oracle for sap technology update, volume 23

No. 23 Oracle for SAP, May 2014www.oracle.com/sap

Oracle SAPfor® ®

T E C H N O L O G Y U P D A T E

Oracle Private DB Cloud Infrastructure for SAP Customers

C O N T E N T S

3 Editorial

4 Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP Customers

6 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP Customers

11 Oracle Exadata Database Machine Start Up Pack for SAP Customers

13 Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance for SAP Customers

16 Oracle Database Appliance certified for SAP Customers

18 Oracle SuperCluster for SAP Customers

23 Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud certified for SAP NetWeaver 7

27 Oracle Security Solutions for SAP Environments – a holistic approach 26 Oracle Exadata for SAP at Lion

35 Q&A Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP Customers

38 Oracle Database 11g Release 2: functionality adopted by SAP Customers

44 Oracle Database 12c: Oracle Multitenant

46 Oracle Database 12c: Information Lifecycle Management

49 Oracle Database 12c: In-Memory Option

55 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at Accenture Engineered Systems Center

56 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at AmerisourceBergen

58 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP – why more SAP Customers worldwide deploy Exadata

60 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at LG Fashion

62 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at China Mengniu Dairy Company

64 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark

66 Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.

68 Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Acquedotto Pugliese

70 Jump Forward by using Oracle SuperCluster Solution

72 Oracle SuperCluster at Atos

76 Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Benefits Businesses

81 Oracle Sun Collateral reference list

82 Oracle SPARC T4 at Cacau Show Services and Sales Management

86 Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP7

88 Validate your SAP on Oracle solution with Oracle Solution Centers72 Oracle Cloud File System for SAP

90 Oracle DB and ES related Notes for SAP

92 Imprint

Please download current version of the Oracle for SAP Technology Update No. 23

www.oracle.com/sap

Hardware and Software

Engineered to Work Together

3Oracle provides a complete IT database and infrastructure stack to run SAP applications

D E A R S A P C U S T O M E R ,

Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together.Oracle provides the world’s most complete, open, and integrated technology stack including database, business software, operating systems, servers, and storage. Oracle technologies make SAP applications run better. Oracle Corporation and SAP AG have had an ongoing commitment to our tens of thousands of joint customers for 26 years. Our longstanding reseller and customer support agreements provide enhanced access to Oracle database technology and world class customer support. The Oracle product strategy provides flexibility and choice across the IT infrastructure. A growing majority of all mid-size to large enterprise SAP customers in every industry entrust their application deployments to the Oracle database. Companies are running SAP applications with Oracle databases on all major operating systems. And SAP Business Suite continues to fully support and optimize for all major databases in the industry, further demonstrating our commitment to openness and innovation without disruption.* The Oracle engineered systems are optimized to achieve best in class enterprise performance levels

that are unmatched in the industry. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Single- vendor infrastructure stack simplifies and reduces the costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments.

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is engineered to consolidate all of your SAP Databases and non-SAP Databases into a private Database Cloud environment. It delivers the highest performance and most available platform for running the private Oracle Database Cloud. Built using industry-standard hardware, and intelligent database and storage software from Oracle, the Exadata Database Machine delivers extreme performance for all types of database workloads including Online Transaction Processing (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0), Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW 7.0 and higher) and consolidation of mixed workloads (SAP and non-SAP). Simple and fast to implement, the Exadata Database Machine is ready to tackle your largest and most important database workload – and often run them 10 times faster or even more – deployed by a fast growing number of SAP customers today.

Oracle SuperCluster is the first general-purpose engineered system that combines the computing power of the new SPARC processor, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database performance of Oracle Exadata storage, and the accelerated middleware processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud on SAP kernel 6.40 and higher. SAP SuperCluster customers are able to mix Solaris 10 and 11 (zones support), can use their existing SAN environment and when needed, their older SAP versions.

Oracle redefines the economics of enterprise computing with a complete refresh and expansion of its SPARC M6 and T5 server portfolio providing customers the industry’s best value with leading price/performance.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance (OVCA) is an engineered system that radically simplifies the way customers install.

The Oracle Database Appliance is a new way to take advantage of the world’s most popular database – Oracle Database 11g – in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It’s a complete package of software, server, storage, HA and networking that’s engineered for simplicity; saving time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of database workloads.

Oracle Linux 6 is the latest Linux version of Oracle for your SAP infrastructure computing needs. It is fast – delivers best performance for SAP – is up to date – brings the latest innovations to customers; is reliable – provides data integrity, better security, and improved application uptime; and is optimized for Oracle Databases under SAP.

Oracle VM Server for x86 is a free server virtualization solution that makes SAP and other enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.

The Oracle development teams on site at SAP AG in Walldorf, Germany continue working together with SAP developers to ensure that SAP customers will always have access to the latest optimized Oracle technologies ensuring performance, reliability and innovation. SAP will support Oracle Database 12c for their applications.** Currently SAP is testing Oracle Database 12c options: In – Memory Option, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) / Automatic Data Optimization (ADO), – Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC), – Oracle Multitenant.

The Oracle for SAP Service & Support team offers Advanced Customer Services (ACS) that include health checks, workshops, database migrations, performance, tuning and ACS Oracle Solaris Services for SAP Environments, including Assisted Services Engagements (Analysis/-Enhancement and SAP Readiness Service for IT Infrastructure).

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: [email protected]

Sincerely,

Gerhard Kuppler

Vice President SAP AlliancesOracle Corporation

*http://global.sap.com/corporate-en/news.epx?PressID=20221 **https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-15887

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O R A C L E E N G I N E E R E D S Y S T E M S F O R S A P : O R A C L E I N F R A S T R U C T U R E O P T I M I Z E S S A P L A N D S C A P E S

SAP landscapes are growing in complexity, with servers, storage, networking, operating systems, and database and middleware all needing to be ordered, configured, installed, tested, and maintained on an ongoing basis. This can turn SAP deployment and operation into a lengthy and complex process. In addition, keeping SAP land-scapes up to date through patching, updating software, and adding hardware requires a lot of skilled manpower and training. Oracle’s engineered systems for SAP are designed to help savvy IT managers deploy more services faster on a streamlined infrastructure that costs less to run.

Oracle’s Engineered Systems for SAP

For more than 26 years, companies have trusted their business-critical SAP environments to state-of-the-art Oracle software. Today, Oracle’s integrated infrastruc-ture stack – consisting of servers and storage, operating systems, database software, middleware, networking, and built-in virtualization features – is optimized to deliver agility and performance to SAP applications. Now this integrated stack is available as a family of Engineered Systems that are pre-integrated, pre-tested, and pre-con-figured to simplify data center operations, ensure fast and easy SAP infrastructure deployment, and accelerate business innovation.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Designed to deliver extreme performance to data warehousing, OLTP, and mixed-load database applica-tions, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine is ready to perform out of the box. The system is pre-configured with all necessary software – Oracle Database, Oracle Database Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Oracle ASM and management tools. Storage Servers are pre-cabled in racks using InfiniBand and Ethernet switches. The complete Oracle Exadata package arrives pre-integrated and pre-tested, and can save weeks and sometimes months of time to deployment. Highly optimized for database use and purpose-built for database consolidation, the core of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the Oracle Database 11g software and Oracle Exadata Storage Servers and Software. These

storage servers overcome the limitations architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between the data-base server and storage. In addition, innovative Exadata technologies, such as Exadata Smart Scan, Exadata Smart Flash Cache, accelerate database processing and speed I/O operations for SAP applications. As the SAP central services (message and enqueue server) and the database can run on the same machine, high availability comes out-of-the-box with the system; the massively scalable, secure, and redundant Oracle Exadata Database Machine is SAP certified and supported, and provides an ideal database-as-a-service platform for SAP applications. Improved application performance, effort-less workload management, greater datacenter efficiency, and faster time to deployment enable enterprises to make better business decisions in real time and at less cost.

