benchmark, 45,350 SAPS, SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition; Certification number: 2009035. Please see:
www.sap.com/benchmark for more information

28

Medical corps of French Army uses Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)

I N C R E A S E D H I G H A V A I L A B I L I T Y, O P T I M U M PERFORMANCE

Industry:
Defense

The medical corps of the French Army uses Oracles Real Application Clusters (RAC) database clustering solution in applications for human capital management (human resources) to boost high availability and performance. This solution offers various benefits.

A Real Cluster of Benefits

Workforce:
Around 13,000

Oracle Products & Services:

Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10.2.0.4 Oracle Clusterware SAPCTL/Control Utility Oracle Support from Oracle Technology Center, Walldorf (Germany)

Key Benefits:
Greater SAP stability/high availability Minimization of unplanned downtimes, for maintenance work for example Optimized performance when using corporate solutions Foundation laid for further optimization/scaling of SAP utilization

The medical corps of the French Army or Service de Sant des Armes is famous well beyond its national borders. The organization has no less than 13,000 members working in various areas and is steeped in history. It can be found in medical establishments such as army hospitals, rehabilitation centers, research institutes, medication logistics and training centers. In order to ideally manage human capital and human resources, a new application environment based on a new IT infrastructure has been available to the Service de Sant des Armes since June 2009. As IT expert Commandant Pascal Cella from the Service de Sant des Armes explains, Various existing HR solutions were merged to form one integrated environment. We now have a special HR solution developed by SAP to suit our requirements and we are expecting it to deliver greater efficiency, cost savings and high availability.

Due to pre-existing general agreement with Editors and industrials (subscription for other non SAP solutions in accordance with French public buying policy) the French Ministry of Defense opted for Dell standard servers and the Oracle RAC database clustering solution on a Linux operating system platform as central infrastructure components. Using Oracle Real Application Clusters opens up several benefits to the Service de Sant des Armes: A much higher level of SAP high availability, a workload distribution spread over several cluster nodes, scaling on the database side (similar to that at application level) including performance optimizations, making grid computing (adaptive computing) reality and cost reductions, for example through use of the Oracle Clusterware provided with Oracle RAC which also ensures efficient monitoring.

SAP on RAC at Rpublique Franaise, Ministre de la Dfense

29

The new human capital management solution (SAP ERP ECC6.0), including the new infrastructure, was implemented with the help of system integrator Atos Origin who collaborated closely with the Oracle and Dell technology and competence centers as well as SAP during the Oracle RAC launch. According to Commandant Pascal Cella, during the implementation there were no major problems and everything went surprisingly fast. The team delivered a really good job. MCOD (Multiple Components in One Database) was used for the Service de Sant des Armes. MCOD is an SAP installation option which allows customers to store data from different SAP Business Suite components in one common database. In April 2010 the database was around 3 TB in size (backup size) and there were 2 RAC nodes working in the database cluster (with Oracle Clusterware). There are a total of 11 Dell servers 2 of which are database servers. The storage systems come from EMC. Around 1,000 users work with the new HR system on a daily basis.

Perfect interaction, excellent experiences

In summary, Oracle Real Application Clusters is a cornerstone of HR at the Service de Sant des Armes. We have an incredibly impressive level of SAP high availability that we wouldnt have were it not for Oracle RAC. The database clustering solution also helps us gain optimum system performance. And whats more, Oracle RAC has helped us cut costs too, says a very satisfied Commandant Cella. Oracle RAC ensures that should one node fail for whatever reason, the other node (automatically) assumes its work. Users working with the HR applications, for example in payroll accounting, making amendments to master HR data, or in HR reporting, dont even notice this switch. The scheduled downtime, for maintenance work for example, is also minimized. And on top of that, when using the concept approach of standard Intel servers with Oracle RAC and Linux, infrastructure and license costs are demonstrably lower than those of other system approaches. Plans are already in place to extend the HR system environment of the Service de Sant des Armes, in terms of both functions and user numbers.
Rpublique Franaise Ministre de la Dfense Service de Sant des Armes http://www.defense.gouv.fr/sante

We have an incredibly impressive level of SAP high availability that we wouldnt have were it not for Oracle Real Application Clusters.

Commandant Pascal Cella, Ministre de la Dfense, Service de Sant des Armes.

30

O R A C L E R A C F O R S A P AT S O U T H W E S T A I R L I N E S

Denise: Correct, timely solutions in a quality implementation as we can. John: So I imagine with 3400 flights a day high availability is one of your main objectives? Denise: Correct, we have made a pretty significant investment in Oracle RAC that for a very cost conscience company there is definitely some pressure to keep these systems up.
Oracle Database podcast with Denise Simpson, DB Manager for Southwest Airlines

www.oracle.com/sap

John Brust, Oracle: I understand it is a pretty important month for Southwest as your airline turned 38 years old recently? Denise Simpson, DB Manager for Southwest Airlines, Dallas Texas: Yes it is a pretty big deal on June 18th. John: What kind of role does IT play in the airline? Denise: We have more than 3,400 flights a day and more than 34,000 employees and given the state of our economy, especially in the travel industry, we are expected to provide innovated solutions, play a key role in reducing costs and increasing productivity. John: And so some day innovated solutions are like you said decreasing costs, but I imagine as well finding great ways to provide the highest availability for your systems?

John: What are some of the specific SLAs for system uptime that really made you look at Oracle Database and specifically the Oracle Real Application Clusters? Denise: Theres not a defined SLA for the database, those are more closely aligned to the application teams which were just components of, but many of the applications we have there are contractual implications. There are revenue generating applications so we need to make sure those stay up to help them meet their goal. John: And are you seeing three nines (999s) or four nines (9999s) or 100% availability on any of these systems or applications? Denise: We have some applications that have that requirement and they have been successfully meeting their goal. John: How many applications do you run on Oracle RAC?

SAP on RAC at Southwest Airlines

31

Denise: We have hundreds of applications Id say 150 plus applications, in our entire environment we probably have 160 boxes; production, dev, QA and thats including at least one SAP RAC cluster. For those environments we recommend a RAC solution, but there are some systems that dont have flexibility or arent certified to run on a RAC environment. John: Denise, it is great to hear you are able to run so many applications on Oracle RAC. When did you begin using Oracle RAC?

John: Great, and I suppose its running well for you? Denise: It has been running fine. John: Whats the approach youve been taking to bring new applications into the RAC environments? Denise: Well RAC is our strategic direction so we ask those questions every time we evaluate a new product. But traditionally everything we bring in house is on a RAC environment. John: And youve been running RAC since Oracle Database 9i since 2001, and on Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Database 11g now. Denise: Yes John: Moving over to site failure, what are you doing to manage that and are you running Oracle Dataguard?

D A T A B A S E

11g

Denise: We actually implement our first RAC solution in 2001, it was on 9.1.3. environment and it was our internal email engine that we use internally to send itineraries back to customers and also to facilitate our CLICK N SAVE application. John: You know one of the other applications thats been talked about before is your Rapid Rewards program? What is that like and how important is up time and why did you choose RAC for that one? Denise: Rapid Rewards is our customer loyalty application and one of our mission statements is around customer service. We are very customer centric and we want to make sure that our customers get the quality service that they deserve and our partners and internal customers have every piece of information that they need. So we have a lot of dependent systems around Rapid Rewards and Rapid Rewards is our customers database of record.

32

SAP on RAC at Southwest Airlines

Denise: Oracle Dataguard is what we use for our disaster recovery, probably have about a quarter of our applications represented in the secondary data center and we practice at least once per year with our application partners to switch over to that site. John: So how do you find Oracle dataguard as far as being able to switch over to your standby sites using our latest releases? Denise: We found that it is pretty easy to configure and weve been able to do it with less downtime.

John: Weve talked here about uptime and being able to keep systems available. What are some of the things that youve noticed or youve been able to do to keep costs low and keep IT efficiency high, something thats so important to your organization. Denise: One of the things I think has been critical to us and adds to our overall value is making sure that our environment is stable, our systems are up. Like I said, we support both the flying and buying side of our business, there are cash registers as well as our customer experience, people in the field our crews, as long as we got value for them the fact that they have access to our systems. John: Well it sounds like this fits perfectly with your airlines goal to be the low cost carrier and to be the most productive in the sky.

Denise: I agree with you and I must brag on my team a little, they have been outstanding. I have 17 DBAs both development and operational and our entire technology organization is passionate about making sure our company is successful and looking for ways to cut costs and generate revenue. John: Great, well Denise thank you so much for joining us, we wish you the very best. To learn more about Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Database 11g we encourage you to go to: oracle.com/clusters
www.oracle.com/sap

Database Vault
The only database that prevents your IT staff from seeing your data.

Without Oracles Database Vault, your staff can see:

Your financial results Your customer list Your employees salaries

Only Oracle has a Database Vault

oracle.com/security or call 1.800.ORACLE.1

Copyright 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its a affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

34

O R A C L E D ATA B A S E VA U LT
CERTIFICATION WITH SAP

Key Benefits:
Prevent privileged Oracle Database users from accessing SAP data transparently, without any application changes Enable Separation of duty within the SAP database environment for security and compliance Extend and customize Database Vault protection for SAP to satisfy your unique security requirements Available for SAP applications with SAP NetWeaver with SAP Kernel 7.0 (SAP ERP 2005 or SAP version 6.1) or higher on Oracle Database Release 10.2.0.4

Outsourcing, application consolidation, and increasing concerns over insider threats have resulted in an almost mandatory requirement for strong controls on access to sensitive application data. In addition, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Industry (PCI), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) require strong internal controls to protect sensitive information such as financial, healthcare, and credit cards records. Oracle Database Vault enforces real-time preventive controls and separation-of-duty in the Oracle Database to secure the SAP application data.
Oracle Database Vault Protection for SAP

Enforcing separation of duty in the Oracle Database while allowing SAP administrators to perform their duties and protecting their SAP administration roles Providing SAP specific Database Vault protection policies for SAP BR*Tools Implementing all Database Vault protections transparently and without any change to the SAP application code
Preventing Privileged User Access

Oracle Database Vault enables SAP customers to prevent access to application data by privileged database users, enforce separation-of-duty, and provide stronger access control with multifactor authorization. Database Vault enforces security controls even when a database user bypasses the application and connects directly to the database. Database Vault certification with SAP applications benefits customers by: Preventing privileged user access to application data using protection realms for the SAP ABAP stack and the SAP Java stack

Database administrators hold highly trusted positions within the enterprise. With Database Vault realms, enterprises increase security by preventing access to application data even if the request is coming from privileged users. This is especially important when a privileged account is compromised or accessed outside normal business hours or from an un-trusted IP address. The regular tools used by administrators to help manage and tune the Oracle database continue to work as before, but they can no longer be used to access SAP application data.
Enforcing Separation-of-Duty

Database Vault helps administrators manage operations more securely by providing finegrained controls on database operations such as creating accounts, granting powerful roles, and changing table structures. Database Vault default separation of duty can be divided into three categories.

O r a c l e D a t a b a s e Va u l t f o r S A P c u s t o m e r s

35

Oracle Database Role

Database account management

Seperation of Duty Description

Database Vault prevents ad-hoc creation of database accounts unless the administrator has the Database Vault Account Management role. Traditional database administration tasks such as those associated with managing tablespace and tuning parameters remain unchanged. Database Vault blocks ad-hoc grants of the DBA role. Only Database Vault security administrators can change Database Vault SAP security settings related to Realms and Command Rules.

Database administration

Database Vault security administration

Oracle Database Vault Separation of Duty with SAP

Protection Realms and Command Rules for SAP

Related Products

Oracle Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption for Oracle databases at the tablespace or column level Built-in key management Network Encryption, SSL Strong authentication using Kerberos and PKI Oracle Label Security Transparent row level access controls using data labels Multi-level security for government and defense organizations Flexible, policy based architecture for commercial organizations Oracle Secure Backup Transparent backup and encryption of database and operating system files to tape Built-in key management Based on open standards AES, 3DES Please see more information about DB Vault for SAP in edition #17,
www.oracle.com/sap

This certification provides customers with pre-configured protection realms and command rules designed specifically for SAP applications. These protections prevent privileged user access to sensitive SAP application data, prevent application by-pass, and protect the integrity of the application. The scripts for these protections can be downloaded from the SAP Service Market Place web site.
Extending the Oracle-Supplied Security Policies

Customers can extend the Oracle-supplied Database Vault security policies by adding additional command rules and realms to accommodate their specific security requirements. For example, the out-of-the-box CONNECT command rule can be customized to restrict database connections to a specific range of IP addresses or to a specific subnet.
Supported SAP Releases

All SAP applications with SAP NetWeaver with SAP Kernel 7.00 (SAP ERP 2005 or SAP version 6.1) and higher are supported with Oracle Database Vault Release 10.2.0.4.

36

Oracle Real Application Clusters for SAP delivers the high SAP availability thats crucial to our business. Were also benefiting from more flexible maintenance management thanks to the RAC option.
R O S E N I A N E V, SAP Infrastructure Integration Leader, Shared Services Coca Cola Hellenic IT Services LTD.

