h6661 planning virtual infrastructure sap wp

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Abstract

This white paper describes technical and business considerations for planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP landscapes. This paper addresses a variety of key considerations for SAP infrastructure. Specifically, the paper addresses example deployment options for the major layers of the infrastructure, including the host or compute layer, the connectivity layer, and the storage or information layer.

December 2009

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Part Number: H6661

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP Technology Concepts and Business Considerations 2

Table of Contents

Executive summary...........................................................................................................................4 Introduction........................................................................................................................................5 Transforming IT data center and operations for SAP .......................................................................6 Data center model...........................................................................................................................10 IT service and operations management..........................................................................................19 Performance and high availability of an SAP virtual infrastructure .................................................21 Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP ..........................................................................................23 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................26 References......................................................................................................................................27


Executive summary

Business case SAP and non-SAP applications support mission-critical business processes in

today’s world. Maintaining continuity of operations and consistency of information across SAP landscapes is an ongoing priority that EMC continues to deliver. SAP landscapes have been expanding from a client /server single instance to federated landscapes that include multiple applications and database instances. It is common for a company to support eight to ten SAP landscapes, each including multiple instances for production, disaster recovery, operational backup and recovery, quality assurance, development, test, and training. These SAP landscapes, sprawling with servers and storage, tend to be highly federated with stringent performance and availability requirements. While supporting the expanding SAP landscapes is a requirement, the expenditure on people, power, cooling, and floor space drives up the capital and operating costs, putting pressure on already strained data center resources.

Business environment

Today, organizations are under increased pressure to reduce capital expenditure, operating costs, and carbon footprint for sprawling SAP and non-SAP application landscapes. This pressure comes with the requirement to maintain or improve existing SLAs for business continuity, performance and availability for this mission-critical landscape. EMC and VMware are working together to help customers build a robust virtual infrastructure to support their SAP deployments. The following figure illustrates the evolvement of SAP landscapes.


Introduction

Purpose The purpose of this white paper is to review business and technical considerations

when planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP landscapes. This paper will address a variety of key considerations for an SAP infrastructure; specifically the major layers of the infrastructure, including desktop, server, network, and storage domains that are critical to a virtual infrastructure. The readers will gain further insights from this paper when considering a virtual infrastructure for SAP IT.

Audience This white paper is intended for individuals interested in data center alternatives for

SAP IT when considering a virtual infrastructure including applied technologies, design concepts, and planning considerations. Senior managers, applications and data center managers, SAP Basis administrators, DBAs, and system and storage architects will benefit from reading this paper.


Transforming IT data center and operations for SAP

Introduction Embracing a virtual infrastructure strategy for SAP will impact the business by delivering

the most efficient IT for SAP with reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including smaller data center facilities and carbon footprints. The transformation ushers in new data center models, management policies, and operation practices for addressing SAP performance and capacity issues, managing SAP IT, and ensuring business continuity.

In addition, SAP Basis and application administrators are looking for better ways to manage the SAP landscapes throughout the application lifecycle – implementation, migrations, consolidations, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance.

A survey sponsored by the SAP’s user group revealed the following three most difficult tasks:

• Moving production data to non-production systems, • reorganizing the database, and • monitoring the system performance.

The most time-consuming tasks also include copying data to a non-production system, managing complex landscapes for performance monitoring, rehearsing disaster recovery, and managing application changes.

In addition, with the growing of SAP landscapes, performance issues are taking place more frequently than before.

Benefits Transforming to a virtual infrastructure for SAP can provide value to applications and

data center teams, including:

• Increased operational flexibility and efficiency – Rapid SAP software application and services deployment, and shortened time to productivity.

• Minimized risk and enhanced IT service levels – Zero-downtime maintenance capabilities and rapid recovery times for high availability and streamlined disaster recovery scenarios across the data center.

• Optimized SAP IT environments – Compliant provisioning, monitoring, and change management for SAP governed by agreed upon service catalogs between business and IT management.


Cloud computing

A key foundation for an SAP virtual infrastructure is the adoption of virtualization technologies to enable delivery of SAP IT as a service to different customers or groups in an enterprise. Key attributes of a virtual computing environment include: • an automated technical workflow for asset management and provisioning, and • a business workflow enabling the positioning of service catalogs for SAP

customers to plan and order services and IT to complete the approval tasks and billing tasks.