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the first engineered system specifically designed to be a foundation for secure, mission-critical, private clouds. Delivering virtually unlimited scalability, unbeatable performance, andpreviously unimagined management simplicity, theOracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an ideal platform for applications – from small-scale departmental applications to the largest and most demanding SAP applications. Balanced for compute-intensive workloads, each pre-assembled, pre-configured Exalogic system contains fully-integrated, hot-swappable x86 compute nodes, a high-performance ZFS Storage Appliance, and high-bandwidth interconnect fabric and switches. An extremely fast, high-throughput interconnect connects all systems together to create a single large computer with extreme scalability, elasticity, and redundancy. The system exploits the I/O fabric, delivering performance results that are ten times faster than standard application server configurations. Thousands of applications with differing security, reliability, performance, and service- level requirements can run on a single Exalogic system, making it an ideal platform for SAP applications conso-lidation. In addition, it forms the foundation of an ideal special-purpose system when used in combination with

5Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP Customers

an Oracle Exadata Database Machine running Oracle Database. Virtual Exalogic offers the possibility of flexi-bility to run any application including SAP in a virtual environment.

Oracle Database Appliance

The Oracle Database Appliance is a fully redundant, integrated database appliance – software, servers, storage, and networking – that offers one-button installation, patching, and diagnostics. A complete Oracle RAC database cluster in a box, it ships with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters already installed to support highly available database services for SAP applications. Maintenance is easy: a single patch handles all firmware and software in one operation, using an Oracle-tested patch engineered specifically for the appliance. With the ability to consoli-date databases up to 18 TB in size, it is ideal for midsize companies and departmental systems.

Oracle SuperCluster T5 and Oracle SuperCluster M6

Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 or SuperCluster M6-32 com-bine multiple Oracle innovations – the computing power of Oracle’s next-generation SPARC T5 andM6 servers, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database performance of Oracle Database 11g and Exadata storage, and the accelerated middleware processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud – into a general-purpose engineered system that provides high availability for enterprise SAP applications. Multiple databases and applications can run on a single system and take advantage of fast improvements for data compression, queries, OLTP response time, and Java middleware performance. The Oracle SuperCluster is well suited as an SAP gene-ral-purpose system with SAP central instances, central services and database software installed together on the system. Because the system is pre-tested and ready to run, organizations can deploy SAP services in days rather than months. Consolidated SAP applications can run on a mix of Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 via Oracle‘s integra-ted virtualization technologies. In addition, the Oracle SuperCluster is SAP certified and supported, and is also offered as an Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP that includes deployment best practices, ongoing full-stack and patch testing, and more.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance OVCA

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is an integrated, “wire once”, software-defined infrastructure system designed for rapid deployment of both infrastructure hardware and application software. Whether running any Linux, Oracle Solaris, or Microsoft Windows, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance supports a large range of OS versions hosted in a converged server, network, and storage environment to enable general purpose, business-, and mission-critical application deployments such as SAP applications in medium-to-large data centers. High per-formance, low-latency Oracle Virtual Networking fabric interconnect with Oracle SDN software allows automated configuration of the server and storage networks. The embedded Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance controller software automates the installation, configuration, and management of all the infrastructure components at the push of a button. The user need only enter some very basic configuration parameters and then create VMs ma-nually or by leveraging templates and assemblies to get a full application up and running in as little as a couple of hours.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, certification is in process, for running SAP within Oracle VM. Backed by Oracle’s world-class support organization, customers now have a single point of support for their entire hardware and software virtualization environments.

Built and tuned to run business-critical applications with extreme requirements for network bandwidth, access, and data growth, Oracle’s engineered systems provide a number of options for optimizing SAP infrastructure and improving operation. Deploying one or more Oracle en-gineered systems within an SAP landscape results in more solid infrastructure, increased performance, greater effi-ciency and utilization, simplified management through application and database consolidation, and improved total cost of ownership.

More information online

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O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

Oracle Exadata Database Machine was certified by SAP on June 10, 2011 and can be used with SAP Business Objects 4.x and SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or higher including all SAP products which are based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x such as SAP ERP 6.0, SAP BW 7.x, SAP CRM 7.x etc. (for a complete list, check the SAP Product Availability Matrix: http://www.service.sap.com/PAM).

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an easy to de-ploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database that delivers the highest available levels of database performance. The Exadata Database Machine is a “cloud in a box” composed of database servers, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, an InfiniBand fabric for storage networking and all the other components required to host an Oracle Database. It de-livers outstanding I/O and SQL processing performance for online transaction processing (e.g. SAP ERP 6.0), Business Warehouse (e.g. SAP BW 7.x) and consolidation of mixed workloads. Extreme performance is delivered for all types of database applications by leveraging a massively parallel grid architecture using Real Application Clusters and Exadata storage. Database Machine and Exadata storage delivers break-through performance with linear I/O scalability, is simple to use and manage, and delivers mission-critical availability and reliability.

SAP customers can easily migrate their database to Exadata Database Machine that runs SAP applications unchanged. The migration to Exadata (DB server on either Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris) is smooth and is not more than a homogeneous or heterogeneous OS platform migration depending on the source platform the database is running on today. The migration can be done either online or offline depending on the source platform and the migra-tion tool (R3Load, RMAN duplicate database, RMAN transportable table spaces or Oracle Lifecycle/Migration Services: O2O/Triple-O) as well. For more details: scn.sap.community/oracle and check Oracle Engineered Systems.

The advantages of Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP customers are obvious since it’s transparent to the application, and runs on proven technology such as Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Real Application Clusters (RAC), it also eliminates systems integration try-and-error, relies on existing personnel and skills, performs database queries much faster (large and complex Infocubes, queries, or transactions that show a large amount of time spent in the database), less administration time, simpler patching, and greater uptime. Exadata Database Machine provides high availability and disaster recovery out-of-the-box and highly proven at SAP customers, it helps to consolidate platforms and database, thus reducing power and cooling consumption. Last but not least, Oracle Exadata Database Machine relies on single vendor, bundled OS and Data-base patch sets – ending the Multivendor nightmare.

The flexible three-tier architecture allows for any com-bination of hardware and operating systems running the SAP instances to be used with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. For instance you can run SAP Appli-cation servers on AIX, HP-UX, Linux or any other SAP certified platform against the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This flexibility allows an easy introduction of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine into existing SAP environments that keeps SAP layer unchanged.

SAP Instances

SAP Application with Oracle Exadata Database Machine

SAP Instances

Presentation Application Database onExadata

SAP Instances

SAP Instances

SAP ECC 6.0

SAP BW 7.x

SAP CRM 7.x

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Additionally, to the database instances running on the database servers, customers can make SAP central services high available on the database nodes through SAPCTL based on Oracle Clusterware, but only if the SAP system is UNICODE. If a separate cluster other than the data-base cluster is already used for the SAP Central Services then customers can continue to use this separate cluster for the SAP Central Services when deploying the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Last but not least, BR*Tools are supported to run on Exadata database servers as well.