O R A C L E R A C F O R S A P AT C O C A C O L A H E L L E N I C : L AY I N G T H E F O U N D AT I O N F O R H I G H E R S A P AVA I L A B I L I T Y A N D O P T I M I Z E D M A I N T E N A N C E MANAGEMENT

www.coca-colahellenic.com Industry:
Beverage industry

Optimum assurance against SAP downtimes

Turnover:
Approx. US$10.8 billion

Workforce:
Approx. 17,000 in sales alone

Oracle Products & Services:

Oracle Database 10.2.04 Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10.2.04 Oracle Support from Oracle Technology Center, Walldorf (Germany)

HW Partner:
Hewlett Packard, HP Superdomes, HP-UX

Key benefits:
Greater SAP stability / high availability / minimization of unplanned downtimes Greater maintenance flexibility Foundation laid for further optimization of SAP utilization

Coca-Cola Hellenic is one of the worlds largest bottlers of Coca-Cola Company products with sales of more than 2 billion unit cases. It has a broad geographic reach with operations in 28 countries serving a population of approximately 560 million people. Coca-Cola Hellenic offers a diverse range of ready-to-drink non-alcoholic beverages including sparkling beverages, juice, water, sport drinks, energy drinks, tea and coffee categories. Coca-Cola Hellenic is committed to promoting sustainable development in order to create value for its business and for society. This includes providing products that meet the beverage needs of consumers, fostering an open and inclusive work environment, conducting our business in ways that protect and preserve the environment and contribute to the socio-economic development of our local communities. It goes without saying that Coca-Cola Hellenic has been utilizing IT and software solutions for many years to support a range of business processes. The company has discovered that the best solution is a centralized IT environment that provides a wide range of services to all 28 countries. The national companies are linked to the data centers by WAN and VPN.

The IT systems are managed by various shared services teams based in Sofia Bulgaria. Some of them are responsible for SAP Administration and SAP infrastructure integration. For the team leader of SAP Infrastructure, Rosen Ianev, there was a very important task to be achieved: Providing maximum assurance against SAP downtime and ensuring optimum SAP availability to support essential business processes.
IT waves mean new challenges

Coca-Cola Hellenic has been using Oracle as its SAP database for a number of years and the hardware is sourced from HP. Recently Coca-Cola has been implementing a far-reaching change affecting the use of its applications. Countries that used to use other solutions alongside SAP are now transitioning almost entirely to SAP. Launching a new IT landscape with the SAP systems becomes crucial, explains IT infrastructure expert Ianev. As soon as the new system environment was launched, we knew that we had to increase SAP availability to a higher extent than a standard OS Cluster setup can offer. This was especially important for the Wave 2 Sales and Distribution component, covered by ERP and CRM systems, which is absolutely crucial to Coca-Colas business.

SAP on RAC at Coca-Cola Hellenic

37

Added to this requirement was the fact that business demands shortened the available time window for system maintenance. The organization simply could not afford to shut some systems down for more than two hours per month. Recently even these two hours started to become an issue.

SAP, HP, Siemens and Oracle as project partners

Single point of failure eliminated with Oracle RAC

The new SAP system with Oracle Real Application Clusters together with the SAP Enqueue Replication Service went live on May 16, 2009. As far as users were concerned, nothing had changed, recalls Rosen Ianev. They didnt even notice that an infrastructure changeover had taken place in the background. Throughout the restructuring project the SAP infrastructure integration team at Coca-Cola Hellenic worked closely with Oracle, HP and the CCH Data Center outsourcing vendor Siemens. The different teams collaborated on the overall system design and implementation. The system landscape included two servers for the SAP instances and another two for the database instances. For the core applications, SAP ERP ECC 6.0 and CRM 5.0, there are two Oracle Real Application Clusters systems, each with two nodes. The SAP and database (cluster) systems are physically separate, each half of both located in a different data center. The two data centers are housed in separate buildings about 400 meters apart. Oracle Clusterware and a high-fiber-density interconnect system allow the Oracle RAC nodes to work together. Should one system fail for any reason either an SAP or Oracle RAC system, in either building the other takes over. The same applies to the SAP dialog service and SAP Enqueue Replication instances.

Oracle RAC also allows maintenance activities to be completed much more effectively. Rosen Ivaney, SAP Infrastructure Integration Leader, Shared Services. Coca Cola Hellenic IT Services LTD.

Coca-Cola Hellenic had been considering the Oracle database clustering technology Real Application Clusters as a possible solution for some time. And at the end of 2008, after talking to vendors SAP, HP and Oracle, it was finally chosen as the preferred solution. Rosen Ianev explains the reasons for this choice: Oracle RAC is an efficient tailored technology with an active/active architecture, designed to prevent SAP database instance from creating problems as a potential single point of failure. This dramatically reduces the occurrence of unscheduled downtimes. The SAP systems database is available virtually round the clock. Or to say it differently, it puts us in a position to efficiently increase SAP availability to more advanced level. Oracle RAC also allows maintenance activities to be completed much more effectively. Coca-Cola Hellenic has also introduced changes related to the SAP instances. At the same time as implementing Oracle RAC, the SAP Enqueue Replication Service was also installed to eliminate the single point of failure in the SAP Central instance. HP MC Service Guard, is Coca-Cola Hellenic long-standing choice of active/passive cluster for the hardware systems (HP Superdome and XP 24000 storage systems) running on HP UX in versions 11.23 or 11.31.

38

SAP on RAC at Coca-Cola Hellenic

As of November 2009, the SAP ERP database was 5 TB and the SAP CRM 4.0 database was 3 TB. Currently the systems support around 400 concurrent users. The teams also worked hand in hand when it came to the extensive testing and the finetuning phase. All the stress and infrastructure tests imaginable were completed in about three weeks. The system as a whole and the individual components were put through rigorous testing under close to live conditions. Whenever a problem cropped up, our partners (Siemens, HP, Oracle) were on the case immediately. We met all our project objectives, notes Ianev. By the beginning of December 2009 the two RAC systems were further expanded to provide even higher capacity and high availability in anticipation of adding four additional countries starting the first of January 2010. Now each of the systems (ERP/CRM) consists of 4 RAC nodes (2 in each DC building) and 4 virtual servers for running SAP Application instances. Each system has now 4 RAC instances and 9 SAP Application instances (2-3 per virtual partition). Also on top of these the SAP Enqueue Replication service is running to fully protect the SAP CI as a point of failure. Simplified picture is attached below:

We've opted for reliability

As Mr. Rosen Ianev explains, Oracle Real Application Clusters for SAP delivers the high SAP availability that is so crucial to our business. And thanks to the Oracle RAC option we benefit from more flexible maintenance management. In practice, this means that if one Oracle RAC node fails for any reason the other takes over, thus minimizing unplanned downtimes. Maintenance work can now be planned and implemented more effectively and efficiently, either by switching over a database instance or redistributing the workload. Increasing the availability of SAP has certainly paid for itself as far as Coca-Cola Hellenic is concerned. For our wave 2 system conversion weve opted for reliability, and this enables us to provide essential support for the business side, says Ianev, summing up the project. More, if not all, Coca-Cola Hellenic countries will make the transition from wave 1 to wave 2 in a staggered process. Without a doubt, Oracle RAC provides CocaCola Hellenic with a versatile tool for optimizing SAP in many different ways: be it dramatically increasing SAP availability, distributing workload over multiple cluster nodes, scaling on the database side (as done at the application level) while optimizing performance, implementing grid computing (with Adaptive Computing), or reducing costs, for example by using the Oracle Clusterware available with Oracle RAC, which also enables efficient monitoring.

Ecc 6.0 P02

Transparent Application Failover on RAC
Appl. server 1
cupp0211

Appl. server 2
cupp0212

Appl. server 3
cupp0213

Appl. server 4
cupp0214

Appl. servers RAC nodes

RAC <-> Appl. servers primary communication

cupp0201 cupp0202 cupp0203 cupp0204

ASCS CRS RAC 1

Enqueue replication

ERS CRS RAC 2

RAC CLUSTER (with CFS)

CRS RAC 3

CRS RAC 4

SAP AS TAF failover to RAC node Enqueue replication

Database host

O r a c l e I n d e x C o m p r e s s i o n a t Ty s o n F o o d s

39

Oracle Index Key Compression is again the perfect tool for us to efficiently implement our strategy to mitigate database growth.
JEFF LEINEN, Team Lead of Database Administration at Tyson Foods

TYSON FOODS IS ON A ROLL WITH ORACLE INDEX KEY COMPRESSION

DBMS/disk space reduction, improved performance/minimized I/O rate, optimized backups
www.tyson.com

Industry:
Food

Tyson Foods is consistently using SAP software with Oracle Index Key Compression and is achieving a number of benefits: DBMS/disk space reduction of no less than 1.4 TB, increased performance thanks to a minimized I/O rate, and shorter backup times. Tyson Foods Inc., founded in 1935 with headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, is one of the worlds largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork, and the secondlargest food production company in the Fortune 500 with annual revenues over $26 billion. The company produces a wide variety of protein-based and prepared food products and is the recognized market leader in the retail and foodservice markets it serves. The company has approximately 117,000 Team Members employed at more than 400 facilities and offices in the United States and around the world.

The prominent US company spent some time searching for an effective tool to further optimize its SAP environment particularly as its data volume was constantly on the rise. As Jeff Leinen, Team Lead of Database Administration at Tyson Foods, explains: Due to our data constantly growing and also the table sizes speed up, it became apparent in 2008 that we needed to come up with a strategy that would demonstrably ease the situation. In this context, it was also necessary to find suitable tools or solutions that would help us bring this strategy to life and turn it into a reality to our advantage. At Tyson Foods, SAP ERP data is increasing by around 1.2 TB each year. Some 3,000 users work with the company software, which is used together with the Oracle database (version 10.2.0.4/single instance based database server and IBM servers/storage systems running on AIX 5.3). The majority of users are located in the US. SAP SRM, SAP Portal and (to a limited extent) SAP BW/BI are also used. SAP transaction and data volumes are set to rise further due to the companys plans to expand internationally.

Objective:
Using an effective solution to efficiently mitigate database growth.

Approach:
Use of Oracle 10.2.0.4 Index Key Compression for DBMS and disk space management

IT improvements:
Optimized SAP operation Reduced database size Minimized disk space Improved I/O rate Increased performance Shorter backup times

Business benefits:
Cost savings Faster use of applications

40

O r a c l e I n d e x C o m p r e s s i o n a t Ty s o n F o o d s

Expectations satisfied in full

Significant improvements achieved

It was an Oracle event that made Tyson Foods decide to seriously consider Oracles Index Key Compression feature. We were won over by the options that were shown to us with Oracle Index Key Compression and they fitted extremely well into our strategy to slow database growth and to minimize the SAP table sizes. We really wanted to test this technology, remembers Wolfgang Boedeker, a Database Administrator in Jeff Leinens team. The tests with Oracle Index Key Compression (SAP Support Note 1109743), which were carried out in March 2009, satisfied Tyson Foods expectations in full. A reduction in database size and the associated reduced disk space were confirmed. It was these aspects in particular that were the focus of the tests. Before testing Oracle Index Key Compression Tyson implemented Oracle Partitioning and gained advantages. The Database Management System (DBMS) team from Tyson implemented Oracle Index Key Compression without any problems. The project identified and defined those SAP tables that seemed to be actually relevant for compression. Seven main tables were selected from around 40. The indexes on these selected tables were then compressed with Oracle Index Key Compression in conjunction with the partitioning process. The Oracle feature then went live following various functional tests.

Oracle Index Key Compression together with Oracle Partitioning has been in productive operation for slightly less than a year, and Leinen and Boedeker both agree that the software is profitable and causes no problems. According to Tyson Foods statistics, using Oracle Index Key Compression has contributed to the reduction of the companys database size. The company is extremely satisfied, as overall the database has shrunk in total from around 4.5 TB by no less than 1.4 TB, which translates to considerable savings in disk space. There have also been considerable improvements in top SAP indexes. The largest one has seen the data volume shrink from 91 GB to 17 GB. Database Administrator Wolfgang Boedeker is certain that he would highly recommend and encourage other companies to use Index Key Compression for SAP tables. But its not just the DBMS/disk space management that has improved in the long term thanks to Oracle Index Key Compression in conjunction with Oracle Partitioning. End users have also confirmed that SAP performance has increased at the same time. This is a result of the minimized I/O rates. The use of compression also helps to perform backups more quickly, as there is a lower data volume to process. As Jeff Leinen, Team Lead of DBAs, summarizes: Oracle Index Key Compression is again the perfect tool for us to efficiently implement our strategy to mitigate database growth. The Oracle technology is also helping us to perform several optimizations at once. Without a doubt, this technology is here to stay. We firmly believe that well achieve more improvements with the Advanced Compression features of Oracle Database 11g.

The Oracle technology is also helping us to perform several optimizations at once. Without a doubt, this technology is here to stay. We firmly believe that we'll achieve more improvements with the Advanced Compression features of Oracle Database 11g.

Jeff Leinen,
Team Lead of Database Administration at Tyson Foods.

SAP on RAC at Sodexo Brazil

41

With Oracles database solutions and the assistance of Oracle Partner, Develop we are now online 24/7, meeting system requirements precisely and providing greater support during financial reporting periods, when more than 5,000 transactions occur per second.
D O U G L A S W I L L I A N C A L O N I D A C O S TA , Systems and Database Coordinator, Sodexo do Brasil Comercial Ltda.

S O D E X O D O B R A S I L C O M E R C I A L LT D A . C O N S O L I D AT E S A L L C O M PA N Y D ATA O N T O A SINGLE, SHARED SYSTEM

Fazer de cada dia um dia melhor

Sodexo do Brasil Comercial Ltda.

