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Categories
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High Availability
High Availability
- A Three-Step Process for Averting Downtime When Modifying Your R/3 System
by Kurt Bishop
Whether your SAP system is still in its settling-in phase, or is one that has been firmly entrenched for years, ushering in new changes is a nontrivial challenge. Even small, seemingly innocuous changes, like rearranging a screen, introducing new headings on a report, or revising your backup practices can introduce downtime. Large or small, IT teams obviously need to avoid downtime and make sure that a change does not have an adverse effect on users, partners, or customers.
Kurt Bishop prescribes a three-step process for averting downtime: document the risk/reward and cost associated with each R/3 change request; categorize change requests according to their risk/reward profile; and safeguard, schedule, and implement the change in a manner that is consistent with its risk/reward profile. This article provides details on all three steps.
- Achieving a More Manageable and Reliable R/3 Spool Server Landscape Using Release 4 Output
Classifications, Logical
Servers, and Alternate Servers
by Uwe Krüger
Three new output features give rise to a more manageable, more reliable R/3 spool server environment — classifications, logical servers, and alternate servers. With Release 4, classifications of output devices and spool servers (along the lines of production, high-volume, desktop, and test printing) are now made possible within R/3 itself. This helps you ensure that print requests are directed to the spool servers that are best able to process them.
Logical servers give you a way to reassign multiple output devices with no more effort than it takes to reassign just one. Alternate servers enable you to establish automated failover and load-balancing scenarios. In the event that a spool server fails or becomes overloaded, print requests will be automatically redirected to another (alternate) server. This article provides detailed coverage of these new output features and shows you how they can be used to remedy many of the common problems that plague the spool systems of older releases.
- Architecting a high availability SAP NetWeaver infrastructure: Strategies for ensuring a
successful, cost-effective
implementation
by Matt Kangas, Product Manager, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Labs, LLC
Providing high availability (HA) for an enterprise
service-oriented architecture like SAP NetWeaver
is a challenge — typical setups include multiple
integrated SAP systems that are required around the
clock for continuous, one-step business scenarios.
This article helps you meet this challenge in your
own systems by explaining the SAP NetWeaver architecture,
its configuration, the procedures involved, and the
implications of these elements on systems availability.
It starts with an overview of HA basics, and then
discusses the technical details of an HA setup with
SAP NetWeaver, including topics such as architectural
single points of failure (SPOFs) and ways to isolate
and protect such failure points.
- Defining SAP Service Level Agreements: An IT Manager's Survival Guide
by Richard DeAngelis, Senior Consultant, Computer Design and Integration, LLC
Given the complexity and investment inherent in large SAP environments, it is quite likely that you and your IT colleagues are being asked to measure and ensure a certain level of service for users of your SAP systems. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be of enormous benefit, because it directly addresses a core frustration of most IT managers: the fact that end users and managed resources grow exponentially while IT budgets increase at a much slower rate. Every IT organization should have an SLA that clearly delineates what services it supports, and how quickly service outages will be restored.
This article explains how to craft an effective SLA, what content should be included in the SLA and supporting Operational Level Agreement (OLA), and how to measure SLA compliance.
- Lessons in Logon Load Balancing
by Janet Hutchison
In large SAP R/3 environments that require multiple application instances, you can achieve intelligent, automated distribution of workload across multiple application instances, with minimal impact to end users, through logon groups. This article explains how logon groups work and how to use them to establish a logon load balancing strategy that can improve system performance, elevate end-user satisfaction, and help attain High Availability objectives.
- Optimizing, Monitoring, and Fine-Tuning a Newly Upgraded Release 4.x Spool Service
by Uwe Krüger
For Release 3.x spool servers, all output requests and related management activities are anchored by a single spool work process. Needless to say, processing bottlenecks can be a common occurrence, forcing administrators to add additional R/3 servers just to get more spool work processes. Release 4.x spool servers, which can support multiple spool work processes, yield far better throughput and performance. Just how many spool work processes should you set up on your Release 4.x spool server?
This article provides you with evaluation criteria and guidelines to answer that question and simple scenarios that illustrate how to apply these factors in a real-world situation.
- Readying to Resize Your R/3 Platform
by Kurt Bishop, Remote Consulting Team, SAP America
Whether you're sizing a brand-new system or resizing an existing system, there is only one governing principle — sizing requirements are defined by the extent of the SAP functionality to be implemented. Upgraded functionality, for example, may consume resources, whether you use it or not. When resizing an existing R/3 system, you must account for all upgraded and additional new functions and applications. You must also make sure your existing system is properly tuned, so you don't needlessly buy additional hardware.
How do you analyze your system to determine whether or not it is properly tuned? And how do you account for the workloads presented by current and future requirements from "conventional" R/3 as well as new Web-based functionality such as mySAP.com, Workplace, and B2B? These are some of the questions this article will address.
- Size Does Matter - Strategies for Successful SAP R/3 Capacity Planning
by Kurt Bishop
Capacity planning is not a trivial task. Choose your hardware vendor and equipment carefully, and upgrades will pose few problems. Choose the wrong vendor-model combination, and you will be forced to make extensive changes to your hardware and operating system that will entail extensive planning and testing, and could ultimately require all new equipment.
So how do you, as a customer, set yourself up for a successful collaboration with your hardware vendor - one that ensures the final system design meets your current requirements and adequately scales over time? This article describes the capacity planning process, some basic tools and techniques employed by the vendors, and how you can ensure all of these items work in your favor as you attempt to size your SAP R/3 System.
- Speed Up High-Throughput Business Transactions with Parallel Processing - No
Programming Required!
by Susanne Janssen, Performance & Benchmark Group, SAP AG and Werner Schwarz, IBS
Consumer Industries, SAP Retail Solutions
Parallel processing is a built-in option available with many SAP programs that helps improve the throughput and processing time of business transactions that must process large amounts of data in a tight time frame. This article shows you how to determine whether parallel processing is the right course of action, how the workload is split up to achieve greater throughput, the options available to you to maximize performance, and how to use concurrent batch jobs when parallel processing is not an option automatically provided by the program. It also points out the two most common parallel-processing pitfalls and how to avoid them.
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