The migration methods of the database are described inthe paper “Using SAP NetWeaver with the Oracle Exa-data Database Machine: A Best Practices Guide.” See on scn.sap.community/oracle and check “Oracle Engineered Systems.” The pure database migration to Oracle Exa-data Database Machine actually does not differ from the migration to ASM (Automatic Storage Management file system) already described in detail.

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an easy to deploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database that delivers the highest levels of database performance available. The Exadata Database Machine is a “cloud in a box” composed of database servers.

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is a pre-configured system ready to be activated on on day one, taking signi-ficant integration work, cost and time out of the database deployment process. Since it is a well known configuration Oracle Support is very familiar with how to service the system resulting in a superior support experience with the system. The benefit of a common infrastructure to deploy a database for any application, whether OLTP, OLAP, a mix of the two, or as a platform for consolidation of several databases, creates tremendous opportunities for efficiencies in the datacenter. It is truly a “cloud in box.”

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP Customers

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There are two versions of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine:

• The Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4-2 comes in Eighth, Quarter, Half, and Full Rack configurations to meet any application requirement and to enable you to easily scale as your requirements change. The Full rack comes complete with eight 2-socket database servers, 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, InfiniBand switches and more than 44 terabytes of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to support extremely fast transaction response times and high throughput

See Data Sheet for more details: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/ exadata/exadata-dbmachine-x4-2-ds-2076448.pdf? ssSourceSiteId=ocomen

• The Exadata Database Machine X3-8 is designed for database deployments that require very large amounts of data, delivering extreme performance and scalability for all applications including Online Transaction Processing (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0), Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW 7.0 and higher) and consolidation of mixed workloads. It comes complete with two 8-socket database servers, 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, InfiniBand switches and more than 44 terabytes of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to support extremely fast transaction response times and high throughput.

See Data Sheet for more details: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/ exadata/exadata-dbmachine-x3-8-ds-1855388.pdf? ssSourceSiteId=ocomen

Exadata Storage Server

The Exadata Storage Server runs the Exadata Storage Server Software and provides the unique and powerful Exadata software technology of the Database Machine including Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Smart Flash Logging, IO Resource Manager, Storage Indexes and Hy-brid Columnar Compression (not certified yet by SAP). The hardware components of the Exadata Storage Server (also referred to as an Exadata cell) were carefully chosen to match the needs of high performance database pro-cessing. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine software is optimized to take the best possible advantage of the hardware components and Oracle Database. Each Exadata cell delivers outstanding I/O performance and bandwidth to the database. The CPU cores in the Exadata Storage Server are dedicated to providing features such as Smart Scan SQL processing that is done in the Exadata storage. Building on the high security capabilities in every Oracle Database, the Exadata storage provides the ability to query fully encrypted databases with near zero overhead at hundreds of gigabytes per second. This is done by moving decryption processing from software into the Exadata Storage Server hardware. The Oracle software and the Intel processors used in the Exadata Storage Server provide Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) support enabling this.

The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is engineered to be the simplest, fastest and most robust way to add additional storage capacity to an Exadata Database Ma-chine or SuperCluster. A natural extension of the Exadata Database Machine, the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack can be used to satisfy the Big Data requirements of the largest mission-critical databases.

The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is designed for database deployments that require very large amounts of data. The expansion rack is extremely simple to configure as there are no LUNs or mount points to configure. Storage is configured and added to a database with a few simple commands, completed in minutes.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine Innovations

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine delivers extreme performance and scalability for all database applications whether they are Online Transaction Processing (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0), Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW 7.0 and higher) or consolidation of mixed database workloads.

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One of the key enablers of this is the Exadata Smart Flash Cache hardware and the intelligent Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software that drives it. The Exadata Smart Flash Cache feature of the Storage Server Software intelli-gently caches database objects in flash memory, replacing slow, mechanical I/O operations to disk with very rapid flash memory operations. The Exadata Storage Server Software also provides the Exadata Smart Flash Logging feature to speed database log I/O. Exadata Smart Flash Cache is one of the essential technologies of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine that enables the processing of up to 1.5 million random I/O operations per second (IOPS), and the scanning of data within Exadata storage at up to 100 GB/second.

Oracle’s Exadata Smart Flash Cache features are unique. Exadata Flash storage is not a disk replacement – Exa-data software intelligence determines how and when to use the Flash storage, and how best to incorporate Flash into the database as part of a coordinated data caching strategy. Scale out Exadata storage enables the benefits of flash performance to be delivered all the way to the application. Traditional storage arrays have many internal and network bottlenecks that prevent realizing the benefits of flash. Flash can be added to storage arrays, but they cannot deliver much of the potential performance to applications.

Oracle has implemented a smart flash cache directly in the Oracle Exadata Storage Server. The Exadata Smart Flash Cache holds frequently accessed data in very fast flash storage while most of the data is kept in very cost effective disk storage. This happens automatically without the user having to take any action. The Oracle Flash Cache is smart because it knows when to avoid trying to cache data that will never be reused or will not fit in the cache.

The Exadata Smart Flash Cache is also used to reduce the latency of log write I/O eliminating performance bot-tlenecks that might occur due to database logging. The time to commit user transactions is very sensitive to the latency of log writes.

When using Oracle Exadata Database Machine, much SQL processing is offloaded from the database server to the Exadata cells. Oracle Exadata Database Machine en-ables function shipping from the database instance to the underlying storage in addition to providing traditional block serving services to the database. One of the unique things the Exadata storage does compared to traditional storage is return only the rows and columns that satisfy the database query rather than the entire table being queried. Oracle Exadata Database Machine pushes SQL processing as close to the data (or disks) as possible and gets all the disks operating in parallel. This reduces CPU consumption on the database server, consumes much less bandwidth moving data between database servers and storage servers, and returns a query result set rather than entire tables. Eliminating data transfers and database server workload can greatly benefit data warehousing queries that traditionally become bandwidth and CPU constrained. Eliminating data transfers can also have a significant benefit on online transaction processing (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0) systems that often include large batch and report processing operations. Oracle Exadata Database Machine is totally transparent to SAP applications using the database. The exact same Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that runs on traditional systems runs on the Database Machine – but on Database Machine it runs faster. Existing SQL statements, whether ad hoc or in packaged e.g. SAP or custom applications, are unaffected and do not require any modification when Exadata storage is used. The offload processing and band-width advantages of the solution are delivered without any modification to the application. All features of the Oracle Database are fully supported with Exadata. It works equally well with single-instance or Real Application Cluster deployments of the Oracle Database. Functiona-lity like Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), Oracle GoldenGate, and other database tools are administered the same, with or without Exadata. Users and database administrators leverage the same tools and knowledge they are familiar with today because they work just as they do with traditional non-Exadata storage. Since the same Oracle Database and functionality exist on the Database Machine as on traditional systems, the IT staff managing a Database Machine must possess similar knowledge about this same software they will manage on the Database Machine. Oracle Database admi-nistration, backup and recovery, RAC, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Linux experience are important to possess when managing a Database Machine.