Sodexo do Brasil Comercial Ltda., a world leader in workers benefits and services, was founded in 1966 in Marseilles, France. Sodexo employs 342,000 workers worldwide, distributed among 29,000 operational units in 80 countries. In Brazil, Sodexo focuses in three main business lines: food, facilities management, and service vouchers and cards.
Challenges

Solution

So Paulo, Brazil br.sodexo.com

Integrate the companys administrative and operational systems and centralize them into a unique database to guarantee better performance and availability Consolidate operational records to support many units spread across Brazil and Latin America Provide information managers with a realtime solution to ensure an accurate decision making process in a secure environment Share information on diverse areas such as finance and logistics to achieve added value in each business process

Implemented Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Real Application Clusters with the help of Develop, an Oracle Partner, consolidating all data onto a single system Enabled online access for associates and clients to information such as billing, customer, sales, inventory, payroll, and help desk data Reduced the systems weekly downtime extensively, reaching a record of 190 days working nonstop and providing a stable IT environment for critical business systems Reduced the monthly closing process from days to hours Improved IT system performance with Oracle Tuning Pack which enabled around-the-clock monitoring with Oracle Diagnostics Pack, which sends cellular text messages to IT staff for rapid reaction and response Centralized the backup process for all systems by completing backups on an hourly basis Broke down data and adjusted the IT environmentwithout the permanent help of the supplieraccelerating results delivery

Industry:
Professional Services

Annual Revenue:
US$700 million

Employees:
13,000

Oracle Products & Services:

Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle Partitioning Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Tuning Pack Oracle Diagnostics Pack

Oracle Partner:
Develop www.develop.com.br

42

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base.

MICHAEL BLAKE, Director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon

Customer: Verizon Communications Inc. dd Category:

Optimized Systems: Recognition of striking performance, scalability, and usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions

V E R I Z O N C O M M U N I C AT I O N S R E D H AT I N N O VAT I O N AWARD WINNER OPTIMIZED SYSTEMS

Backround

Solution

Industry:
Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

Geography:
North America

Business challenge:
Needed a reliable and cost effective solution for its SAP and Enterprise Resource Planning applications that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

Migration Path:
UNIX-based SMP platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP x86 commodity based hardware

Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. With more than 235,000 employees, Verizon was selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for its consolidation and standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its SAP and Enterprise Resource Planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and allow the ability to scale for growth. The company now runs its servers more efficiently,with minimal need for additional equipment, and Verizon has further bolstered its conservation efforts.
Business Challenge

Verizon identified the need to migrate its large proprietary UNIX-based SMP platform to standardize on an open source operating system running on x86 based commodity hardware to achieve the required scalability, reduced costs, and equivalent performance, in regards to all of its business critical SAP applications. After a thorough evaluation period in 2007 of multiple open source vendors, Verizon selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system for the mission critical business application migration project. Verizon decided to deploy the SAP project in phases. The first phase began in 2008 and started the financial modules, taking about 6 months to complete before moving to production. The second phase consisted of the HR and Payroll modules and due to the better than expected results, Verizon plans to continue the consolidation with its reporting, warehousing, and credit card processing applications. The SAP applications were migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy for Management, Provisioning, & Monitoring running on over 300 Dell and HP Intel/AMD based servers and Oracle RAC.

Software:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, SAP, Oracle RAC

Hardware:
300 Dell and HP x86 commodity servers

Benefits:
Reduced costs, improved performance, increased ability to scale and prepared for future growth, increased energy conservation efforts

With a massive global workforce of more than 235,000 employees, Verizon had an increasing need to consolidate and standardize business applications, most notably, its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Due to Verizons acquisition business growth and the challenges of implementing disparate systems, and the need to serve its employees, the company needed to migrate its systems to a highly reliable and stable platform that would scale with the growing computing infrastructure while simultaneously reducing costs. Verizons existing UNIX-based IT architecture lacked the ability to cost-effectively scale horizontally with the constant business growth.

S A P o n R A C a t Ve r i z o n

43

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base, said Michael Blake, director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon, The fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified with all of our third-party applications, such as SAP, allowed us to make this decision confidently and proceed quickly, as the costs continued to mount with the previous solution.
Benefits

Migrating the systems off the proprietary UNIX based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowed Verizon to reduce costs, increased its ability to scale and prepared its architecture for future growth, while at the same time providing increased performance. If migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply allowed us to scale at a fraction of the cost, and provided the same performance, we would have deemed the migration a success, said Blake, But, the real impact on the business was the increased performance with the same applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to the cost savings and performance increase, Verizon also realized a two-thirds reduction in power usage in its data center. This is a very real and valuable benefit and will have a direct impact on our energy conservation efforts, said Blake. Verizon was able to increase capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. Blake commented that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has eliminated performance surges and through the consolidation the company was able to identify bottlenecks in the system, providing a more streamlined environment. End users were minimally disrupted by the change in systems but have since noticed a more improved IT environment. The total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a trusted product with excellent value and allowed us to extract the value of the new HP C-Class hardware, said Blake, We also saw Red Hat Network Satellite as a strategic component to our deployment, it enhances patch management, and security, and without Satellite it would be difficult to manage our systems. Satellite simplifies this process and frees up our system administrators for strategic business projects.
Customers Advice

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base.

For companies in similar situations, the most critical component is to run tests, document, and confirm the expected behavior of your Red Hat certified applications as this will drastically reduce the complexities of the migration project. We knew that with Red Hat, we could worry less about the application certifications, and focus more on proving the business case to secure buy-in from the entire IT organization. By running tests and executing numerous examples for specific teams, we were able to prove to our internal customers, that not only would the solution work, but it will perform better, and at a fraction of the previous costs, said Blake.

Michael Blake, Director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon.

44

SAP on RAC at Essent Netherlands

Oracle technology and a good design made it possible to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of our IT landscape.
MARCO SPOEL, Landscape Expert, Essent

Essent Arnhem, The Netherlands www.essent.nl Industry:

Utilities

E S S E N T C O N S O L I D AT E S I T I N F R A S T R U C T U R E TO REDUCE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP BY 50%

Annual Revenue:
US$1.26 billion

Employees:
6,000

Essent, the biggest energy company in the Netherlands, supplies electricity, gas, and heat to individual households and commercial customers. Essent is active throughout the energy chainfrom energy generation right through to supplying end consumers. Essents power stations and wind parks have a total generation capacity of 6,000 megawatts.
Challenges

Oracle Products & Services:

Oracle Database Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle Partitioning Oracle Diagnostic Pack Oracle Tuning Pack Oracle Configuration Management Pack Oracle Change Management Pack Oracle Provisioning Pack

Increase computing capacity to better service the processes Reduce costs by standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure Ensure high availability and performance for business-critical systems such as customer registration and energy consumption forecasting, which is performed every five minutes
Solution

Oracle Partner:

IBM Nederland B.V. www.ibm.nl

Worked with Oracle Partner IBM Nederland B.V. to implement an Oracle Database grid with Oracle Real Application Clusters on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server consisting of 28 Intel Xeon servers, each with eight cores and 32 gigabytes of RAM

a KPN company

Achieved cost savings by migrating the databases for large and critical applications, such as financial reporting and energy consumption, from DB2 on a mainframe to the Oracle Database grid Achieved availability of the Oracle Database grid that is just as high as the mainframe environment and established a disaster recovery environment based on Oracle Data Guard Consolidated a large number of existing Oracle databases that were running on various machines and operating systems Enabled SAP applications including SAP Business Information Warehouse to run on Oracle Real Application Clusters Improved performance with more powerful and cost effective hardware and the ability to add central processing unit capacity flexibly to the database grid Outsourced management to partners IBM, Getronics, and CIBER and leveraged Oracle database packs for effective Oracle Database grid management Cut total cost of ownership by 50% with cheaper hardware, better utilization of the hardware, and simplified management

www.getronics.nl

IQ Test
IBMs
SPARC
Computer

Fastest
Computer

7x Faster
Response Time

6x Energy
Consumed

Building Faster Computers

Building Smarter Planets

oracle.com/sunoraclefaster
Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council, www.tpc.org as of 11/3/09. 12-Node SPARC Enterprise T5440 server cluster, 7,646,486 tpmC, $2.36/tpmC, available 3/19/10. IBM Power 595 Server Model 9119-FHA, 6,085,166 tpmC, $2.81/tpmC, available 12/10/08.
Copyright 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names my be trademarks of their respective owners.

46

HP Integrity Superdome [servers] and Dual-Core [Intel] Itanium processors give us the best price-performance ratio. Plus, HP Integrity is the next step in the evolution of our SAP/Oracle infrastructure.
J O N TA N N E R , Server Engineer, Steelcase Inc.

S T E E L C A S E F I N D S C O M F O RT I N S A P P L AT F O R M H P PAY P E R U S E S AV E D $ 9 0 0 , 0 0 0 O V E R T H R E E YEARS

HP customer case study:

HP Integrity Superdome servers and Virtual Server Environment deliver more performance and flexibilityfor less

The leap to higher performance

Delivering a better user experience

Industry:
Manufacturing

Steelcase Inc. is known for innovationand insight into the way people work. The Grand Rapids, Michiganbased furniture manufacturer succeeds in a global market through extensive research and creative ideas about personal and organizational productivity. Its Leap and Think chairs, for example, are among the most ergonomic, attractive products in the world. Steelcases leadership in creating a healthier, more pleasant office environment has earned it a ranking in 2007 as one of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens by CRO magazine. The US$2.9 billion office furniture company leverages an SAP-based supply chain to link more than 50 manufacturing facilities, 900 independent dealers, and approximately 16,000 employees worldwide. The companys North American SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.7 system interacts with company facilities in Asia and Europe. Steelcase uses an SAP Business Warehouse (BW), built on Oracle Database 10.2, to run large, complex queries for analysis, planning, and reporting. The company chose Oracle ten years ago as its premier database because of Oracles market-leading performance, integrity, and reliability.

Just as Steelcases laser-like focus has delivered better work experiences to its customers, the companys Application Technology Services (ATS) group focuses on providing its internal business users with a better work experience. ATS sets its service-level agreements (SLAs) at 99.99 percent uptime. To maintain these levels, the staff leverages HP Services, HP Integrity Superdome servers, HP-UX 11i, and the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE). SAP is a very demanding, critical resource, says Jon Tanner, Steelcases server engineer. Through the years, HP has delivered the capacity, reliability, and processing power to run Steelcases SAP environment and roll out new SAP tools in a timely manner. The Integrity architecture gives us even more performance and flexibility to drive up resource utilization and further leverage our IT investment.

SAP on Oracle at Steelcase, HP-UX

47

Objective:

Gain more powerful, flexible, economical performance for the companys SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment
Approach:

While affording substantial capacity and flexibility, the change was cost-neutral according to Tanner, with no impact on the companys total cost of ownership and operational costs. We saw significant performance increases. One user called and reported that the job must have failed because it finished too quickly, he says. As the leases were about to expire, the staff competitively bid the Integrity Superdome servers against IBM AIX equipment. Again, HP Superdome servers stood out as the best choice due to their reliability, availability, and price-performance ratio. Additionally, by adopting the latest technology, Steelcase lowered its maintenance expenditures.
Joint tenancy for processor architectures

Migrate SAP and Oracle databases to HP Integrity Superdome servers with the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for greater flexibility and performance
Business technology improvements:

Greater utilization of computing resources Consolidation of legacy and newer applications in virtual partitions on the same server Dynamic alignment of computing resources for varied application needs Fewer physical servers Less administration burden Reduction in software images from 75 to 35
Business outcomes:

An HP Virtual Server Environment and HP-UX 11i allow us to host even more applications.

Lower TCOreduced support, maintenance, administrative, and software costs Investment protection for older legacy applications Faster response to IT demands HP PPU savings of $900,000 over three years compared to a straight lease

For the recent migration, Orion Group Software Engineers worked with HP Services to size and design the Superdome solution. Configured with three to four hard partitions (nPars) and up to eight virtual partitions (vPars) each, two servers support production, while one server handles development tasks. The development Superdome contains SingleCore Intel Itanium 2 (9 MB cache) processors. Using nPars and vPars, the staff can completely isolate an application and migrate CPU resources over to busier applications as needed. These configurations resonate with Steelcase, affording investment protection for older legacy applications that must operate on PA8900 processor-based servers. The ability to run certain legacy systems (a product ticketing application and the Advanced Planning System, which shop floor personnel use for detailed scheduling) on virtual servers spares the staff the trouble of upgrading applications and purchasing new software licenses and support contracts.

Jon Tanner, Server Engineer, Steelcase Inc.

Technology at pace with growth

In the 1990s, the company ran its SAP system and databases on the HP AlphaServer-Tru64 UNIX architecture. In 2000, Steelcase refurbished the platform with PA-RISC processor-based HP 9000 rp-series and Superdome servers running the HP-UX operating system. To support additional SAP initiatives four years later, including the SAP Manufacturing module, the company migrated to HP Integrity Superdome servers with Intel Itanium processors under a three-year lease through HP Financial Services.