The following figure illustrates the way to plan a virtual infrastructure for SAP.

Considerations Make sure to perform the following steps when transforming to an virtual

infrastructure strategy: • Prioritize business and application drivers for transforming changes to SAP

application based on upgrades, new modules, instance consolidation, and legacy retirements.

• Develop phased transition strategy through looking at consolidation, virtualization,

IT operations, and data center management. • Develop a project-based roadmap prioritized on the impact to the business and

ROI.


SOA and SOI Two computing paradigms are merging to bring business agility with improved time

to value for application development and deployment, along with financial efficiencies – both capital and operational in providing SAP IT as a service. Enterprise Service Orient Applications (SOA) platforms, such as SAP NetWeaver, are driving new application IT paradigms for developing and adopting process-driven applications. The goal is to deploy adaptive business processes based on reusable application services with secure access to any device from any location. With a virtual infrastructure, the Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) enables the data center to provision SAP IT as a service, as against physical assets, for customers including SAP business users and applications IT. The following figure illustrates the SOA and data center platforms.

Note: A virtual infrastructure for SAP must align IT service levels to support federated application landscapes based on the SOA platforms and virtual IT assets.


Efficiency and responsiveness through end-to-end management

SAP landscapes are heavily distributed and interfaced. An effective IT management framework requires a top-to-bottom view of SAP virtual hosts, including SAP components, dependent software, and underlying component infrastructure. In addition, an end-to-end mapping of SAP and non-SAP virtual hosts is required to manage the external interfaces dependencies. The key to reducing cost and risk for SAP IT is the ability to know what exists, what has changed, and if configurations are compliant with the regulatory or internal IT best practices for SAP. The problem, even if can be solved manually, is often a labor-intensive, costly, and risk-prone proposition. A solution that focuses on automation and integrated IT management can greatly reduce risk and maximize your operating expense investment. The following figure illustrates the end-to-end IT management for SAP.


Data center model

Introduction This section covers some of the alternatives for each of the IT domains: SAP

application, OS, network, storage, and desktop. The IT management requirements for monitoring and managing the cloud data center for SAP will also be addressed.

Foundation platforms

Virtualization makes it possible to pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model. By virtualizing your SAP application and infrastructure, the hardware costs in the data center will be highly reduced, which leads to reductions in real estate, power, and cooling requirements, and results in significantly lowered IT costs. Virtualization also offers a new way of managing your SAP application and infrastructure, which can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks, such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance.

“Application” versus “Hypervisor” virtualization When looking at virtualization for SAP applications, it is important to distinguish between the application and hypervisor virtualizations. The following figure compares the two types of virtualizations.

As part of SAP NetWeaver, the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) provides the ability to virtualize the SAP landscape “on top of the OS” by separating the application layer form OS dependencies whether they are UNIX or x86 platforms. SAP’s strategy for ACC is to integrate with UNIX, Hypervisor, and storage vendors for platforms to capitalize on partners’ domain expertise.


The Hypervisor Virtualization takes place at the hardware level of the server by separating the OS and its dependent services from the server platform. VMware vSphere allows a data center to implement an OS cloud, supporting SAP and non-SAP applications. Note: SAP ACC and Hypervisors are complementary in SAP deployments. SAP ACC with VMware vSphere 4 and EMC virtual storage can enhance SAP landscapes in realizing the capital and operating savings of a virtual infrastructure.

Data center logical view

A logical view of the data center serves as a guide in reviewing deployment options for an SAP virtual infrastructure based on the EMC and VMware platforms. The primary IT domains include the OS cloud for the servers, shared storage for the datastore, SAP desktops, and a unified network approach. It is important to implement a virtual infrastructure based on the platforms that will “scale out” to provide the performance and availability for growth in SAP. Once the computers, storage, and network platforms are set, an integrated IT management framework must be in place for IT operations and service management for the SAP landscape. The following figure illustrates the logical view of an SAP data center.

Notes:

− The virtual infrastructure for SAP must be able to “scale out” for landscape growth.

− Management abstraction and integration between the IT domains are critical to

reducing operating expenses and delivering IT services for SAP.

− Automated discovery and mapping for SAP virtual hosts are critical for application-aware IT operations and service management in a virtual infrastructure.