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Exadata Smart Flash Cache

Each Exadata cell comes with 3.2 TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache. This means in the Database Machine X3-8 and Full Rack X4-2 there is 44.8 TB of Flash – larger than most databases. This solid state storage delivers dramatic performance advantages with Exadata storage. It provides a ten-fold improvement in response time for reads over regular disk; a hundred-fold improvement in IOPS for reads over regular disk; and is a less expensive higher capacity alternative to memory. Overall it delivers a ten-fold increase performing a blended average of read and write operations. One of the key enablers of Exadata’s extreme performance is the Exadata Smart Flash Cache hardware and the intel-ligent Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software that drives it. The Exadata Smart Flash Cache feature of the Exadata Storage Server Software intelligently caches database objects in flash memory, replacing slow, mechanical I/O operations to disk with very rapid flash memory opera-tions. The Exadata Storage Server Software also provides the Exadata Smart Flash Logging feature to speed database log I/O. Exadata Smart Flash Cache is one of the essential technologies of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine that enables the processing of up to 1.5 million random I/O operations per second (IOPS), and the scanning of data within Exadata storage at up to 75 GB/second. With the Write Back Cache Flash feature, the Exadata Smart Flash Cache also caches database block writes. Write caching eliminates disk bottlenecks in large scale OTLP and batch workloads. The Exadata Write Cache is transparent, persistent and fully redundant. The I/O performance of the Exadata Smart Flash Cache is comparable to dozens of Enterprise disk array with thousands of disk drives.

Exadata Storage Capacity, Performance, Bandwidth

and IOPS

The Oracle Exadata Storage Servers comes with either twelve 1.2 TB 10,000 RPM High Performance SAS disks or twelve 4 TB 7,200 RPM High Capacity SAS disks. The High Performance SAS disk based Exadata Storage Servers provide up to 3.25 TB of uncompressed useable capacity, and up to 1.8 GB/second of raw data bandwidth. The High Capacity SAS disk based Exadata Storage Servers provide up to 16 TB of uncompressed useable capacity, and up to 1.3 GB/second of raw data bandwidth. When stored in compressed format, the amount of user data and the amount of data bandwidth delivered by each cell significantly increases.

The performance that each cell delivers is extremely high due to the Exadata Smart Flash Cache. The Exadata software can simultaneously scan from Flash and disk to maximizebandwidth. The automated caching within Flash enables each Exadata cell to deliver up to 5.4 GB/second band-width and 125,000 database IOPS when accessing uncompressed data. When data is stored in compressed format, the amount of user data capacity, the amount of data bandwidth and IOPS achievable, often increases up to ten times, or more. This represents a significant improvement over traditional storage devices used with the Oracle Database.

Enterprise Manager Support for Oracle Exadata Database

Machine

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c uses a ho-listic approach to manage the Exadata Database Machine and provides comprehensive lifecycle management from monitoring to management and ongoing maintenance for the entire engineered system.

Integrated System Monitoring

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides comprehensive monitoring and notifications to enable administrators to pro-actively detect and respond to problems with Oracle Exadata Data Machine and its software and hardware components. Administrators can easily adjust these monitoring settings to suit the needs of their datacenter environment. When notified of these alerts, administra-tors can easily view the history of alerts and associated performance metrics of the problem component, such as the network performance of an InfiniBand port or the disk activity of an Exadata storage cell, to identify the root cause of the problem. With direct connectivity into the hardware components of Exadata, Oracle Enterprise Manager can alert administrators to hardware-related faults and log service requests automatically through in-tegration with Oracle Automatic Service Requests (ASR) for immediate review by Oracle Support. Problems that would have required a combination of database, system and storage administrators to detect in traditional systems can now be diagnosed in minutes because of integrated systems monitoring for the entire Exadata Database Machine.


www.oracle.com/sap


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O R A C L E E X A D A T A S T A R T U P P A C K F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

An integrated approach to enable rapid results

Oracle Engineered Systems deliver extreme performance through pre-integrated technology. In order to realize the rapid time-to-production benefits that this can bring, customers need to ensure that they are able to address the requirements in an optimal way.

The Oracle Exadata Start-Up Pack for SAP customers delivers an integrated service package and product ex-pertise to ensure an optimized and planned deployment of an Oracle Exadata Database Machine system. Oracle’s service experts deliver a suite of services that begins with strategic architectural design and planning. Oracle then installs and configures the system according to Oracle best practices. Oracle support engineers provide supportability reviews throughout pre-production as customers execute the architectural design plans. Once in produc-tion, Oracle provides quarterly patch especially for SAP customers, deployments across the entire Oracle Exadata stack for one year.

Start Up Advisory Service

The Oracle Exadata Start-Up Advisory Service provides an exceptional level of implementation assurance. Our teams of experts work closely with customers’ organiza-tions help them to deliver the best overall Quality of Service by building a strategic plan that ensures mission-critical applications meet the performance and operational needs of the customer’s business. Providing assessments,

planning and recommendations, Oracle delivers the fundamental guidance needed to minimize project and deployment risks while accelerating operational readiness for the Oracle Exadata platform. Oracle’s Exadata Start-Up Advisory Service is the first step to a well-executed implementation, and is tailored to custo-mer business requirements, time to value objectives, and long-term strategic vision.

The service provides current state assessment of key areas essential for a successful Oracle Exadata deployment. In addition, a gap analysis of assessment against Oracle best practices is provided, along with documented recommendations that cover implementation, migration strategies and change management across both people and business processes.

Production Support Readiness

Oracle’s Service Delivery Managers and Oracle Engineers will pro-actively support project objectives, coordinating both the Oracle and client project teams and overseeing the Oracle Exadata installation and go-live process. Governance meetings are conducted to review key best practices, so as to ensure supportability, and report on all Oracle, customer, and partner pre-production activities.

Leveraging the outputs of the Oracle Exadata Start-Up Advisory Service, Oracle engineers deliver the detail and recommendations to keep customers on a seamless path to a successful deployment and ongoing production support. Key technical areas that are re-viewed include configuration, data migration, kind of migration method SAP’s R3LOAD, RMAN, Transportable Tablespaces, O2O (Oracle DB to Oracle DB migration) or Triple-O (Oracle to Oracle Online database migration, based on SAP Note 1508271), patch planning, and production support readiness.

Oracle Exadata Start Up Pack for SAP

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Oracle Exadata Database Machine Installation Service

The Oracle Exadata Installation Service provides com-prehensive hardware system installation to shorten time to deployment. Oracle system implementations combine highly trained engineers with proven, standardized installation methodologies along with best practices, tools and technology for all installations.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine Configuration Service

Guided by the Start Up Advisory outputs, the Oracle Exadata Configuration Service delivers complete Oracle Database configuration based on Oracle best practices. Oracle engineers cover all aspects of the required configuration and patching across the Oracle Exadata storage servers and software, database servers, shared storage, and database patches. Using well-documented processes, Oracle Exadata experts configure login and network addresses, create cell disks, and configure logins and network addresses. All configuration settings are documented and delivered to the customer IT team du-ring the post installation procedures. Activities include installation of licensed Oracle Database, configuration of database servers and shared storage to support Oracle Real Application Clusters, running verification tests, and documenting configuration and maintenance procedures.

Quarterly Patch Deployment Service

The Oracle Exadata Quarterly Patch Deployment Service delivers a proactive patch deployment process to ensure each customer’s Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP is optimally maintained. Oracle delivers a special patch only for SAP customers (SAP Note 1591389) Oracle performs a high-level check of the system’s configuration profile to identify known configuration issues. Oracle support experts then generate a standardized report of findings, based on Oracle’s recommended best practices. Oracle implements the required updates, once per quar-ter for one year, in a unified and proactive manner across all system components including firmware, Oracle Enter-prise Linux or Solaris, and other Oracle software installed on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Customers retain the flexibility to apply additional configuration and patches as needed between the planned deployments of this service.

Optimizing Time to Production

Proper planning, installation, deployment and support of Oracle Exadata are critical to optimizing system performance. By utilizing the Oracle Exadata Start-Up Pack integrated solutions and personalized expertise, customers can ensure the ongoing system stability and the performance expected of the technology – right fromthe start.