48

Superdomes partitioning features let us create virtual servers and run our legacy applications alongside newer applications, Tanner says. An HP Virtual Server Environment enables us to align our resources with different application needs. Another nice thing is if we shift to a Microsoft platform, we can run it on the Superdome, alongside HP-UX 11i. So we have flexibility and investment protection.
HP VSE cushions costs

The HP PPU program has already saved us more than $900,000 during our previous three-year lease vs. a straight lease program, says Tanner. We anticipate more savings over the next three years.
A pattern for reduced costs

The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) helps with SAP workload management. The staff uses HP Global Workload Manager (gWLM) to assign CPUs automatically to multiple application workloadsincluding to virtual and resource partitionsbased on established policy and priorities. They also use gWLM to move processing power around to support the resource partitions and to manage them manually, when necessary. With gWLM, the staff controls virtual partition resources from a single pane of glass, managing workloads during failover by manually reassigning the workload definition to the failover server. The staff shifts processing power to computehungry applications and manages multiple workloads within a single operating system instance with HP Process Resource Manager. Steelcase also deployed HP Serviceguard, which works as a failover mechanism in activeactive mode to guard servers, applications, and virtual partitions. The software is a practical tool for managing Steelcases redundant network links. These dynamic resource capabilities, combined with HP Pay per use (PPU) leasing through HP Financial Services, provide Steelcase with real-time access to reserve capacity for peak workloads. Like many companies, Steelcase must contend with variable SAP workloads that undergo huge, relatively short spikes during the day. PPU allows the company to pay only a portion of the total cost, yet still have plenty of capacity for processing demands.

Resource sharing, enabled by Integrity servers and the VSE, helps streamline administration, boost server utilization, and decrease software outlays. The staff consolidated eight HP 9000 application servers on the new platform in 2006, thereby decreasing the number of HP-UX 11i images and physical hardware resources the company would need to purchase. We shrunk our software footprint by half, which also helps reduce the server administration burden and increase our teams productivity. We couldnt continue our old method of adding a server for every single application and operating system with the people resources we have today, Tanner says. Within HP-UX 11i, Steelcase leverages HP-UX Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-UX Integration and Kerberos interfaces with a Microsoft Windows Active DirectoryHP ProLiant environment to provide single-point user and security administration. ProLiant servers run SAP front-end and Web portal functions and extract data from the back-end SAP/Oracle/Integrity systems. ProLiant servers provide us the reliability and availability that we like. We have the same HP personnel servicing our ProLiant and Integrity Superdome [servers], and we are very pleased with the service we get, says Tanner.

SAP on Oracle at Steelcase, HP-UX

49

C U S T O M E R S O L U T I O N AT A G L A N C E
Virtualized, powerful, flexible computing for SAP business processes
Primary applications Primary software

SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.7: Financials, Business Warehouse (BW), Sales and Distribution, Shop Maintenance, Procurement, Human Resources, Supply Chain Management, Portal, Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)
Primary hardware

HP Virtual Server Environment: Global Workload Manager (gWLM),HP Process Resource Manager (PRM), nPars (hard partitions), vParsvirtual partitions), and Pay per use (PPU) HP-UX 11i v2 operating system HP Serviceguard clustering software Oracle Database 10.2 VMware ESX Server (ProLiant servers) Microsoft Windows 2003 (ProLiant servers)
HP Services

3 HP Integrity Superdome servers (24 Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors, PA-8900 processors, 32 Single-Core Intel Itanium 2 (9 MB cache) processors 5 HP 9000 servers 200 HP ProLiant servers

HP Care Pack services (Proactive 24 Service) Pay per use leasing through HP Financial Services

Little risk to operations

Steelcase is also pleased that HP Services completed the changeover to the Integrity Superdome architecture in just a month with little risk to operations. As part of our migration plan, HP Services maintained both the HP 9000 and Integrity infrastructures side by side so if we had issues, we could fall back to the original equipment, Tanner recalls. The implementation was surprisingly clean. There werent any issues. Steelcase has tapped HP consultants and engineers in the past, for previous SAP migrations and for assistance in transitioning several Microsoft Windowsbased applications to HP-UX 11i.

It made sense to use top-notch, SAP-certified, HP-UX-knowledgeable consultants, Tanner notes. They went above and beyond in many ways to educate and train us on how the products work. Steelcase also has an HP Proactive 24 Service contract for the Superdome environment. We get HP technical service and extended hardware support, adds Tanner, that are also top-notch. Just as office design and furniture can affect personal and organizational productivity, Steelcase knows that technology design and infrastructure can influence company productivity and impact the bottom line. Investing in HP technology and services has enabled us to grow and support our business. Our senior management is pleased that we are saving money as we provide responsive support, Tanner concludes.

50

Oracle RAC and Connectria customized managed hosting is an ideal combination of reliability and scalability demanded by our SaaS solution.

J O H N PAT T O N , Managing Partner, VQS

CONNECTRIA MANAGED HOSTING AND ORACLE R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N C L U S T E R S ( R A C ) D E L I V E R S MAXIMUM UPTIME FOR DEMANDING ENVIRONMETS

Industry:
Managed Hosting and Data Center Outsourcing

VQS and ProgramScope

Data Centers:
St. Louis, MO (2) Philadelphia, PA (1)

Oracle Products & Services:

Oracle Database 10g Oracle Database 11g Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Oracle Clusterware

Key Benefits:
Hosting allows IT / management to focus upon business needs Oracle and Oracle RAC expertise as an extension of your organization More flexibility and scalability in use of SAP Greater SAP stability / high availability and performance

VQS is the developer of ProgramScope software, a SaaS-based program management solution. Development of ProgramScope started in 1997 with the idea to create a new standard in program management software systems. Since that time VQSs development team has continued to aggressively develop additional feature sets and performance enhancements for its customers in the Telecommunications industry. ProgramScope has successfully reduced customer budgets by 60%, as compared to local Access databases or Excel spreadsheet initiatives. As a SaaS solution, ProgramScope enables customers to rapidly implement the software without internal IT support under a costeffective monthly subscription model. End users are able to securely access ProgramScope software 24/7 via the Internet.

Because ProgramScope is a mission-critical application, VQSs customers depend upon the continuous availability of the solution. As a result, VQS engineered ProgramScope with Oracle RAC architecture. VQS also wanted to concentrate upon its core capabilities which is developing and marketing software not operating and supporting IT infrastructure. Thus, it chose Connectria to host and manage the Program-Scope solution. Connectrias custom SaaS Managed Hosting solution allowed VQS to immediately begin offering its ProgramScope software to a broader market, without having to build and maintain a complex technology infrastructure or operate a 24/7 support organization. A key component of Connectrias custom SaaS Managed Hosting solution was a flat monthly pricing model that allowed VQS to accurately budget its costs and build a profitable business model for its SaaS offering. Connectrias ability to completely tailor its support services to meet VQSs unique requirements was another key component in VQSs successful SaaS offering.

Corporate Headquarters:
10845 Olive Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63141 314-587-7000 (Phone) 800-781-7820 (Toll-free) www.connectria.com info@connectria.com

Oracle Partner Connectria

51

As part of the Software as a Service (SaaS) implementation, Connectrias engineers provided comprehensive configuration and integration support to assist VQS during its launch, allowing VQS to greatly minimize its risk. Connectria also provides 24/7 Monitoring, Management and Administration of the Program Scope web front-end and Oracle Database 11i infrastructure hosted within Connectrias enterprise class data centers.
Connectria Managed Hosting and Data Center Outsourcing

Many companies, including Oracle, rely upon Connectria to host and manage Oracle database environments. Running complex Oracle environments requires an experienced technical staff with a strong knowledge of Oracle products, database clustering and load balancing technologies. Connectria is also an experienced SAP application hosting provider, with notable customers such as Paramount Studios and Caterpillars dealer network. SAP representatives and customers interested in more information may contact Connectria as indicated below. Connectria Corporation East Regional Headquarters 1060 First Avenue, Suite 400 King of Prussia, PA 19406 USA 267-523-5723 Office 610-757-5896 Mobile sazzolina@connectria.com

As an award-winning Oracle Hosting Provider, Connectria has a strong background in 24/7 business-critical Oracle hosting, including Oracle RAC environments, from its faulttolerant World Class Data Centers.

52

The stability of Solaris 10 has been simply outstanding. Its delivered additional key functionality while continuing to provide the same outstanding level of availability to which weve become accustomed.
KEN KARLS, Manager of Network and Datacenter Engineering, Dow Corning

D O W C O R N I N G C O R P O R AT I O N D E V E L O P S , MANUFACTURES AND MARKETS A WIDE PORTFOLIO OF SILICON-BASED PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Industry:
Manufacturing

Business Issues:
Support global growth through dependable IT services Minimize IT expenditures Extend lifespan of older servers and storage arrays Enhance availability and stability Enable innovation

Headquartered in Midland, Michigan, the company offers more than 7,000 products used in the manufacture of everything from cosmetics to medical devices. About 50 percent of the companys annual sales occur outside the United States.

Success at a glance

Solution:
Dow Corning is able to virtualize and manage servers quickly and efficiently by exploiting the Containers and ZFS features in the Solaris 10 Operating System as a key part of its adaptive computing model. Further, the Solaris 10 OS has enabled Dow Corning to substantially reduce IT costs to support global growth.

Industry leader Dow Corning makes more than 7,000 types of compounds and industrial ingredients for everything from cosmetics to medical devices. In order to meet the needs of its thousands of customers globally, it has come to rely on rock-solid stability of its global SAP infrastructurethe core of which runs on Solaris. To support operations at its 47 locations worldwide, the company depends on applications such as SAP and Oracle Database 10g, hosted on 110 Sun and third-party Solaris based servers connected to 250 terabytes of disk storage. Most of this infrastructure runs on the Solaris 10 Operating System and is managed by an IT Unix team of just three people. To succeed, the team relies on Solaris 10 OS features that enable virtualization, remote management and a self-healing file system.

A key feature is Solaris Containers. Theyre flexible, software-defined boundaries that can be used to create virtual servers, so that multiple environments can run on a single server box. Solaris Containers now enable 130 virtual servers to be housed on 36 physical servers. Virtualization has allowed us to avoid the purchase of approximately $2 million as compared to the traditional computing model, says Ken Karls, manager of network and datacenter engineering at Dow Corning. Dow Corning has adopted a modular approach to capacity, acquiring blocks of server resources in anticipation to near term demand. Once installed, these resources are allocated and deployed using Solaris 10 Containers and ZFS. In the past, Id have to send out individual RFPs and POs for each request and the process took four to six weeks, remembers Gene Down, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Dow Corning. Now, I can meet the need for a new server image in less than two hours. From a customer viewpoint, the company is not only saving money, but the deployment time has been reduced by 99%.

SAP on Oracle at Dow Corning

53

Containers also support the companys databases. We move our production data often. We extract it from one database, back it up, and move it to another Oracle instance. It is much easier using Containers, since all my Oracle instances have the same user ID numbers and naming conventions. Remote offices can also be provisioned at dramatic savings. IT can buy a single server, which supports up to 10 Solaris Containers. The local site gains the flexibility of 10 virtual servers, while the team has to purchase and manage only one. As a result, Dow Cornings total cost of ownership (TCO) for deploying and managing remote servers has been reduced by 50 percent. Another key Solaris 10 OS feature for the team is the ZFS file system, which streamlines the companys global IBM Tivoli Storage Manager data protection environment. ZFS is enabling 50 percent disk compression on the fly, so in a sense were getting 50 percent more storage capacity, Down says. And it ensures data integrity with a self-healing checksum feature that catches any silent data corruption we may have in older storage arrays. That lets us extend the lifespan of three older disk arrays that wed otherwise retire. By not replacing them, we save $75,000. And were using the ZFS file system to pool their 34 terabytes. We have re-purposed them as the equivalent of a virtual tape library, enabling disk-to-disk-to tape data protection while avoiding a six-figure expenditure for a new library. The ZFS file system is also being deployed on new servers and storage systems, such as the Sun StorageTek 6140 array and 2540 arrays being used for Oracle, TSM and Documentum. Since the ZFS file system can be used to pool storage elements into volumes, Dow Corning is starting to replace the Veritas Storage Foundation software.

Another advantage for the team in working with Sun was using Suns partner competency centers to pilot installation techniques. Weve used the competency centers a lot, especially when we were getting started, Down recalls. Often, we would have Oracle people sitting right beside Sun and SAP people to solve a problem, or figure out the best upgrade path. The impact that the UNIX IT team has made using Solaris 10 OS has been recognized with one of four awards Dow Corning gives annually for outstanding IT improvements within the company. External consultants have recognized the IT teams achievements, too. They determined that were delivering service at a substantially lower TCO than the benchmark companies with which we are being compared, Down concludes.

Business Results:
$2 million in server hardware cost avoidance 99% reduction in server deployment time (4-6 weeks reduced to 2 hours) 50% reduction in total cost of ownership providing and managing remote servers 50% gain in storage capacity where Solaris 10 ZFS file system disk compression is utilized $50,000 saved in storage purchase avoidance due to Solaris ZFS file system Six-figure virtual tape library purchase avoided due to the Solaris 10 OS No unplanned production system downtime in the past 1.5 years

Products/Services/Solutions:
Solaris 10 Operating System Sun Fire V215 Server Sun Fire V445 Server Sun StorageTek 6140 Array Sun StorageTek 2540 Array Sun StorageTek 9990V System

54

The Oracle RAC cluster solution is an excellent way of increasing scalability and system stability while reducing administrative workload. The whole system scales extremely well and peak loads are now a rare occurrence. We also saved a lot of money on hardware and third-party licenses. I warmly recommend Oracle RAC for SAP.