OS cloud SAP deployments can generate significant server sprawl due to its tiered

architecture and the need to provision separate systems for development, quality assurance/test, and production environments. As a result, SAP implementations can


span 50, 100, or more servers, and even smaller implementations can have a relatively large IT footprint. Virtualization enjoys fast-growing adoption among SAP customers who are already reaping significant benefits in optimizing data center resources; easing SAP upgrades, new implementations, and platform migrations; and better managing SLAs to provide support services to the business for SAP. The VMware vSphere cloud operating system leverages the power of virtualization to transform the data center into cloud computing infrastructures. This is an extension of the VMware Infrastructure platform that customers adopted in support of server consolidation strategies for improved server utilization. A VMware vSphere cloud operating system is comprised of the following two service groups for supporting the cloud computing infrastructure: • Application services – The set of components that provide built-in service level

controls to all applications running on VMware vSphere, regardless of application type or operating system.

• Infrastructure services – The set of components that are provided for server,

storage, and network resources and are aggregated and allocated precisely on demand to applications based on business priority.

Administration of infrastructure and application services, and automation of day-to-day operational tasks with visibility into every aspect of VMware vSphere environments are provided by VMware vCenter Server.

The VMware vSphere cloud operating system provides the following benefits: • Enhances SAP upgrades / maintenance by increasing the number of testing cycles

without impacting project plans

• Meets SAP SLAs for availability, application performance, and disaster recovery. • Provides data center resources pooling during mergers and acquisitions, driving

application consolidation and retirement of legacy systems. • Optimizes data center resources for SAP landscapes with reduced physical

servers, carbon footprint, and energy requirements, and with increased CPU utilization.


Datastores SAP landscapes typically generate significant storage footprints driven by the size of

production instances and the number of copies maintained for QAS, DEV, TST, TRN, and backup. This is compounded as organizations typically have multiple landscapes including ERP, CRM, and BI which ultimately drive multi-terabyte SAP storage footprints.

The key for an SAP datastore in a virtual infrastructure is to reduce capital and operating expenses for SAP storage. EMC’s storage platforms deliver this reduction with “scale-out” and tiering capabilities within a single frame and management abstraction by virtualizing storage resources in the array.

Scale-out and storage tiering in a single frame

The figure below depicts the EMC advanced functionality to optimize storage tiering through a suite of software-based tiering capabilities, including areas such as quality-of-service management and optimization tools that offer the right levels of performance to meet specific application service levels.

The next figure explores how the tiered storage can lower cost with optimized service levels. Compared to an all-Fibre Channel configuration, a tiered storage configuration not only provides a 17 percent cost savings, but delivers 38 percent more IOPS, and requires 32 percent less power and cooling and 384 fewer drives.


Management abstraction enables ease, speed, and automation

When deploying VMware for SAP, all VMware ESX services in a cluster must be mapped to the storage to leverage mobility features such as VMware vMotion. As stated earlier, SAP landscapes are expanding and scaling out, thus storage management in a virtual infrastructure requires:

• Automated discovery, reporting, and alerting that provide end-to-end visibility and

control for virtual server environments. • Simplified and automated storage provisioning allowing administrators to create

host groups, port groups, and device groups, and automate the process for mapping storage to servers.

• “Just-in-time” capacity allocation with virtual provisioning by presenting a large

amount of capacity to a host, and then consume space only as needed from a shared pool.

• Non-disruptive mobility of SAP data between any drives or RAID types with no

disruption to the availability of the application.


Integrating OS cloud with the datastore

EMC and VMware have invested heavily to achieve benefits related to simplified management of virtual environments in order to lower cost and enable higher levels of service. The following figure highlights the integration of VMware vSphere and EMC virtual storage. This integration provides management abstraction that enables ease, speed, and automation for provisioning resources, centralized reporting and control, and ensures performance and minimized disruption for SAP landscapes.

Integrating the OS cloud with the storage datastore provides the following benefits: • Reduces operating expenses with management abstraction and automation for

SAP landscapes. − Quickly provision resources on demand − Centralized, automated management, reporting, and control

• Ensures SAP performance and high availability.

− QoS - Policy-based load balancing across physical resources − Non-disruptive mobility of applications and data


Desktop Managing traditional desktops has become increasingly more complex. This is due

to the increasing number of users, remote and mobile, and the demand for high levels of performance and quality while access multiple applications including SAP. In addition, costs associated with IT administrative activities, including PC maintenance, repairs, and upgrades, are also rising. This results in the transformation of desktop management toward virtualization. VMware View (formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI) lets organizations streamline desktop management and control, providing SAP users a virtual desktop that behaves like a normal PC. The figure below illustrates the centralized SAP desktop management.