Oracle service professionals deliver the thought leaders-hip, technical expertise, tools, and best practices to help ensure a smooth and highly optimized Oracle Exadata production implementation. Customers get the right expertise at the right time to help mitigate risk and to maximize the value of their technology investments.

Please contact in EMEA:

Michael Weick, [email protected] Delivery Director for SAPOracle Walldorf

In North America:[email protected]

Japan, APAC, ANZ: Oracle Japan Eisuke SekiguchiSenior Manager, ACS Service [email protected]


Oracle Exadata Start Up Pack for SAP

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O R A C L E V I R T U A L C O M P U T E A P P L I A N C E ( O V C A )

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance: Turnkey Solution,

Data Center Scale

Oracle has a long-standing history of delivering integrated enterprise solutions to market to help simplify IT and enable datacenters to deliver better services from database, to business applications, to middleware and hardware integrated solutions – addressing both traditional com-puting to cloud infrastructures such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic in the Oracle Engineered Systems portfolio.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is an easy-to-acquire, easy-to-deploy, “turnkey” solution that integrates compute, network, and storage resources in a software- defined fabric to enable agile and efficient data center deployments. With Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, you get an infrastructure that can be scaled linearly, one server at a time, from 2 to 25 compute nodes per rack. Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance also uniquely provides the capability to rapidly deploy applications, not just hardware, based on the ability to leverage Oracle VM Templates and assemblies that are user created or that are available for download from Oracle.Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance also fits into your existing data center by supporting the operating systems you run and connecting to your choice of storage inclu-ding Oracle’s ZFS Storage Appliance or NFS or iSCSI storage from other vendors.By leveraging an integrated system, administrators are free to focus on delivering flexible services, addressing strategic needs, and transforming IT to respond to their customers’ evolving needs rather than investing considerable time to plan and hand-configure hardware infrastructure from scratch.

By default, all Oracle software is certified for use with Oracle VM and thus is certified for Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance including the Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications, and Oracle Real Appli-cation Clusters. With the new SAP application support this is now avaiable for running SAP application as well. Backed by Oracle’s world-class support organization, customers now have a single point of support for their entire hardware and software virtualization environments.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance (OVCA)

14

Consistent with this strategy, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is offered to provide IT a highly scalable virtualization foundation to support consolidation as well as providing a robust integrated solution to help IT achieve maximum efficiency with existing investments as well as prepare for the migration to cloud computing. With Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance customers get infrastructure that scales linearly, applications that can be deployed rapidly and benefiting from integrated software, hardware and virtualization.

Automatic Power Up, Installation, and Configuration

With the Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, users only need to move the rack into place, connect power, network, and storage cables, and power on the system. Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance controller orchestration software automatically powers up, installs, and configures the hardware and software environment. Within minu-tes, the system is ready, and users can add VMs by using standard Oracle VM Templates or by creating them from scratch.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance offers exceptional value in the following areas:

• Accelerated time from power-on to application pro-duction: Getting applications to users requires a lot more than just hardware provisioning. End-users need their applications provisioned as well. Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance accelerates deployment of the full, hardware-to-applications stack so you can get applications to users within hours of power-on, rather than days or weeks

• Wire-once infrastructure for which Oracle does the wiring for you: The Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance server and storage components sit on a software- defined network fabric allowing installation and configuration of servers and storage to be accomplished through software – no more physical recabling to reconfigure the environment

• Lowered business and IT risks with easy, linear scaling to meet your performance and cost needs over time

• Reduced maintenance and support complexity by de-ploying a pre-configured hardware and software solution

• Integration into existing data centers with support for the operating systems and storage you use today

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance Software

The following software, which is included with Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, enables scalability, soft-ware-defined virtual networking, and GUI-based over-sight:

Oracle VM: Oracle VM application-driven server virtualiz-ation is designed to be highly scalable and built to enable rapid application deployment. Oracle VM supports up to 128 vCPUs and a variety of guest OSs such as Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Microsoft Windows. Oracle VM is also optimized to accelerate applications deploy-ments. Entire Oracle application stacks such as Oracle Database and Oracle enterprise applications can be de-ployed in minutes to hours using Oracle VM Templates and assemblies. The ability to quickly and easily deploy applications to a highly scalable virtualized environment enables IT to meet SLAs and reduces time to market for the business. In addition, IT can rapidly deploy test, development, and staging environments.

Oracle SCN software: Oracle SCN dynamically connects servers to networks and storage. It eliminates the phy-sical storage and networking cards found in every server and replaces them with virtual network interface cards (vNICs) and virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs) that can be deployed on the fly. Applications and operating systems see these virtual resources exactly as they would see their physical counterparts. Oracle Virtual Networking simplifies complex data center deployments with a wire-once solution and simple software-defined network configurations.

Hardware and Software

Engineered to Work Together

15

Compute Appliance configurations without any down-time. The base rack contains 2 compute nodes and can support a maximum of 25 compute nodes.

Integrated Storage: Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance features a fully integrated, enterprise-grade Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance for centrally storing the management environment as well as providing data storage for VMs. This storage subsystem is built using Oracle’s enterprise -class storage products and technology and is designed to be fully redundant for maximum fault tolerance and serviceability in production. The Oracle Virtual Com-pute Appliance storage subsystem is loaded with high- performance DIMM and flash memory for optimal read/write performance under the most demanding file storage workloads. The storage capacity of Oracle Virtual Com-pute Appliance can be expanded beyond the internal, included storage, to external data center racks containing more than one Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance or supported storage available from other storage vendors.

Conclusion

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is an engineered system that radically simplifies the way customers install, deploy, and manage virtual infrastructures for any Linux, Oracle Solaris, or Microsoft Windows application. By making it available for SAP applications,* customers can get the full benefits of faster, easier and consistent infra-structure to run their SAP applications in a most efficient and effective way.

* to be certified soon

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance controller software: The controller software allows users to manage and monitor the systems hardware, perform software upgrades, create and manage virtual resources (virtual servers, virtual net-works, and storage), and monitor utilization of all system resources in real time. The controller software runs on two dedicated management nodes that are configured for high availability with automatic failover in the event of a failure, and it is accessible via a GUI dashboard. The embedded Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance controller software automates the installation, configuration, and management of all the infrastructure components at the push of a button. The users only need to enter basic con-figuration parameters and then create virtual machines (VMs) manually or by leveraging Oracle VM Templates and assemblies to get a full application up and running in as little as an hour.

Key Components of Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance X4

Virtual Networking: Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance uses ultra-high performance Oracle Fabric Interconnect, a component of the Oracle Virtual Networking family, which has been specially developed using Oracle’s QDR InfiniBand hardware and software. Each Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance hardware configuration contains multiple redundant QDR InfiniBand switches and Orac-le Fabric Interconnect systems that serve as gateways to the datacenter’s Ethernet network. This high-speed fabric supports not only access to shared storage, but also serves as the physical platform for creation of virtual Ethernet networks that allow applications in the cloud to connect to any other application accessible over the data center’s standard Ethernet network. The fabric offers extremely low latency (typically 10X faster speeds than Ethernet), 40 Gb/sec throughput, full redundancy, integrated end-point security, and scalability (without any downtime) with little-to-no degradation in performance as additio-nal VMs and servers are added to the appliance.