Bauerfeind AG + Projekt www.bauerfeind.com

ALEXANDER KFERLEIN, Data Centre/SAP Basis Manager, Bauerfeind AG

Industry:
Manufacturer of medical aids (compression stockings supports, orthoses, orthopedic insoles and shoes,prosthetic components)

R E D U C E D A D M I N I S T R AT I V E W O R K L O A D AND COSTS

Workforce:
1650 worldwide

Profile: Bauerfeind AG

In IT, good design is everything

Oracle Products:
Oracle Database 10g (10.2.04), Oracle RAC Real Application Clusters, 4 nodes

Benefits:
Excellent scalability Assurance of constant availability, better than with HACMP technology Reduced administrative workload and costs Lower hardware and license costs (HACMP / TSM) Straightforward implementation

Bauerfeind AG is a leading manufacturer of medical aids such as compression stockings, supports, orthoses, orthopedic insoles and shoes, prosthetic components and measuring technology. The midsize family business, founded in Zeulenroda, Germany in 1929, employs around 1650 people at two sites in Germany (Zeulenroda and Remscheid) and at 15 subsidiaries in Europe, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates. Its products are marketed around the world by over 70 distributors. Since 2005 there has also been an online ordering system for German-speaking trade partners.

Bauerfeind, now in its 80th year, is a highly innovative company with no less than five awards to its credit for product innovation and design. The JT20 prosthetic knee joint won the iF gold award, the iF product design award and the red dot design award. The SofTec Coxa hip orthosis was also honored with the iF product design award and the red dot design award. As well as assessing the overall design the jury was also interested in the degree of innovation, functionality, and durability of the product. Bauerfeind utilizes powerful IT systems across all business areas, and the IT team is continually evaluating key factors such as constant availability, speed, flexibility, agility, low costs, and minimal maintenance. It was for this reason that Bauerfeind became an early adopter of leading SAP and Oracle solutions, and in fact we previously reported on the companys successful use of the Oracle Database index compression option.

SAP:
40 central systems, ERP ECC6.0, Internet Sales 5.0, CRM 4.0 with Mobile Sales, NetWeaver 2004s, (BI 7.0, XI 7.0, EP 7.0), Solution Manager, GTS 7.1

Infrastructure:
IBM: 2x Power 570 (16 CPUs, 196GB RAM), 2x Power6 570 (8 CPUs, 92GB), 2x Power 520 GPFS tiebreaker nodes, 8x JS22 Blade Power6 (4 CPUs, 32GB), 2 mirrored SVC clusters in SAN. Operating system AIX 5.3 TL8 / 6.1 TL2 SP2, LPARs uncapped

SAP on RAC at Bauerfeind

55

24 x 7 x 365

The dynamically evolving markets created by globalization are confronting businesses with new challenges in relation to their IT landscapes. The company simply cannot afford a system failure or excessive response times for its web portal (used 24 hours a day, 365 days a year) and all other critical software applications. The computing resources of the 40 central SAP systems need to respond quickly to changing load requirements. This presents Bauerfeinds IT team with an ongoing challenge. Added to this are the roundthe- clock availability requirements and ever smaller maintenance windows for updates, backups and troubleshooting. The workload this placed on the SAP Basis administration team, who often had to cram a lot of work into one weekend, coupled with the companys dissatisfaction with the existing HACMP cluster solution, meant that a new, powerful, easy-to-use cluster solution was needed. The aim was to achieve better scalability (allowing the system to be expanded by simply adding new hardware instead of costly replacements), greater system stability, a reduction in administrative workload, and a reduction in the costs of licenses and IT infrastructure.
Fast migration, excellent scalability

Encouraged by the promising first results, and the excellent support from Oracle SAP experts, the team successfully converted the BI development and QA system to Oracle RAC in October/November 2008. To validate the planned next steps it was decided to perform more availability and flexibility tests. The results were so successful that the first two RAC cluster nodes with SAP BW/BI went into productive operation on IBM Power6 570 in December 2008. Impressed by the smoothness of the conversion process and the resulting benefits, from December to January the team began to port the SAP ERP development and QA system. There were a few teething problems with performance, but these were quickly resolved by increasing the shared_pool_size to 3GB, adding new database patches (including blocking at database level), additional tuning in the GPFS, and updating various database parameters. Since the end of January 2009, SAP BI and the ERP QA / development system have been in smooth, powerful productive operation on two nodes. Remarkably, this was after a testing and conversion phase of just four months.
There have even been cases where neither we nor our users have noticed a cluster node failure because with Oracle RAC the system balances itself so well on the remaining servers! Alexander Kferlein, Data Centre / SAP Basis Manager at Bauerfeind AG.

Impressed with the Oracle Database as the standard database for SAP, in April 2008 the company began evaluating the Oracle RAC technology and ways of implementing it for SAP. After attending a workshop at the Oracle Database for SAP Global Technology Center in Walldorf, Germany and quickly obtaining SAP approval, it was decided in June 2008 to introduce the new cluster solution. The team headed up by Alexander Kferlein opted for SAP BW/BI as a suitable entry-level system. Once the system had been converted to Unicode and the GPFS was up and running, the Oracle RAC tests got underway in September 2008.

56

Great scalability, but what about the costs?

Benefits gained- Excellent scalability

Taking full advantage of the scalability of the Oracle RAC cluster solution, in March 2009 Bauerfeind replaced the existing IBM Power6 570 servers with low-cost IBM JS22 blades. This added two smaller database instances the existing two RAC nodes to make a total of four nodes. As a result the company was able to eliminate the TSM license fees while benefiting from the excellent scalability of the overall system. Peak loads are now a rare occurrence. Alexander Kferlein comments: There have even been cases where neither we nor our users have noticed a cluster node failure because with Oracle RAC the system balances itself so well on the remaining servers! And as he points out, it is obviously essential to have enough application servers.

Assurance of constant availability, better than with HACMP technology Reduced administrative workload and costs Lower hardware and license costs (no HACMP/no TSM) Straightforward implementation Users do not notice any failures that do occur Goal achieved

Moving on

As a result of the consistently good results achieved, and in particular the excellent support from the Oracle Database SAP technology team in Walldorf, SAP ERP with Oracle RAC went into productive operation in June 2009. Bauerfeinds other systems with high availability requirements are to follow suit by the end of 2009. Once that is complete, Alexander Kferlein is sure to be reporting back on the process at SAP and Oracle events and sharing some invaluable tips.

Only Oracle Database 1 1g Release 2 provides for SAP customers

Oracle other DBs

Fully integrated, platform independent active-active clustering solution for both SAP and database through RAC and Clusterware/SAPCTL Enhanced Add COLUMN Functionality High Performance NAS Storage through Direct NFS Online Patching Real Application Testing Option Updatable Standby Database RMAN Backup Compression, RMAN Backup Encryption SecureFile out-of-line LOB data compression Deferred Segments Creations Disk-Based Bitmap Indexes Tablespace Encryption Data Guard Secure Network Transport Database Vault Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)

Oracle the # 1 Database for Deploying SAP Applications

oracle.com/sap saponoracle_de@oracle.com
Copyright 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its a affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

58

OUR SAP CUSTOMERS RUN ORACLE FREUDENBERG IT DELIVERS SMB SAP HOSTING SOLUTIONS ON ORACLE RDBMS

Freudenberg IT LP 601 Keystone Park Drive, Suite 600 Morrisville, North Carolina 27560 Phone: +1 (866)-705-6385 Fax: +1 (919) 321-0258 info@freudenberg-it.com www.freudenberg-it.com

Freudenberg IT relies on its years of SAP/Oracle hosting expertise and its unique dual data center concept to guarantee large enterprise service levels to SMBs - but at SMB prices. We support SAP applications on HP-UX, AIX, Linux, and Windows platforms with the Oracle database, we are able to deliver the value, security, reliability, and scalability our customers require, stated Scott LaBouliere, SVP of Hosting Operations for Freudenberg IT USA.
Why Freudenberg IT prefers Oracle RDBMS

Freudenberg IT is committed to providing SAP hosting services to small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) since larger outsourcing service providers often fail to provide the correct balance of service quality and price that is demanded by SMBs. Freudenberg IT maintains its own data centers and full-time employees and does not subcontract SAP operations. In addition they have: SAP/Oracle hosting focus and expertise (certified SAP Global Hosting Partner) Standard dual data center concept in all locations worldwide for cost effective disaster prevention/recovery as a standard customer service offering 4-zone security model (building, office, datacenter, logical) with access control and 24/7 camera surveillance Redundancies in the data center infrastructure (Power, UPS, HVAC, communication lines) Standardized platforms and vendor agreements worldwide (SAP, Oracle, IBM, HP, EMC, NetApp, VMware, Cisco) Standardized proactive monitoring and support of all hosted systems worldwide 24/7 International Call Center using a Follow-the- Sun concept Flexible service level agreements with performance penalties Data centers located in Germany, China, and United States wherever your business may be.

Rock solid operational reliability Highly scalable regardless of database sizes Supported across multiple operating systems Platform independent Established monitoring and management tools integrate into Freudenberg ITs Global Active Monitoring System Architecture designed for multi-user Enterprise level I/O Excellent disaster recovery options

Hosting with Oracle at Freudenberg IT

59

SAP/Oracle Hosting Service Packages

Freudenberg IT has developed two main service offerings that incorporate standard disaster recovery using its dual data center concept. The two data centers are connected with fiber optic connections (owned and operated by Freudenberg IT). This avoids the high telecommunication costs typically incurred when maintaining a Disaster Recovery concept between two data centers (Note: there is no usage charge for this line). Standard to all hosted systems, regardless of which data center they are in, is tape library backup to the other data center. Additionally, all hosted 3-system SAP landscapes will have their Quality Assurance system located in the other data center. In this way, Freudenberg IT has standardized disaster recovery for all of its customers at no additional charge. In the case where the data center with a Production system becomes inoperable, the Quality Assurance system along with the tape backups can be used to recreate the Production system and bring it online. In the case where the data center with the Quality Assurance system and the tape backups becomes inoperable, the Production and Development systems will still be running. The Quality Assurance system will be recreated and the tape backups redirected to the tape drive unit in the remaining data center. SAP Application servers are allocated to customer SAP systems based on the number of SAP users. These application servers are also distributed between both data centers so that at least half the Application Servers will still be available in the case where one of the data centers becomes inoperable. Freudenberg IT does not charge extra when additional application servers are required to maintain agreed upon service levels.

Freudenberg IT is responsible for all LAN lines within each data center. WAN lines into each data center can either be dedicated to each customer or shared (i.e. Freudenberg IT Internet Lines using SONET with multiple path redundancy) using VPN access. The choice of network security concept, communication line carrier, data line type, bandwidth, associated network devices, the backup data line method, and actual location of the WAN entry point (the customers location(s) and/or a Freudenberg IT data center) is mutually agreed upon between the customer and Freudenberg IT and is defined in the hosting contract service levels.
Hyper-FIT ERP Hosting Package

This hosting package is designed for customers looking to run their SAP applications on the highly-scalable Intel architecture. The hardware platform is HP/Intel servers running Linux or Windows with an Oracle database. System Availability commitments range from 99. 5% to 99.9%. These platforms run with a shared EMC or NetApp enterprise storage device. Virtualization Option: This architecture provides added flexibility in load-balancing and enables capabilities to reduce both planned and unplanned outages. This architecture can support either Windows or Linux, and utilizes virtualization capabilities through bare-metal products. High-Availability Option: This architecture leverages virtualization capabilities through bare-metal products, as well as advanced enter-prise storage solutions. Data mirroring is used across the two data centers, supported with stand-by virtual servers at the opposite data center. This provides for an Availability of 99.9%, and an improved Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) beyond the standard 24 hours and 4 hours respectively.

Our average production system availability since 2005 has been over 99.97% with Oracle we are able to deliver the value, security, reliability, and scalability our customers require.

Scott LaBouliere, SVP of Hosting Operations for Freudenberg IT USA

60

Hosting with Oracle at Freudenberg IT

FIT Professional ERP Hosting Package

This hosting package is designed for a higher level of hardware redundancy. The hardware platform is either HPs Integrity servers running HP-UX, or IBM p-series servers running AIX. Each of these servers run with an Oracle database and a shared EMC or NetApp enterprise storage device. Advanced Mirror Option: This add-on package is for customers with large amounts of data who need to reduce RTO and the RPO even further. The Professional package is enhanced with immediate and automatic mirroring of data at the CPU/OS level to 2 SAN storage devices one in each data center. (CPU/OS-based mirroring is used for server boot disks as well). When the Production system and/or data center becomes inoperable, the SAN storage device in the other data center contains the entire customers data up to the last successful data write transaction. It is reconfigured and attached to the Quality Assurance system, the SAP instance is started and brought up as the recovery Production system. SAN-based RPO is less than 1 minute. Similar capabilities are offered by our NAS storage solutions as well.