The centralized SAP desktop management reduces capital and operating costs for desktop applications including SAP through: • migrating users and intelligence from standalone machines to centralized data

center, and

• unifying data centers to serve SAP business users requirements across different geographies.


Network

Unified networks Typical SAP performance and availability require the data center to have two separate but interdependent physical networks – the Ethernet LAN and the Fibre Channel SAN. Each network has its own terminology, protocols, management tools, and physical components. This requires unique equipment and creates a tremendous amount of redundancy, especially when it comes to administration. IT administrators with different skill sets are needed to manage and support the two networks. Fibre Channel over Ethernet enables consolidation of server cables and adapters by allowing LAN and SAN traffic to travel on a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet link. It also seamlessly integrates with existing Fibre Channel networks, management processes, and workflows, offering a smooth migration path for existing Fibre Channel customers.

Virtual switches Until recently, data center networks were designed under the safe assumption that each end node was connected to the access port of an end-of-row switch in the network and corresponded to one server running a single image – that is, a single instance of an OS and a single instance of a given application. Another safe assumption was that the application and its associated OS would be persistently bound to that specific physical server and would rarely, if ever, move onto another physical server.


Server virtualization modifies both of the previously mentioned assumptions of data center network design by allowing multiple OS images to transparently share the same physical server and I/O devices. As a consequence, it introduces the need to support local switching between different SAP virtual machines within the same or between physical servers to keep consistent with the current network operation models.


IT service and operations management

Introduction With the adoption of SAP NetWeaver, an end-to-end IT management framework and

tools for data center operations are now becoming a high priority. Failing to properly configure, monitor, and manage server, network, and storage systems sprawls in expanded SAP and non-SAP landscapes leads to inefficiency, cost escalation, availability and compliance concerns, and reduces the mean time to repair (MTTR). Automated discovery and mapping of an SAP IT landscape is the “getting started” point to provide a clear documentation required for planning and managing an SAP upgrade, consolidation, or migration to virtualization in deploying a virtual infrastructure. Discovery and IT “blueprinting” unify SAP landscape information with infrastructure configuration information from multiple sources into one single solution for CMDB population from which IT can automate effective management of SAP IT.

IT operations IT operations should provide automated service and perform infrastructure

monitoring, analyzing, and reporting, including the following: • Tracking SAP performance and identifying network bottlenecks before they impact

service levels.

• Managing the performance of SAP critical applications and identifying problems before end users call.

• Isolating rapidly the root cause and remedy of an SAP application performance

problem.

IT service management process

IT service management process frameworks and best practices should incorporate: • a fully integrated service catalog for SAP landscapes, • the integration of SAP landscape and infrastructure configuration information into

a purpose-driven CMDB supporting service desk management, and • tightly governed processes to ensure that virtualization configuration policies are

enforced and risk of interruption is minimized for SAP.

Governance, risk, and compliance

IT governance, risk, and compliance need to provide continuous compliance analysis with real-time violation alerting for internal governance and regulatory compliance initiatives across the complete data center infrastructure, including: • the visibility of SAP IT infrastructure and how its components interact with each

other,

• the ability to monitor, manage, and report on IT GRC for an SAP systems landscape,


• an efficient and accurate process for managing data center configurations for SAP

IT, and

• the consolidated view and control of physical and virtual infrastructure.

EMC Ionix EMC® Ionix™ provides an IT management framework and tools for end-to-end SAP-

aware operations and service desk management.


Performance and high availability of an SAP virtual infrastructure

QoS Quality of service (QoS) provides the ability to guarantee the SAP landscape’s

priority in a shared virtual infrastructure environment, ensuring a defined level of performance for SAP users. It is critical to provide QoS at every level of the IT infrastructure: • Server - guarantee sufficient server-side resources (CPU, memory) to specific

virtual machines, establishing priority control and time sharing of resources.

• Network - guarantee sufficient network resources (queuing, scheduling, traffic shaping)

• Storage - guarantee sufficient storage-side resources (response time, bandwidth,

throughput) to specific LUNs, establishing priority control and performance (minimum/maximum) on a LUN-by-LUN basis

Organizations need to effectively guarantee the performance across the IT stack for SAP transactions responding to potential problems diagnosed as soon as they start occurring with a self-adjusting, self-optimizing services.