Compute Nodes: Compute nodes comprise Oracle‘s Sun Server X4 systems containing Intel Xeon CPUs, high-speed dual inline memory modules (DIMM) redundant, 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs), and redundant disks. Each compute node runs Oracle VM Server for x86 to provide server virtualization. Compute nodes may be added or removed from Oracle Virtual

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance (OVCA)

16

The appliance is also designed with mission-critical re-quirements in mind, with hot-swappable and redundant components. Combining high availability and simpli-city, the Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 is the perfect clustered database solution for rapid deployment and maximum uptime.The Oracle Database Appliance runs Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and customers have the choice of running Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).

The Oracle Database Appliance enables you to take advantage of the world’s most popular database – Oracle Database – in a single, easy-to-deploy-and-manage sys-tem. It’s a complete package of software, server, storage, and networking that’s engineered for simplicity; saving time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of highly available database workloads.

Fully Redundant Integrated System

Providing access to information 24/7 and protecting databases from unforeseen as well as planned downtime can be a challenge for many organizations. Indeed, ma-nually building redundancy into database systems can be risky and error-prone if the right skills and resources are not available in-house. The Oracle Database Appliance is designed for simplicity and reduces that element of risk and uncertainty to help customers deliver higher availa-bility for their databases and capacity on demand.

The Oracle Database Appliance hardware is a rack-moun-table system containing two Oracle Linux servers and one storage shelf. Each server features two 12 core Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors, 256 GB of memory, and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GBase-T) external networking connectivity. Each system has redundant server nodes, interconnects, storage controllers, power supply units and cooling fans. In addition, disk and flash storage are double or triplemirrored and shared to ensure data availability and to provide accelerated database performance. The two ser-vers are connected together via a redundant 10-GbE interconnect for cluster communication and share direct-attached high performance SAS storage.The appliance contains 36 TB of raw storage that’s double mirrored or triple-mirrored, offering 18 TB or 12 TB, respectively, of resilient usable database storage.

O R A C L E D A T A B A S E A P P L I A N C E C E R T I F I E D F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

Database redo log performance is dramatically improved by using solid state disks (SSD) in the Oracle Database Appliance.

17Oracle Database Appliance certified for SAP Customers

Ease of Deployment, Management, and Support

To help customers easily deploy and manage their databases, the Oracle Database Appliance features the Appliance Manager software for one-button automation to provision and diagnose database servers. The Appliance Manager feature greatly simplifies the deployment process and ensures that the database configuration adheres to Oracle best practices. Its built-in diagnostics also monitor the system and detect component failures, configuration issues, and deviations from best practices. Should it be necessary to contact Oracle Support, the Appliance Manager collects all relevant log files and environmental data into a single compressed file. In addition, the Oracle Database Appliance Auto Service Request (ASR) feature can automatically log service requests with Oracle Support to help speed resolution of issues.

Certified and Supported for SAP

All SAP products, SAP Business Objects, BI 4.x, as well as all solutions based on SAP NetWeaver Technology using a minimum SAP NetWeaver Version 7.0 are certified and supported in a three-tier configuration with the Oracle Database Appliance.

Therefore SAP products such as SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ECC 6.0, SAP BW 7.0, SAP CRM 7.0, SAP SRM 7.0 or SAP Solutions such as SAP Banking Services version 7.0 can be used in a three-tier configuration with the Oracle Data-base Appliance.

The Oracle Database Appliance provides the following capabilities for an SAP environment:

• Highly available active-active clustered database server for SAP Applications, based on Oracle Cloud File System (ACFS)

• Highly available file server based on Oracle Cloud File System (ACFS) for SAP required shared file systems such as/sapmnt

• Complete clustering solution for SAP High Availability Resources such as Central Services for both ABAP and JAVA stack

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The Oracle SuperCluster combines the best Oracle technologies in a single unified engineered system – the multi-core, multi-threaded T5 or M6 CPUs including the highly flexible virtualization setup with PDOMs, LDOMs and Solaris Zones with the high performance network bandwidth of the InfiniBand technology plus the so called Storage Server/Cells both added from the Oracle Exa-Stack – not to forget the extensive amount of available memory which is especially useful for the consolidation of existing SAP environments. The Oracle SuperCluster is an engineered system that delivers extreme levels of efficiency, cost savings, and performance for the consolidation of mission-critical SAP and non-SAP applications and the rapid deployment of all kinds of cloud services. It impacts all tiers of the data center, and enables businesses to reduce their operating expenses, including costs to assemble, test, deploy, maintain, upgrade, time, and cost of assembling point products. All SuperCluster elements together enable SAP customers to quickly deploy apps-to-disk solutions that provide the highest SPARC performance, security, and manageability with the lowest TCO. In average you can expect an im-provement of up to 10x on data compression, queries, OLTP response times, and Java middleware performance.

O R A C L E S U P E R C L U S T E R F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

Delivered tested and ready to run, these systems can be deployed in days, not months, and include special enhancements unique to this Oracle product offering that cannot be replicated by other vendors or assembled separately by customers. Oracle SuperCluster enables customers to deploy cloud and virtualization technologies with a solution that integrates seamlessly into existing data centers. Existing SAP applications can transition smoothly to Oracle SC, and customers can grow and expand capacity as their compute requirements grow. Customers with existing SAP application components running on Oracle Solaris 10 can continue to leverage Oracle Solaris 10 on Oracle SuperCluster, meaning that over 11,000 ISV applications (including SAP ERP) can run on this platform.

No Single Point of Failure

Oracle SuperCluster has no single point of failure due to built-in full component redundancy, and it provides a highly available framework offering automatic appli-cation fail over and recovery to support the demands of mission-critical applications. It enables the high database and application availability to minimize planned and unplanned downtime providing the highest service-level

19Oracle SuperCluster for SAP Customers

for core applications across all tiers of the data center. Oracle Clusterware drastically improves database availa-bility while Oracle Solaris Cluster provides industry leading application uptime. (Oracle Solaris Cluster and Oracle RAC are used to provide high availability of the SAP-system landscape – on the Database level as well as on the Application Server level).

Virtualization options for Oracle SuperCluster T5-8

Oracle SuperCluster in the context of SAP

Oracle SuperCluster runs the Oracle Database, the SAP application runtime environment (SAP NetWeaverABAP and Java), Web servers, and Oracle Enterprise Manager management software along with all your SAP business applications on top. It‘s the ideal multi-purpose system for customers who need to consolidate and virtualize all their enterprise or multi-tier applications on a single unified hardware platform within their data centers. It allows flexible two-tier and three-tier SAP deployments. It can be used for running SAP-Unicode or SAP-NonUni-code installations. The Oracle SuperCluster is certified for SAP versions starting from SAP Kernel version 6.40 onwards.Oracle SuperCluster T5-8

Virtualization can be layered

T5-8 and ExaStorage

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PAS = SAP Primary Application Server, (A) SCS = (ABAP) SAP Central Services, DB = Database, O-RAC = Cluster, AAS = SAP Additional Application Server, HA = High Availability, Pre-PRD = SAP QAS, SAP DEV ...

SAP PRD / Non-PRD AppS – Oracle VM Server for SPARC (using LDom)

• Physical separation between PRD and Non-PRD systems using LDom‘s

• Logical separation between SAP AppS instances and SAP SCS based on Zones

• Consolidate SAP AppS (e.g. ECC, CRM, BW, EP, …) instances in Application LDOM

• SAP System Central Service(s) high availability based on Oracle Solaris Cluster SAP PRD / Non-PRD DB –

Oracle VM Server for SPARC (using LDOM)

• Physical separation between PRD and Non-PRD systems

• Consolidate SAP PRD DB (e.g. ECC, CRM, BW, EP, …) instances in Database LDOM

• SAP Database high availability basRAC

Possible T5-8 Oracle SuperCluster deployment scenarios

Virtualization options for Oracle SuperCluster M6-32

Virtualization can be layered

Oracle SuperCluster M6-32

M6-32 ExaStorage

Extensive Virtualization Infrastructure

SSC T5-8 usage type:Multi-Purpose

21Oracle SuperCluster for SAP Customers

PAS = SAP Primary Application Server, (A) SCS = (ABAP) SAP Central Services, DB = Database, O-RAC = Oracle Real Application Clusters, AAS = SAP Additional Appli-cation Server, HA = High Availability, Pre-PRD = SAP QAS, SAP DEV ...