Plus Shadow Option: This add-on package is for customers with large amounts of data who need to reduce overall RTO and RPO who also need a low RTO and RPO when logical database errors occur (e.g. user error resulting in mass deletion of master data). The entire production (active) SAP landscape is shadowed with a passive SAP landscape in the other data center. Using Oracle Data Guard in Redo Apply mode, DB redo logs are copied to the shadow landscape on a regular basis. At pre-determined periods (e.g. every 4 hours) the redo logs will be applied to the shadow database to keep it consistent with the Production database. This increases system availability to 99.9% or higher. When the customer becomes aware of a logical database error, they immediately contact Freudenberg IT with a critical call. Hosting personnel immediately shutdown the shadowing process. After analysis of the redo logs, the shadow database can be updated to reflect the production database just before the logical error occurred. The shadow system becomes the Production system and original Production system will be recreated and assume the role of shadow system. Shadow-based RTO is less than 1 hour (no need to reconfigure the Quality Assurance system or attach the other SAN storage device) and RPO is less than 1 minute before the logical error (but all data entered after the logical error will not be available in the shadow database so the customer must have all SAP users cease their work as soon as the logical error is detected). Interested in a cost-effective SAP/Oracle hosting solution? Please contact:
info@freudenberg-it.com www.freudenberg-it.com

Dual Data Center Concept Diagram

Freudenberg IT specializes in SAP hosting, SAP and MES consulting, and EDI. As an international SMB IT service provider, Freudenberg IT has 16 different office locations in North America, Europe and Asia and operates SAP-certified data center locations in Durham, North Carolina; Weinheim, Germany; Suzhou, China; and Singapore, and Malaysia. Freudenberg IT holds SAP Hosting and Services Partnerships along with SAP Special Expertise Partnerships in Business Intelligence, CRM, BPC, HCM, Enterprise Portals, Financial Supply Chain Management and NetWeaver. Freudenberg IT has also developed its own MES (Manufacturing Execution System) solution called the Adicom Software Suite, which ensures the seamless flow of real-time information between the plant floor and the enterprise in the areas of Logistics, Production and Labor Management.

Oracle Partner Delta Consulting

61

D E LTA C O N S U LT I N G
Delta Consulting, Inc. is an SAP-focused consultancy offering extensive SAP consulting services and Software Components for its SAP Customer Base. Delta has a deep rooted belief that the successful implementation of an SAP solution involves much more than installing software it requires the integration of people, processes and technology. Our extensive SAP expertise and multi-disciplinary business backgrounds makes Delta consultants uniquely qualified to effectively deliver a broad range of SAP solutions.

As a certified SAP Services Partner for over 11 years and a member of the Oracle Preferred Partner Program (OPP), Delta Consulting is pleased to announce its selection by Oracle to extend its agreement to provide support services for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Using SAP with Oracle RAC offers a unique solution for SAP customers already running Oracle by providing them with a total solution that provides high availability and scalability. Our team includes highly skilled and experienced Oracle DBAs who are trained and certified in SAP basis administration. Oracle Database 11g is the highly scalable and reliable database for mission critical SAP solutions. Our commitment and focus on this technology enables Delta Consulting to bring the best practices for migrating an existing SAP installation from a single instance Oracle database to a multiple instance Oracle RAC cluster database configuration. Services to be provided by Delta Consulting include: RAC Implementations Database Migrations Tuning and Performance Optimization Backup/Recovery and Hot Standby Solutions

Over two-thirds of all mid-sitze to high-end SAP customers run their applications on Oracle. With SAPs endorsement and certification of Oracle Database 11g, the motivation to implement RAC include: Higher Availability New Requirements Maintenance window negotiation More and more work places rely on SAP ERP More Flexibility Dynamical growth by adding servers Better reuse of equipment Cost Savings Buy cheaper servers (scale out) Reduce maintenance costs Want to increase the ROI on your existing SAP system? Working with Delta Consulting, we can help you explore areas where you can leverage industry best practices and make current processing even more efficient. We offer a wide array to help you take advantage of your SAP investment. Delta Consulting, Inc. 5 Christy Drive, Suite 109 Chadds Ford, PA 19317 Toll Free: 1-888-461-5553 Phone: 1-610-558-1730 E-mail: info@go-delta.com Website: www.go-delta.com

Delta
For additional information regarding Delta Consulting, please visit our website at www.go-delta.com or contact: Jack Tomb, Partner at 610-558-1730.

62

Oracle Partner All4it Group

All4it focuses his offer on a SAP ERP on Oracle database delivery solutions

I T S T R AT E G Y A N D T R A N S F O R M AT I O N : A L L 4 I T ' S S T R AT E G I C I T E F F E C T I V E N E S S P R O F E S S I O N A L S H E L P O R G A N I Z AT I O N S O P T I M I Z E I N V E S T M E N T S , T R A N S F O R M C A PA B I L I T I E S A N D A C H I E V E G R E AT E R B U S I N E S S VA L U E F R O M I T

All4it Group

Founded in 1997, All4it was surrounded by senior consultants to issue an advisory service for high value-added technology around the Oracle database for SAP: Consulting, technology and outsourcing. Through large projects at the enterprise level, All4it now offers a range of vertical services, from physical infrastructure, to the business borders of the information systems. In particular, All4it has managed to distinguish this market that supports projects involving very large databases and infrastructure SAP and respecting the strength core business of its customers. Specifically, All4it led many successful ECC/Oracle database migrations and major implementations of new Oracle features (RAC, partitioning, charset migration, environment split/merge, key index compression, Flashback, Data Guard, and now, Database Vault) in compliance with the rules of SAP ERP and BI support. The partnership between Oracle database & SAP and All4it is historic. First, from the origin of its employees and then thanks to the permanent will to better meet its customers utilizing the technologies offered by Oracle. Recently Decathlon, leader in distribution of sports items, was wining by the acquisition of SAP Award, thanks to migration ECC5.0 conducted jointly with All4it.

Today, as part of strategy partners, Oracle chose All4it for its ability to manage end-toend projects. From a practical point of view, All4it invested in programs Oracle for SAP Organization: Global Technology Center, RAC training program, to be perpetually aware of best practices. In Paris at the event Fujitsu-Siemens to the Palais des Congrs (FSC-Future IT), All4it was implementing a platform RAC-10g/ SAPECC6 to demonstrate the capabilities of solution FlexFrame for SAP Solution. In summary, the success of All4it builds on the following key drivers: - Understanding of the issues customers upstream phase of study and design - Project monitoring and control - Proposals of the best technologies, federation, implementation, skills transfer - Integration of technologies offered by manufacturers like IBM, HP and others and finally propose optimizations in outsourcing of the operation to free up budgets ...

Industry:
Consulting & outsourcing

Locations:
Luxembourg Belgium France

Annual Revenue:
12,5 M

Employees:
135 For additional information regarding All4it, please visit our website at www.All4it.com, or contact Olivier Lambert at +33 6 08 73 09 92

# Database
Vendor Share

1
Oracle

44.3%

IBM 21%

Microsoft 18,5%

Oracle Database
Trusted by 280,000 Customers Worldwide

oracle.com/sap saponoracle_de@oracle.com

Source: IDC, Worldwide Relational Database Management Systems 2007 Vendor Shares , IDC #212840, June 2008.
Copyright 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its a affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

64

D ATA R E C O V E RY W I T H O R A C L E D ATA G U A R D , L O G M I N E R AND FLASHBACK QUERY IN AN SAP ENVIRONMENT

DR.THIMO
Freudenberg IT Weinheim, Germany BASTUCK

Keywords:

Introduction

Data recovery, SAP, Data Guard, LogMiner, Flashback Query, high availability, user error, application error, logical corruptions, physical corruptions, corrupt blocks. Freudenberg IT is the internationally active IT service provider for small and medium-sized companies, specializing in hosting, infrastructure services and consulting for SAP and MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems). As an SAP Global Hosting Partner with a clear focus on medium-sized businesses, Freudenberg IT offers a uniform portfolio of products and services for SAP hosting throughout the world. In addition, Freudenberg IT has many years of extensive business process experience in SAP consulting as a long-standing SAP partner for medium-sized businesses. The SAP competence of Freudenberg IT is based on comprehensive experience with projects for the automotive component supply industry, discrete production, logistics service providers, rolled goods producers and industrial trading. Various SAP Special Expertise Partnerships underline the companys consultancy performance in the business intelligence, content and document management, financials and integration services fields. The Adicom Software Suite from Freudenberg IT, which has won multiple awards, offers medium-sized and large companies the leading holistic MES solution for production and human resources planning and control. With a sales share of more than two thirds in the independent market, Freudenberg IT is the most successful German IT spin-off. The company employs more than 500 associates at 16 locations in Europe, America and Asia. The IT service provider is part of the Freudenberg Group.

Oracle Data Guard, LogMiner and Flashback Query are standard functionalities of Oracle Enterprise Edition. Oracle Data Guard is Oracles foremost disaster recovery solution. Freudenberg IT uses Oracle Data Guard to protect SAP systems running on Oracle. As well as offering protection against corruptions in the file system, at Freudenberg IT, Data Guard also protects against logical errors caused by defective user programs. Changes to the production system only take effect in the physical standby database after a set delay of several hours, in a process known as a delayed apply. Oracle LogMiner allows redo logs to be analyzed. This analysis enables the reconstruction of the SQL statements created when the data was changed and the associated UNDO statements. Correct data inventories can then be recovered from a given point should any logical errors occur. Oracle Flashback Query is one variant of the Flashback technologies that form part of Oracle Database. It allows you to query table content at a point in the recent past using information in the UNDO tablespace. Freudenberg IT also uses Flashback Query to reconstruct original data after a program error. This paper explores the Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Flashback Query and Oracle LogMiner technologies. The practical benefits are illustrated by means of case studies where customer data inventories have been successfully recovered with the aid of these basic technologies. The problem in the examples described was that, owing to the particular error situations, it was not possible to simply restore the entire database from a backup. Instead, it was necessary to restore individual data areas (i.e. individual tables or parts of table content) without affecting or destroying other, still intact fields.

Oracle Data Guard Freudenberg IT

65

Oracle Data Guard, LogMiner and Flashback Query: An Overview

Any business that provides SAP hosting to end customers gives top priority to the availability of the overall systems and customer data. Successful data recovery after an unforeseen error depends on an indepth knowledge of SAP products and the database technologies they are based on. Oracle Database offers numerous functionalities for building high-availability, error-tolerant systems. Freudenberg IT uses Oracle Data Guard, LogMiner and Flashback Query in many hosted customer SAP systems.
Oracle Data Guard

Possible areas of use include: Identifying the start time of a logical corruption Defining the necessary actions to perform a fine-grained recovery at transaction level Performing trend and capacity analyses for tuning measures Auditing previous transactions in the database
Oracle Flashback Query

Ever since Oracle Data Guard was first introduced as an Oracle standby database technology in Oracle Database 7.3, it has been continually developed from one version to the next. It has been known as Data Guard since Oracle Database 9i. It provides a software infrastructure for creating and administering one or more standby databases as transaction-consistent copies of the production database. Data Guard protects critical data against errors, downtimes, disasters and corruptions. If the production database fails or is deliberately shut down, one of the connected standby databases can take over production tasks. This minimizes downtimes and prevents data loss. Data Guard is part of Oracle Enterprise Edition. In Oracle Database 11g and higher it enables read-only access to the physical standby database for queries while continuously applying changes. This requires a license for the Active Data Guard option. Data Guard may be combined with other Oracle high-availability functionalities such as Real Application Clusters (RAC), Flashback Database and Recovery Manager (RMAN).
Oracle LogMiner

Oracle Flashback Query is one of the various Flashback technologies that form part of Oracle Database. Flashback technologies enable very flexible responses to human errors, which according to various studies are the cause of around 40% of application failures. In many cases these errors result in logical corruptions of the data. In other words, although the SQL statement is syntactically valid as far as the database is concerned, it produces logical inconsistencies at application level. Typical user errors include inadvertently deleting datasets, making incorrect changes to datasets, and accidentally deleting tables. Oracle Flashback technologies allow the user to view historical data inventories, perform change analyses, retrieve deleted tables, and quickly reset the entire database to a point in the past. Oracle Database 9i introduced the Flashback Query functionality, which enables to query tables at a point in the recent past. In Oracle Database 10g the technology was expanded to allow flashback across all levels: database, table, row, and transaction. The functions added in Oracle Database 10g include Flashback Database, Flashback Table, Flashback Drop, Flashback Versions Query, and Flashback Transaction Query. Oracle Database 11g also introduced Flashback Data Archive to store long-term historical information about individual tables and their changes. The advantage of the Flashback technologies is that they allow a specific part of the database to be repaired with surgical precision, according to the error situation, without having to resort to a global media recovery.

LogMiner is an Oracle Database component that has been available since Version 8i. It provides an interface for analyzing the content of online and archived redo logs. All changes to user data implemented in the database or the databases data dictionary are logged as redo entries in the redo logs.

66

CASE STUDIES Case Study 1: Data Extraction from Standby Site (Data Guard)

Problem: A user error has resulted in several million datasets being deleted from three customer tables (Y*). Result: One entire department was unable to process orders, paralyzing a considerable proportion of the customers retail business. Customer requirement: To reset the datasets of the affected tables to the status they had approximately three hours before in the QA system. Solution: The customer used Data Guard with a physical standby database running four hours behind the primary site in managed recovery mode, using the delayed apply principle. As soon as it was discovered that data in the production system had been damaged, managed recovery of the standby database was stopped. Three hours had elapsed since the user error occurred. Thanks to the set four-hour delay, the content of the standby database had not been affected by the error. This meant that the correct data could be extracted and made available in the QA system. The following steps were taken: Standby: managed recovery stopped: recover managed standby database cancel; Standby: standby site recovered to a customerspecified point immediately before the error: recover standby database UNTIL TIME '2008-03-06:15:20:00';

Standby: standby site opened in read-only mode: alter database open; shown in alert.log Physical standby database opened for read only access. Standby: standby site tables exported: expsapdat/<passwd>
file=export_YINT0101.dmplog=YINT0101.log tables=YINT0101 indexes=no direct=yes etc.