Archiving Data management in SAP environments has become progressively more

challenging due to the fast-growing production databases for SAP Business Suite applications data and reports. The impact of the growing database includes performance degradation for end users, increased tier 1 storage footprint costs, and longer backup and recovery windows, which can impact availability. Today, there are additional drivers and influencers on archiving such as availability, security, compliance, and record retention. Supporting these needs requires secure data and document archiving with the ability of SAP end users to view data that has been archived. SAP data archiving provides the following benefits: • Ensures compliant storage and online access to SAP archived data by SAP and

non-SAP users.

• Enforces ILM policies from SAP applications to data at rest in storage. • Extends business value and availability of SAP archived information for non-SAP

users to intelligently browse, search, and view archived print list reports and business documents.

• Reduces risk, training, and support costs with EMC certification for SAP

NetWeaver archiving APIs.


Backup and recovery

As an organization embraces virtualization for SAP, backup and recovery strategies will be required for the desktop, applications, and database instances. Traditional challenges for large SAP databases will continue, including insufficient backup capabilities to handle growth and inability to meet backup and recovery windows. In addition, backup and recovery strategies will be required for SAP application VMs and centralized desktops. The design and planning considerations should include: • The size of the production database and the downtime window available for

backup. • The performance impact to SAP virtual servers, such as VMware ESX in managing

backups. • The performance impact on the LANs and SAN. • The size of the storage footprint required to maintain backup. EMC with VMware can provide the following benefits: • Reduced impact to SAP virtual servers with array-based clones and snapshots to a

proxy server. • Enabling backup of SAP VMs with minimal impact to network resources leveraging

EMC source-based de-duplication. • Achieving backup windows for production SAP databases with reduced storage

with EMC target-based de-duplication.

Disaster recovery

The most visible and, in some ways, most critical part of business continuity planning is taking care of mission-critical applications such as SAP. The SAP Business Suite manages business processes, such as order processing, shipping, and supply chain management, that trigger updates to several applications in the landscape prior to completion of the business event. Application services and data from multiple sources or federated groups must be managed and protected for business-consistent recovery. Since an average company incurs over $1 million of revenue loss per hour of downtime, data is required to be protected across the entire infrastructure -- the network, server, and application layers. The continuity across local production environment and remote environment should be established for planned and unplanned downtime, including disaster recovery. EMC products integrated with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provide the ability to reduce risk and cost for SAP landscapes with automated failover testing with no impact to the production.

System refresh SAP Basis administrators and DBAs are challenged with the time and risk

associated with managing upgrades, new modules, maintenance, QA refreshes, and migrations. Cloning SAP data is important to the lifecycle management of SAP applications.


For “pre-go-live” environments, procedures must be documented and tested repeatedly from an established base to prepare for upgrades or migrations. For “post-go-live” environments, copies of SAP data are required for patch testing, feeding a data warehouse or an SAP Business Intelligence initial load, and configuration and customization for enhanced functionality or new modules including training. To reduce the operating expense, risk and time for an SAP system refresh, consider the following: • Integrating EMC with VMware enables array-based replication in support of large

SAP instances. • Empowering SAP Basis administrators and database administrators to create

second-instance copies—where and when needed. • Automation walks users through the steps needed to create and manage replicas.

Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP

Introduction Transformation to a virtual infrastructure is multi-faceted with significant impact

across infrastructure and applications with the journey representing a foundational change in how IT organizations architect, operate, and deliver services to their customers. The last thing CIOs want to do is to introduce risks as they transfer their current data center to a virtual infrastructure. Developing a strategy is critical to achieve enterprise-scale virtualization of mission-critical SAP applications. Removing risk from the equation, and delivering predictable results and faster ROI should be primary objectives when planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP applications.

Planning the move to virtual infrastructure

As previously mentioned, IT drivers for moving to virtualization and cloud computing are well understood – rising costs due to sprawling SAP and non-SAP application landscapes, decreasing data center floor space, cost of cooling and energy, and others. A disciplined approach is required to achieve the goals with minimal disruption to the business. You may look at the following phases when planning the move to the virtual infrastructure. Consolidation – Look for areas to consolidate SAP and non-SAP landscapes including application consolidation influenced by planned mergers, acquisitions, retiring legacy applications, or SAP upgrades. And then look for opportunities to consolidate infrastructure, including desktops, servers, networks, and/ or storage.