SAP PRD / Non-PRD AppS – Physical Domain (PDom)

• Physical separation between PRD and Non-PRD and within the PDom use LDOM for even more separation

• Logical separation between SAP AppS instances and SAP SCS based on Zones

• Consolidate SAP AppS (e.g. ECC, CRM, BW, EP, …) instances in Application LDOM

• SAP System Central Service(s) high availability based on Oracle Cluster

SAP PRD / Non-PRD DB – Physical Domain (PDom)

• Physical separation between PRD and Non-PRD systems and within the PDom use LDOM for even more separation

• Consolidate SAP DB (e.g. ECC, CRM, BW, EP, …) instances in Database LDOM

• SAP Database high availability based on Oracle RAC

System use cases:

While the use case for every customer is different, custo-mers have the choice to use either the T5-8 SuperCluster or the M6-32 SuperCluster for their most demanding

SAP computing tasks:

Oracle SuperCluster M6-32:

Mainframe-class Reliability, Availability and Service- ability (RAS)

High Memory requirements (like in memory computing, Cloud computing, very large database) can have up to 32 TB memory Datacenter in a box

Oracle SuperCluster T5-8:

Consolidation of Databases and Application InstancesTraditional SAP/Sun customers who would like to upgrade their traditional SPARC and Solaris SAP landscape to the latest and most efficient and powerful technology.

Possible Oracle SuperCluster M6-32 deployment scenarios for SAP

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Conclusion

Like all Oracle engineered systems Oracle SuperCluster is a complete, pre-configured, cluster-capable solution optimized to provide the best performance, availabili-ty, and security for running business-critical enterprise applications like SAP. Oracle SuperCluster is particularly well suited for multi-tier enterprise applications that are comprised of web, database and application components. Along with the powerful bundled no-cost virtualization capabilities it offers the ideal platform to consolidate large numbers of applications, databases, and middleware workloads. Deploying complex multi-user development, test and production environments is also considerably simpler and faster.

With the choice of Oracle SuperCluster based on T5-8 or M6-32 SPARC-Servers organizations now choose an Oracle SuperCluster platform based on fine granularity requirements such as required availability, compute, memory, I/O bandwidth, and storage capacity (both in terms of database storage and application storage). This offering gives you the ideal platform to be used as con-solidation platform of a legacy database and application infrastructure.

More details about certification and supported usage of Oracle SuperCluster are documented in the SAP notes: (SAP user login required)Important SAP-Notes are:Note 1693680 - Running SAP Software on Oracle SuperCluster

Note 1696570 - Oracle SuperCluster: Patches for 11.2.0.3

Note 1696716 - Creating a modified Solaris kernel medium

Oracle SuperCluster for SAP Customers

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O R A C L E E X A L O G I C E L A S T I C C L O U D C E R T I F I E D F O R S A P N E T W E A V E R 7

SAP on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud including virtual environment is officially supported by SAP, documented in SAP Note 1617188.

Oracle Exalogic is the Engineered System for running middleware and packaged applications, capable of virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity. It follows Oracle Engineered Systems philosophy (similar to Oracle Exa-data Database Machine) of integrating all components of a system at the factory level providing a highly standar-dized, optimized and integrated solution that minimizes risk while maximizing performance and reliability.

SAP customers are traditionally facing the challenge of building infrastructure for deploying SAP out of indivi-dual components: Servers, storage, networking, virtuali-zation, OS, database, etc. This introduces a high amount of complexity and therefore risk, as well as sub-optimal performance due to lack of integration. The power of Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata and Exalogic show that the right point of integration is at the factory level, where server, storage, networking and software engineers can build a highly integrated, optimized and tested solution that is ideally suited for customer needs.

Exalogic includes support for a highly optimized version of the Oracle VM hypervisor, which can be used to sub divide a physical compute node into multiple virtual servers (vServers), each of which may run a separate Oracle Linux operating system instance and applications.

Oracle VM has been engineered for tight integration with Exalogic’s Exabus I/O backplane using a technique called Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR¬IOV). This approach requires all operating systems running in these vServers to have special device drivers for communica-ting with the outside world via Exabus. The benefit of this approach is unmatched application performance: in an Exalogic configuration, the impact of virtualization on application throughput and latency is negligible.

Applications running in Exalogic vServers perform on par with deployments on bare metal, but retain all of the manageability and efficiency benefits that come with server virtualization. On Exalogic, Oracle VM significantly outperforms comparable hypervisors from other leading vendors. The substantial performance advantage that Exalogic enjoys results in better application usability, improved hardware utilization and lower software licensing costs. For enterprises with investments in Oracle middle-ware and business applications, Exalogic is an ideal choice to realize benefits of a high performance, fully virtualized applications platform and applications to disk manage-ment.

Combining the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with the

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP NetWeaver

When running SAP NetWeaver on Oracle Exalogic, it uses an Oracle database for SAP running on an Oracle Exadata database machine.

Oracle Exalogic for SAP Customers

24

While detailed SAP performance data is not yet available, we expect Exalogic to deliver similar performance gains for SAP NetWeaver as well.

Exalogic is also the best solution for realizing the full performance benefits of Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP, because it integrates directly into the the heart of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine backplane: The InfiniBand fabric.

Simplicity is another key advantage for SAP on Exalogic: Because all components of Exalogic have been engineered, assembled and tuned together at the factory, set-up time is reduced by up to 95%. And by reducing risk of errors, simplifying diagnosis, and enabling more efficient, lower-cost operation, total infrastructure costs can be reduced by as much as 60%. Prerequisites for running SAP NetWeaver 7.0 on Oracle

Exalogic Elastic Cloud

When using Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud in SAP environments, the following prerequisites need to be in place: See Oracle White Paper: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: A Brief Introduction http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/exalogic-wp-173449.pdf

• Only SAP NetWeaver 7.x or higher is supported, including SAP products which are based on SAP Net-Weaver 7.x. Please check the SAP Product Availability Matrix for details regarding supported SAP product releases

SAP NetWeaver 7.x or higher including SAP products which are based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x. and which are supported on Oracle Linux 5 (OL5) or on Oracle Solaris/x64 11. Please check the SAP Product Availability Matrix for details regarding supported SAP product releases.