Standby/QA system: export data transferred: scp... QA system: status of QA tables backed up: create table YINT0101_backup as select * from YINT0101; etc. QA system: SAP stopped QA system: QA tables renamed: alter table YINT0103 rename to YINT0103_orig; QA system: menu-guided import of previously mentioned exports: imp... QA system: SAP started QA system: customer given green light to check / extract data from the QA system Standby: managed recovery restarted after customer approval: alter database recover managed standby database disconnect from session; QA system: following completion of data extraction and customer approval, imported tables dropped and ..._orig renamed Duration of measures taken: approximately 1 hour, including customer consultation Because of interdependencies with various other tables in the SAP system it was not possible to reset the tables directly in the production system (this is also not supported by SAP). In addition, some small areas of the table (data for other departments) were still intact and it was essential not to reset them. For these reasons the data was made available in the QA system. From there it was read out using SAP standard methods and applied in the production system.

Oracle Data Guard Freudenberg IT

67

Case Study 2: Data Reconstruction from Redo Logs (LogMiner)

Analysis scripts (SQL scripts) generated, each evaluating 10 redo logs (split into smaller jobs). Sample script:
orap11p> cat redo_analyze_134303.sql /* Analyse von Redo Log Nr. 134303 bis 134312 */ ... -- auszuwertende Redo Logs definieren: execute dbms_logmnr.add_logfile( '/oracle/P11/oraarch2/P11arch1_134303.dbf' , dbms_logmnr.new) execute dbms_logmnr.add_logfile( '/oracle/P11/ oraarch2/P11arch1_134304.dbf', dbms_logmnr.addfile) execute dbms_logmnr.add_logfile( '/oracle/P11/oraarch2/P11arch1_134305.dbf', dbms_logmnr.addfile) ... -- Start des LogMiners, Verwendung Online Catalog: execute dbms_logmnr.start_logmnr(OPTIONS => dbms_logmnr.DICT_FROM_ONLINE_CATALOG) -- Abfrage der relevanten SQL_Redo und SQL_UNDO Statements: select SCN, to_char(TIMESTAMP,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') as TIMESTAMP, SQL_REDO, SQL_UNDO from v$logmnr_contents where SEG_NAME='KNMT'; spool off

Problem: Data has been distorted over several days by a defective program. In the KNMT table, a developer error resulted in several thousand datasets out of an approximate total of 120,000 being distorted over the course of a week: all non-key fields, in particular the essential KDMAT and POSTX fields have been set to empty. Result: The distortion has damaged the link between Internal material number and Customer material number, so the customer (a retailer) was unable to process incoming orders. Customer requirement: To reconstruct the original data content replaced by empty. To add to the problem, the datasets had been updated several times during the week but the required information was deleted after the first update. Solution: This customer had activated supplemental logging of the database (alter database add supplemental log data;). This allowed the redo logs to be fully analyzed with LogMiner (otherwise, in the case of chained rows, the analysis could have yielded datasets with the result Unsupported). The following steps were taken: Redo logs restored to new directory from start of data distortion (approx. 300 redo logs of 140 MB each).

Sample result - see Graphic:

Sample output of above LogMining; SQL_REDO contains the defective instructions (in red boxes), SQL_UNDO contains the deleted KDMAT and POSTX data to be recovered (in green boxes)

68

The result of the above SELECT statement was further analyzed with a shell script. The SQL_UNDO entries where for the corresponding SQL_REDO KDMAT a value other than empty was replaced by empty were backed up to a file in order to recover the original state of KDMAT. Information forwarded to the customer for checking and/or further selection. Updates (SQL undos) of unambiguous datasets, as confirmed by customer, performed (customer checked and confirmed interdependencies with other tables and requested that in this special case the SQL undos be applied directly to the production system). Customer performs manual correction of the remaining (ambiguous) datasets using standard SAP input methods. Various alternative solutions were discussed with the customer in advance, but because the data distortion happened gradually and went unnoticed while the system continued to operate, LogMining was the only realistic way of correcting the problem. All other options would have resulted in data loss or required considerable resources.
Case Study 3: Reconstruction of Changed Fields in SAP Pool Table (LogMiner)

The data was reconstructed as follows: Table pool to which T030K belongs was identified (SAP transaction se11): here ATAB. Time of error established (defective transport order imported: start+end). Redo logs created during this period (a few minutes) identified and restored. LogMining commenced as in Case Study 2 to reconstruct the data; system searches for undo statements relating to changes in ATAB containing the table name T030K:
select SCN, to_char(TIMESTAMP,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') as TIMESTAMP, SQL_UNDO from v$logmnr_contents where SEG_NAME='ATAB' and SQL_UNDO like '%T030K%'; SCN TIMESTAMP ---------- -------------------------SQL_UNDO ------------------------------------------220517473 29-SEP-2008 16:13:50 insert into "SAPDAT"."ATAB"("TABNAME", "VARKEY","DATALN","VARDATA") values ('T030K','110PYINVSTD9','40',HEXTORAW '002800300030003000300031003500340036003600 300030003000300030003100350034003600360030' ));

Problem: Data in the SAP pool table T030K (Tax account determination) has been deleted by an incorrect transport (user error). Result: Impersonal account deleted in the production system. Customer requirement: Name deleted values. Solution: As in Case Study 2, supplemental logging of the database was activated, so LogMining appeared to be the most appropriate option. Unlike the previous case, however, table T030K was not created at database level but in the SAP table pool ATAB. So as far as the database was concerned, there was only the ATAB table, the entries in which concealed the pool table. This had to be taken into account and evaluated during the LogMining process.

The SQL_UNDO contains the key fields of T030K as one character chain (here: 110PYINVSTD9) and the respective values as HEX. The VARKEY column in the ATAB table contains the values of the key fields MANDT, KTOPL, KTOSL, MWSKZ of the T030K table as a combined string: 110PYINVSTD9. In accordance with the table description, this produces 110=MANDT, PYIN=KTOPL, VST=KTOSL and D9=MWSKZ. After the HEX length, the VARDATA column indicates the HEX values of the KONTS and KONTH columns in the T030K table. This HEX representation can be converted into and read in ASCII in this example: (00001546600000154660. This results in an insert in the pool table T030K with the values:

Oracle Data Guard Freudenberg IT

69

key:

MANDT=110 KTOPL=PYIN KTOSL=VST MWSKZ=D9 values: KONTS=0000154660 KONTH=0000154660

Files copied and imported into development system:

imp sapdat/<pwd> file=exp_cepc_restore.dmp full=Y

Data made available to the customer, who can then re-enter it in the system using standard SAP methods.
Case Study 4: Data Recovery in the Undo Area (Flashback Query)

Tables created in ABAP dictionary to allow access to the data from SAP (to achieve this, the tables were renamed again to satisfy the SAP naming convention). Customer performs normal transport of correct, checked data into production system using standard SAP methods. In this example the original data required was made available within about an hour (including analyses and discussion with the customer), enabling the customer to transport the correct data into the production system a short time later (after checking). For the system in question, with a database of around 2 TB, providing a temporary system restore (point-in-time recovery just before error) would have taken several hours, not to mention the considerably greater time and hardware resources required.
Summary:

Problem: A user error has resulted in obsolete statuses of the CEPC and CEPCT tables (Profit center master data) being transported from the development system to the production system. Result: No new customer datasets could be created. Customer requirement: Make the original statuses of the production tables available. Solution: Although the table changes occurred about 20 hours ago, the before images of the data could still be reconstructed with a sufficiently large undo tablespace, such that a Flashback Query of the two tables yielded the table status prior to the import of the defective transport order. These statuses were copied to a new (temporary) table to enable the customer to check them and compare them with the now available data and make any necessary corrections. The following steps were taken: Time of error established from SAP transport log; result: 25.06.2009 - 22:04:22 Data from old status copied to new table (in production system), e.g.:
SQL> create tables sapdat.cepc_2009_06_ 25_22_04_00 as (select * from sapdat.cepc as of timestamp to_timestamp('2009-06-25:22:04:00' ,'yyyy-mm-dd:hh24:mi:ss')); Table created.

Oracle Database offers numerous functions for high availability and data security. This includes architectural concept-based features such as Real Application Clusters (not described in this paper) and Oracle Data Guard, and built-in features such as LogMiner and Flashback technologies. This paper deals with Data Guard, LogMiner and Flashback Query. As can be seen from the case studies, these functionalities some of them unique on the market enabled Freudenberg IT to respond flexibly to a wide range of error situations in the hosted SAP environments and quickly restore availability of the particular SAP application. It made no difference whether the problem was the result of physical corruptions caused by a hardware defect or a logical corruption caused by a user program error.

New tables exported from production system:

exp sapdat/<pwd> file=exp_cepc_restore.dmp log=exp_cepc_restore.log tables=\(cepc_2009_06_25_22_04_00,cepct_200 9_06_25_22_04_00\)

70

ORACLE ADVANCED CUSTOMER SERVICES FOR SAP

Database Services for SAP Environments
Oracle Support for SAP

A key attribute to the deep customer focused partnership with SAP, is SAPs requirement for a permanent onsite technical staff. These Centers of Expertise staff SAPs Oracle Development Level Support queue and provide immediate assistance for a wide range of activities ranging from critical issue support to production down outage situations. The Centers, located in Walldorf, Tokyo and Palo Alto, also assist SAP customers with a wide range of proactive support in areas such as management of increasing data volumes, performance optimization, setup of high availability solutions and data exchange between the SAP system and other Oracle databases. The SAP-Oracle integrated support model draws from over 20 years of close-in collaboration and delivers a highly responsive and anticipatory level of service.
Oracle Direct Customer Support Through Advanced Customer Services

The services provide for three levels of annualized operational support, Assisted Services Engagements and onsite Technical Skill Workshops. As SAP certifies new versions of Oracle databases, as with Oracle Database 11g, that deliver greater speed, scalability and reduced IT costs, Oracle Advanced Customer Services has the expertise and certifications to help customers adopt and leverage this technology for SAP applications. In addition, onsite assistance in deploying and leveraging Oracle database features such as Database Vault, DataGuard, Partitioning and RAC is available to ensure proper configuration and set ups with SAP application requirements. All Advanced Customer Services Database Services for SAP Environments are delivered by Oracle experts who are skilled in maximizing Oracle technology contributions to overall system performance, stability and recoverability.
Oracle with SAP Expert Guidance Tailored to Your Business

In addition to the integrated support with SAP, many customers choose to engage Oracle Support directly to help achieve even greater performance and ROI from their SAP-Oracle configured environment. These services are available through Oracles Advanced Customer Services (ACS) organization. Advanced Customer Services experts deliver personalized services directly to customers worldwide to maximize performance and increase productivity for all Oracle systems. SAP works in partnership with Oracle to provide quality system support. Many of our joint customers however, require even higher levels of support for their database environments to leverage maximum Oracle capabilities. Our annualized services take support to the next level, explains Larry Abramson, Senior Vice President, Oracle Advanced Customer Services.

Database Services for SAP Environments offers three levels of annualized services that can be combined with engagements and workshops to meet your specific needs.
Advanced Support Assistance

facilitates and expedites service requests through a single point of contact. Your Service Delivery Manager (SDM) ensures that the right people and organizations are aligned with meaningful action plans resulting in more efficient and effective issue resolution.

Business Critical Assistance

combines service request resolution with proactive advice and assistance tailored to your specific operations and projects. Your SDM coordinates the efforts of a team of engineers who develop background capabilities on your company and your IT goals, and then assist with ensuring a successful outcome for each of your projects.

Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) for SAP

71

Solution Support Center offers our most comprehensive service, with a team of focused engineers that are deeply aware of your environment, operations and projects. This focused team of engineers is available to you through a direct access hotline to provide assistance for critical Service Requests and a range of proactive services including assessments and root cause analysis.

Designed to help customers deal more effectively with external and internal compliance and security requirements, the workshop focuses on how to leverage the Oracle database features to safeguard their deployments at the database level. Key areas include: database-user security, auditing, network security, Transparent Data Encryption and Oracle Database Vault. To further enhance the value, these Technical Skill Workshops can be modified and enhanced to help ensure alignment with your specific situation and goals. Technical Skill Workshops are specific to your company and are scheduled based on availability. Many customers find that deep Oracle and SAP experience and expertise is necessary to improve database performance and system stability, when upgrading or moving the database or when leveraging Oracle database features. Our most popular engagements include: Database Health Check Database Partitioning SAP ERP Administration Concepts Review and Proof of Concepts Hot Standby/Data Guard Implementation Backup/Restore/Recovery RAC Setup Assistance HW Migration O2O/Oracle (Advanced Customer Services as Provider) HW Migration Assistance O2O Packages (Advanced Customer Services as Assistance) Database Migration Assistance Database Reorganizations With Advanced Customer Services Database Services for SAP Environments you enjoy a preferred relationship with Oracle subject-matter experts, IT professionals, and developers to maximize the value of your Oracle environment.

Oracle/SAP- Oriented Workshops and Engagements

To build your IT staffs capabilities and confidence in optimizing the Oracle database in an SAP environment, our workshops are created and delivered by specialists who know how SAP applications interact with Oracle databases. With the content drawn from a long history of technical partnership with SAP, Oracle Advanced Customer Services provides the following Technical Skill Workshops: Fundamentals of Oracle database for SAP ERP (Level I) Oracle Advanced Performance Tuning for SAP ERP (Level II) Oracle Expert for SAP (Level III) Oracle Database 11g for SAP Business Suite Technical Skills Workshop Oracle Database Administration for SAP Business Intelligence Oracle Real Application Clusters for SAP SAP ERP ABAP Tuning with Oracle database Platform In addition to established portfolio of workshops, a new workshop, Oracle Security for SAP ERP Customers is now available on request.

