Special Report: Choosing hardware for SAP environments

SAP's always been vendor-agnostic when it comes to hardware, allowing customers to run their applications on what they choose. But making the right hardware decisions is critical to application performance. SAP may be one of the most mission-critical applications out there, and optimized software depends on a quality hardware infrastructure for SAP. As such, it's important for SAP professionals to keep an eye on advancements to hardware.

Hardware is also becoming more important in SAP's software development.

SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner predicted that future advances in hardware may bring forth new approaches to building applications in his 2009 Sapphire keynote. SAP's since been busy incorporating in-memory database technology into development.

In this special report, find out why SAP customers are finding that changes to SAP infrastructures can yield quicker ROI, and learn how both hardware and software teams need to collaborate when addressing hardware-related issues such as scalability and reliability. Also, gain insight into what role hardware plays when considering virtualization in an SAP environment, and how to size hardware for SAP BW.

Selecting hardware for SAP environments

• Mission-critical SAP software demands a mission-critical hardware infrastructure
  SAP software application performance depends on a well-managed, quality hardware infrastructure. Find out what role hardware plays in an SAP infrastructure, and how servers, storage and memory are the keys to the SAP enterprise hardware.

   

• Collaboration a must for SAP hardware teams and software teams
  Hardware issues affect SAP software performance in SAP infrastructures. Does the SAP hardware team resolve these issues or the SAP software team? Or is there one SAP-centric IT staff? If the server and hardware managers aren't part of the overall SAP team, the consequences can be disastrous.

   

• SAP infrastructure changes to databases, servers yield quick returns
  Making SAP infrastructure changes, including changing databases, putting in blade servers and virtualizing SAP applications, could result in savings in less than a year.

Optimizing hardware for SAP application performance

• How to improve SAP application performance through smart hardware decisions
  Some IT managers are improving SAP application performance by reconfiguring hardware infrastructures with faster servers, new network hardware, and more powerful storage arrays and even solid state drives.

   

• Running a virtualized SAP environment: Can your hardware handle it?
  Many firms virtualizing an SAP environment should first see if their existing hardware and available memory are sufficient or if they need to bring in new, more powerful servers.

   

• Sizing hardware for SAP BW applications
  An SAP user wants to assess the hardware requirements for an SAP BW application and wants to know what the parameters are of sizing hardware for SAP BW. Find out how the SAP Quick Sizer tool can be used for sizing hardware based on user and throughput.

SAP's appliance strategy

• SAP co-founder Plattner: Hardware will change the way SAP develops software
  Multi-core CPUs and columnar storage databases will allow users to extract information from databases 'instantaneously,' according to SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner. Find out what Plattner had to say about the future of application software development and how hardware will affect SAP's software strategy.

   

• SAP pitches in-memory DBMS to handle transactions as well as analytics
  The plunging cost of memory and the power of multi-core servers is making it orders of magnitude less expensive -- and much quicker -- to mine in-memory, column-based databases for data analysis. But can they be used to run back office transactions?

   

• Moving SAP, hardware and all, into the cloud
  Does it make sense for companies to continue to own their servers and desktop computers? In this post, one analyst suggested that companies can achieve significant cost savings by moving their non-mission-critical SAP infrastructure into the cloud.