Virtualization – Consider virtualizing components of the SAP landscape, including the SAP desktop, the application Dialogue Instance (DI), and the database Central Instance (CI). For the infrastructure, look for virtualization within the IT domains (servers, networks and storage). For mission-critical applications such as SAP, start with the non-production environment.

Supporting IT Services – With the adoption of virtualization for SAP landscapes, a unified IT framework and tools for providing support services needs to be in place to


protect and ensure landscape availability for SAP users. The services include backup and recovery, data replications for SAP system refresh, business continuity, and automated IT resource management.

Policy-based automation for provisioning SAP IT – In order to realize the value of a virtual infrastructure for SAP, data center management needs to be able to provision IT infrastructure as a service. Components for policy-based automation include Service Catalogs for SAP; business workflow for reviewing, ordering and chargeback of services; and automated IT best practices such as ITIL, for service management, problem resolution, root cause analysis, configuration and change management.

The figure below illustrates the process or phases that an organization will move through on the journey to realizing the vision of the virtual infrastructure for SAP. Note that the phases may overlap.

Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP

As stated earlier, building a virtual infrastructure for SAP begins with a strategy that considers the SAP application lifecycle and data center directions impacting the SAP landscapes providing value to the business. Focus on the value to the business creates consensus for project requirements, resources, and management support. Second, a documented blueprint of the SAP and non-SAP landscapes, including dependency mapping for IT components, will be critical for planning projects and facilitating implementation. Third, a project roadmap that supports business and data center management objectives for the SAP landscape should be developed. The key in developing a project-based roadmap is the prioritization based on the project’s business impact, including ROI and the complexity to implement. Employing a project-based taxonomy, EMC works with customers to bring together senior management, SAP teams, and IT to drive discovery and business impact workshops to identify and prioritize projects enabling management to plan and commit based on value and return to the business.


The following figure provides a framework for project-based discovery and business impact assessment for SAP IT transformation.


Conclusion

Summary SAP project teams are looking for better ways to manage their SAP landscapes

throughout the application lifecycle – implementation, migrations, consolidations, upgrades and ongoing maintenance. In addition, the teams need to continually ensure optimal performance and high availability for SAP.

For IT, with growing SAP landscapes, infrastructure challenges are compounded by constraints for power, cooling, and floor space within data centers and the continual corporate acquisitions that introduce heterogeneous platforms into the corporate architecture.

Recommendations When transforming to virtual infrastructure for SAP where reusable applications

and IT services for SAP landscapes represent a key factor, you should consider the following recommendations: • Understand the business and IT drivers for change – including challenges and

objectives. − From a business and application perspective, drivers may include mergers

and acquisitions, new company offerings, plans for SAP upgrades, or new modules or DBMS/ OS migrations for SAP.

− From a data center management and IT operating standpoint, drivers may include addressing deteriorating service levels for SAP IT, rising cost due to a growing storage footprint for the SAP landscape (QAS/ DEV/ TRN), or space limitations as the data center cannot support an expanded SAP IT footprint due to physical limitations of data center size.

• Have a current, documented “IT Blueprint” of the SAP systems landscape

− Ideally, it is optimal to have an IT management framework and tools that can automatically discover and map SAP IT dependencies. Not only will it help planning and implementing new projects, but also subsequently the configuration information can support ongoing IT operations and service desk management.

• Focus on collaboration − Commitment to change requires investment by the business and IT that is

based on value to the business. − The SAP application landscape is mission-critical to the business. For many

organizations, it is the largest single consumer of IT services. Working with a vendor like EMC can help bring IT and business together to assess the business impact for IT projects, leading to the virtual infrastructure deployment for SAP.


References

Related documentation

For additional information, see the following documents: • Cisco technical primer - Cisco VN-Link: Virtualization-Aware Networking • EMC white paper – Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

• EMC white paper - EMC Symmetrix V-Max and VMware Virtual Infrastructure • VMware white paper - Best Practice Guidelines for SAP Solutions on VMware

Infrastructure

Next steps EMC can help accelerate assessment, design, implementation, and management

while lowering the implementation risks and cost of building a virtual infrastructure for SAP. To learn more about this white paper, contact an EMC representative or visit http://www.EMC.com/solutions/sap.


http://www.emc.com/solutions/sap

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