72

Database Healthcheck/Performance Analysis

Database Migration Services for SAP

Performance is a primary key to success in the introduction and operation of an SAP system for all SAP customers. Our specially trained staff, not only knows the Oracle database in detail, but is also trained in the intricacies of Oracle in a SAP environment. Both at the beginning of a deployment and at regular intervals over the application life-cycle, Database Healthchecks can ensure proper configuration and tuning for optimum performance.
High Availability/Backup Concepts

Unavailability of the SAP system leads to catastrophic problems for most customers, both logistically and financially. In order to minimize the risk of unplanned downtime in a mission critical environment, IT organizations must proactively plan for failover and recoverability. Oracle database products enable different approaches, such as hardware clusters, mirror technologies, standby databases, RAC and Data Guard. Oracle Advanced Customer Services can advise on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches as it applies to your particular situation and, of course, assist with the implementation of the chosen solution.
Oracle RAC Enablement for SAP

The majority of all SAP ERP installations run on an Oracle database. The Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP group is certified by SAP for database migrations and can assist companies who wish to migrate their SAP Business Suite installation from a non-Oracle database to Oracle. A much valued aspect of Oracles migration services is the deep familiarity of the change from a DBA perspective. Oracle Advanced Customer Services can assist your staff in executing a migration plan while familiarizing them with the new database operations.
Oracle to Oracle Database Migrations (O2O) Extremely Fast and Smooth Database Migrations for SAP Systems

The Real Application Clusters (RAC) option enables the distribution of your database instance across different servers, or nodes. This offers new possibilities in the area of high availability of an Oracle database system, and also provides greater flexibility in the dimensioning and scalability of system resources. Oracle Advanced Customer Services provides professional services, in the areas of planning, technical workshops and implementation, to assist you with enabling RAC for your SAP environments.

Because standard tools require long transfer times, many situations require more than 48 hours to migrate a database. Oracle provides O2O migration Services to shrink the total transfer time. Based on a set of services, procedures and tools, Oracle Advanced Customer Services can help customers achieve a significantly faster process, typically at a speed of 100 to 150 GB per hour. This means systems can now be migrated within bound time-frames that could not be handled previously using standard tools. In addition, applying Oracle Streams enables an online approach for O2O migrations. The service set is based on Oracle technologies, and support migrations of SAP ERP as well as BI/BW systems. Systems using this advanced migration approach remain fully within SAP supportability requirements.

Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) for SAP

73

Oracle Partitioning for SAP Customers

Oracle Database 11g!

Oracle Partitioning is an option to Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition (also along with Oracle Database 11g certification). At a technical level, Oracle Partitioning allows tables and indexes within a database to be subdivided into smaller pieces. Oracle can partition a table by ranges of values, so for example, the data for Jan 1, 2010 through Jan 31, 2010 can reside in its own partition. Oracle can also partition a table by a list of values, so, for example, North American data is in one partition, while the European data is in another partition. Partitioning is a critical feature for managing large databases. Partitioning is the feature that allows a database to scale for very large datasets while maintaining consistent performance, without an unduly increased need for hardware resources or administrative efforts. Oracle Partitioning is embedded into the core database engine and supported by Oracles administrative tools. From an SAP application perspective, partitioning is completely transparent. Thus, no changes need to be made to the application or to the SQL statements in order to use partitioning. Partitioning for SAP has been supported since SAP Release 4.6C (see SAP Note 742243) for the SAP Kernel 6.20.

With the many new capabilities and enhancements of Oracle Database 11g, such as Advanced Compression, DirectNFS, Securefiles and Online Patching, enthusiasm and advanced demand continues to build for fast deployment. In addition, Database Vault is now certified by SAP for supportability. Advanced Customer Services stands ready to advise and assist SAP users in efficiently and smoothly upgrading to Oracle Database 11g in line with SAP supportability requirements. Technical workshops are in development to help your IT staff become aware and comfortable in deploying and supporting the many new features of Oracle Database 11g. Whether through our ongoing support and partnership with SAP, or directly with your IT organization, Oracle Advanced Customer Services deliver personalized services with deep experience operating with SAP applications. For further information please contact us:
saponoracle_de@oracle.com

D A T A B A S E

11g

74

J O I N T T E S T I N G O F A U T O M AT I C O R A C L E D ATA B A S E I N S TA L L AT I O N ( FA S T S TA RT ) O N H P S Y S T E M S S U C C E S S F U L LY C O M P L E T E D

In order to help small businesses and midsize companies implement SAP Business All-in-One, SAP offers a fast-start program. The purpose of the program is to dramatically reduce the time and skill required for new installations, to cut costs while minimizing risk. This web-based umbrella program accelerates the process, from the requirements analysis and the selection of hardware and software to proposals for process optimization within the organization. Lead generation is handled by an easy-to-use referral program. General information about the companys sector is entered in the webbased configurator and the system uses this information to select the relevant SAP partner. The system then suggests a configuration for hardware, software and licenses and produces a cost estimate. The core of the fast-start program is the installation wizard, which assists with pre-installation with the relevant SAP partner and is used to prepare, control and implement the automatic installation procedure on the customers system.

Web-based testing and installation are performed on site using SAP standard processes and best practices, with maximum efficiency and minimum personnel requirements. SAP software is optimized for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise servers, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SAP MaxDB. On the hardware side, customers can choose from HP, IBM, Intel and Fujitsu systems.
Configuration without the Constraints

Now that SAP has opened up what was once a very restricted choice of partners, the way is open for SAP Value Added Resellers (VARs). HP is one of the first partners who joined the SAP fast-start program and developed a broad range preconfigured solutions. With the help of pre-configured hardware and software, as offered by HP with its Factory Express program, SAP estimates that installation time can be cut from around five days to just five hours with the fast-start program. To support customers using SAP Business All-in-One together with an Oracle database HP and Oracle developers were looking for the right patch set with the appropriate parameters for the Oracle database. The process was optimized by using Oracle procedures. The team now has access to a container of patches, from which the installation including the necessary parameters can be carried out and the necessary patch sets put together. This package-based approach means that onsite installation no longer demands advanced database knowledge.

SAP Fast Start with Oracle and HP

75

The Oracle database installation process is started automatically as part of SAP installation by entering a few pieces of key information, without the need for additional manpower. This process, the time saved and the high level of security mean massive cost savings for customers and partners alike. Testing has been successfully completed for system environments in the low-end mid-market with 60 to 300 users. The pre-installation of Oracle databases has now been made much simpler, not only on HP UX but also on Windows and Linux platforms.
Premium Design with Value Added

These developments open up a new chapter in the old debate as to whether IT should be unconditionally subordinate to internal processes or whether the organization should in certain cases adapt its processes to the IT infrastructure. Preconfigured systems like those offered by the SAP fast-start program in collaboration with qualified partners contribute additional, high-quality information and knowledge about a companys operations, sector, processes and IT. For customers, especially midsize companies, when it comes to new installations the scales may well tip towards adapting internal processes to these preconfigured knowledge packages. And these offer only limited functionality without the knowledge stored in databases.

SAP currently has a portfolio of around 500 best practices, specific adaptations of the SAP standard to so-called microindustries as used by SAP partners, which effectively contribute to operational management as a quality knowledge source. Three of these best practice templates for service, manufacturing and wholesale can already be used for the fast-start program.

76

Only the Oracle Database provides for SAP customers...

Best Performance & Scalability

Best Deployment Flexibility

Best Availability & Scalability

Best Support for Very Large DBs

Best Database Security

Best Manageability & Self-Management

O r a c l e P a r t n e r I S 4 I T, S A P o n R A C

77

PEOPLE, KNOWLEDGE, PROJECTS, AND IS4IT = 4 SUCCESS FACTORS TO HELP YOU GET AHEAD!

The main task of IS4IT, as a manufacturerindependent IT-consulting firm, is solving our clients technical problems through the application of our IT-specialists expertise. We provide IT services individually-tailored to your specific requirements. With the help of around 85 consultants across Germany, we provide a full range of services, from analysis, conception, and planning, to final implementation to the production process. SAP Basis and SAP Infrastructure have successfully been our main focus for many years. From the very beginning, our activities have included solving problems of server- and storage virtualization, as well as HA cluster. In addition to handling such projects, we also provide our customers with SAP technical maintenance in accordance with Service Level Agreements.

Contact:

Michael Jilg Area Manager IS4IT GmbH Gruenwalder Weg 28b 82041 Oberhaching/Germany Tel: +49 89 638 98 48 22 e-mail: michael.jilg@is4it.de

78

Useful links Oracle database for SAP customers

Oracle Database Global Technology Center for SAP http://www.oracle.com/sap Customer Success Stories, SAP on Oracle http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/archive.html Events http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/events.html Some OSS Notes Oracle and SAP 1021844 Extension of Oracle 9.2 maintenance until July 31, 2008 1027012 Details about MOPatching 1043380 Unicode Migration Optimizations, Efficient Table Splitting for Oracle Databases 1045847 Unicode Migration Optimizations 105047 + 742243 + 722188 Partitioning and Oracle Functionality supported by SAP 1086956 + 1058988 Instant Client 1109743 Index Compression 1125923 + 966117 + 966073 Flashback Database 1169872 Unicode Migration Optimizations 1173954 Support of Oracle for VMWare and XEN 1259767 Management of online redo log files 1272951 Changes in BR*Tools Studio 7.10 1279682 Support for Oracle data encryption 1324684 Creating encrypted RMAN backups using BR*Tools 1324930 BR*TOOLS, Creating encrypted EXPDP exports with BRSPACE 1325304 Conversions between heap-organized tables and IOTs 1329848 Oracle Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V 1330038 Oracle 9.2 Sustaining Support 1333328 SAP Partitioning Engine 1339724 Oracle 10.2 extended Support 1351051 Support of Oracle for HP-UX Itanium Integrity VM 1355140 Oracle Database Vault for SAP 1358126 Oracle 10.2.0: Patches for Oracle Database Vault 1358277 Oracle 10.2.0: Configuration Scripts for Database Vault 1360603 Reorganizing and rebuilding individual partitions 1374807 Freezing single kinds of statistics 139863 Oracle 11g Roadmap 1398634 Oracle 11g Release 2 156548 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel version 4.6x 23875 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel version 3.1 407314 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Web Application Server 6.x 524816 Enqueue Service for RAC SAP-Enqueue-Service 527843 Oracle RAC support in the SAP environment 5740897 Licensing 581312 Licensing 581320 FAQ Oracle RAC for SAP 592393 FAQ Oracle 598678 Oracle9i: New functions (composite SAP Note) 669902 Oracle9i: Setting the national character set to UTF8 (This note is valid also for Oracle 10g) 701235 Compressed Data Segments 705608 SAP RAC specific monitors 720886 Oracle Database 10g: Integration into the SAP environment 740897 Info about the Oracle license scope; required Oracle options 819655 Upgrade to SAP NW 2004s ABAP ORACLE 819829 Oracle Database 10g: Instant Client 10.x on Unix 819830 Oracle Database 10g: Additional Information on upgrade:UNIX 820062 Oracle Database 10g: Patch sets/patches for 10.1.0 828268 Oracle Database 10g: New functions 830576 Parameter recommendations for Oracle 10g 830982 HW fine tuning for SAP on RAC environment 836517 Oracle database 10g: Preparation for SAP-upgrade 838725 Oracle database 10g: New database statistics 841728 Oracle Database 10g: Software installation wizzard 10.2.0 850306 Oracle Critical Patch Update 85838 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel versions 4.5x and 4.0x 871096 Oracle Database 10g: Patch sets/patches for 10.2.0 885167 Upgrade to SAP NW 2004s Java ORACLE 921594 Inst. SAP NetWeaver2004s SR1 - UNIX: Oracle 925871 Customer Care Support' for Oracle 9.2 932722 Upgrade to Oracle 10.2 during a database copy 936441 Unicode Migration Optimizations 940794 Releasing Oracle 10.2 versions for older SAP versions 940811 Oracle Database 10g: Migration from 32-bits to 64-bits 960280 R3load export tuning for split tables with Oracle 973450 Advanced Security (Network Encryption) 974876 Advanced Security (Transparent Data Encryption) 990955 Oracle Datamining Connector 2.1 for SAP 998004 Update the Oracle Instant Client on Windows

Imprint

79

Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Published by Oracle Corporation, Oracle Database for SAP Global Technology Center Albrecht Haug albrecht.haug@oracle.com Altrottstr. 31 69190 Walldorf, Germany Tel. ++49 (0) 6227-8398 - 0 Fax ++49 (0) 6227-8398 - 199 E-mail: saponoracle_de@oracle.comX Internet: http://www.oracle.com/sap http://www.sap.com/ partner/index.htm

Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. SAP, SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver, R/3 and all other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents here of are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. This document is provided for informational purpose only and the information herein is subject to change without notice. Please report any errors herein to Oracle (saponoracle_de@oracle.com). Oracle Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically disclaims any liability in connection with this document. Copyright 2010 Oracle. All Rights Reserved. Published in the U.S.A.

The First OLTP Database Machine

Exadata V2
Hardware by Sun Software by Oracle

oracle.com/exadata or call 1.800.ORACLE.1