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an easy-to-deploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database that delivers the highest levels of database performance available.The Exa-data Database Machine delivers outstanding I/O and SQL processing performance for online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and consolidation of mixed workloads. Exalogic connects to Oracle Exadata Database Machine through the same high-speed, low-latency InfiniBand fabric that is used inside the systems, providing a scalable and powerful networking foundation for communication between nodes in a system, as well as for scaling across multiple Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic racks. The InfiniBand fabric that spans Exalogic and Exadata components provides the following key ways of simplifying and accelerating SAP NetWeaver installations running on Exalogic:

• NFS mounts from the ZFS Storage Appliance to SAP application nodes in Exalogic use the InfiniBand and infrastructure for faster data transport than traditional TCP/IP over 10 GbE. This benefits both SAP applica-tion servers running in Exalogic and Enqueue Servers running on Oracle Exadata

• SAP application servers running the ABAP stack use

Oracle Net through Oracle Instant Client to connect to the Oracle database. This enables them to easily use the SDP protocol over InfiniBand at high bandwidth and low latency, bypassing the traditional TCP/IP stack

• All remaining standard TCP/IP connections running on the InfiniBand fabric will benefit from the 4x higher bandwidth per network connection compared to 10 GbE

• Both networking and storage connections to and from SAP NetWeaver application server nodes are handled through a single fabric, reducing complexity and im-proving reliability through using reduced component counts

In addition, IP over InfiniBand can be used for the communication between the SAP work processes and the Enqueue Server on Exadata.

Compared to typical alternatives, Oracle Exalogic delivered 2-3x improved OLTP performance due to its superior I/O connectivity to Oracle Exadata Database Machine.1)

1) Please see the Oracle white paper Using SAP NetWeaver with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine for details on how to set up Exadata for use with SAP - www.oracle.com/sap

25

Examples include: - SAP ERP (ECC) 6.0 - SAP BW 7.x - SAP CRM 2005 / 2007 / 7.x - SAP PLM 6.0 / 7.0x - SAP SRM 2005 / 2007 / 7.x - SAP SCM 2005 / 2007 / 7.x - SAP Oil & Gas 2005 / 6.x - SAP Banking Services 5.0 / 6.0 / 7.0 / 8.0

• Running SAP on Exalogic is only supported as a Three-Tier SAP installation. SAP instances run on the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server nodes. The Oracle database for SAP must run on an Oracle Exadata Data-base Machine system. Oracle Exalogic can only be used in combination with Oracle Oracle Exadata Database Machine and may not be used in combination with other database server hardware or non-Oracle databases. In this setup, SAP Central Services need to run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine system

The following image illustrates the relationship between the SAP components, Exadata and Exalogic in a Three-Tier configuration:

Please see the Oracle white paper “Using SAP NetWeaver with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine” for details on how to set up Exadata for use with SAP.

• Only Unicode installations of the SAP Software are supported

• As of this time, Oracle ExalogicX3-2 and X4-2 models are supported

• For virtual Exalogic the minimum Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software (EECS) version 2.0.6.0.0 (includes Oracle VM 3.2.1)

Only Oracle Linux 5 with UEK is 11.2.0.3 on Exalogic Minimum Oracle Database Server 11.2.0.3 on supported from the delivered guest template for the vServer (no support for Windows, Solaris, RHEL or SLES guests) Minimum Oracle SAP Instant Client 11.2.0.3 on Exa- logic Minimum Oracle Database Server 11.2.0.3 on Exadata

Using the ZFS Storage Appliance in Exalogic for SAP

Environments

The ZFS Storage Appliance included in the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is ideally suited to act as a “Central Storage Repository for SAP” by providing shared file systems in a highly available and high performance manner for the complete SAP landscape, consisting of application servers running on Exalogic servers nodes and the SAP Central Services running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This configuration offers one of the highest potential service levels and troughput compared to more traditional implementations.

The ZFS Storage Appliance supports the concepts of Projects and Shares for allocating and organizing storage to users, applications and other consumers. In the case of SAP storage for Exalogic, the following strategy is recommended:

• One project “trans” with one share “saptrans” for the /usr/sap/trans directory

• One project “oracle” with one share for providing the /oracle directory and one share per Oracle client software release, mounted as /oracle/client/<RELEASE>


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Conclusion

The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud offers a simple, reliable and high performance solution for providing infrastruc-ture to SAP application servers, in combination with the Oracle Exadata Database machine. Especially in conso-lidation scenarios, where Exalogic is used as a platform for hosting WebLogic, Oracle and other applications, the recent certification of SAP for Exalogic allows the consolidation of SAP development, test and production environments onto Exalogic as well, maximizing the utilization of Exalogic compute nodes.

Furthermore, environments that are especially sensitive to network latency can greatly benefit from Exalogic’s direct InfiniBand connection to Oracle Exadata Database Machine as a way of minimizing network latency by a factor of 10 while maximizing bandwidth by a factor of 4. Installation of SAP on Exalogic is straightforward and leverages existing Oracle Linux best practices for running SAP on x86 systems, as well as the innovative Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance that is built-in into Exalogic. High availability for SAP can be achieved through lever-aging standard mechanisms such as Oracle RAC, Oracle Clusterware, Oracle Data Guard etc.

Through growing Exalogic and Oracle Exadata Database Machine from Eighth, Quarter to Half and Full Rack configurations and by adding more racks of Exalogic and Oracle Exadata, Exalogic provides a very flexible and scalable infrastructure solution for SAP, while maintaining simplicity and high levels of stability.

With Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata, deploying simple, reliable and high performance infrastructure for SAP can now be achieved quickly, cost-effectively and at low risk, compared to traditional ways of deployment.

More information can be found at the following sources:

• SAP Note 1617188

• Oracle White Paper: Running SAP NetWeaver on the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/netweaver-onexalogic-489027.pdf)

• Oracle White Paper: “Using SAP NetWeaver with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.” (http://www.oracle.com-/us/products/database/sap-exadata-wp409603.pdf)

• One project “trans” with one share “saptrans” for the /usr/sap/trans directory

• One project “oracle” with one share for providing the /oracle directory and one share per Oracle client soft-ware release, mounted as /oracle/client/<RELEASE>

• One project per SAPSID, with three shares per project: 1. “usrsap” for the /usr/sap/<SAPSID> directory, 2. “sapmnt” for the /sapmnt/<SAPSID> directory, 3. “oracle” for the /oracle/<SAPSID>/<RELEASE>

directory

Using the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance as the Central Storage Repository also leverages the facility to easily create unlimited additional Application Servers with minimal effort using the ZFS “snapshot” and “clone” capabilities of the appliance.

Because of the broad variety of supported protocols, in-cluding HTTP which allows access to the ZFS appliance through WebDAV, ZFS Storage Appliances can be used in combination with Exalogic to implement SAP’s ILM concept using either the standard ArchiveLink ADK or the XML Direct Archiving Service.

High Availability for SAP NetWeaver on Oracle Exalogic

and Oracle Exadata

In addition to extreme performance, lower risk, simpli-fied deployment and operations, Exadata and Exalogic offer a simple and comprehensive way of scaling the SAP NetWeaver infrastructure.Within a rack, both Exadata and Exalogic offer deploy-ment units of an eighth, quarter, half or a full rack. By using the InfiniBand fabric, multiple racks can be joined together to quickly and easily grow the underlying infra-structure.

For growing SAP NetWeaver 7.x environments, this capability offers a simple, quick, low-risk, and modular growth path. This avoids the typically long, complex, time and resource intensive, and error-prone process of selecting, qualifying, acquiring, testing, and quality assuring of multiple individual components.

Instead, with the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, infrastructure for SAP environments of any size can now be installed and expanded in a matter of days instead of months, while substantially reducing TCA and TCO costs.


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sell doors, and SAP applications do not even check during startup whether the door of your data center is locked

• The model is called SAP Security Solution Map, and rightly so. But many managers and administrators are responsible for an enterprise IT environment, which also includes non-SAP applications. A holistic approach then calls for as many general security functions as possible: functions that are implemented once and can handle all application requirements. The layer of these general functions can be called Superstructure Security

This model is less complex, but more general than the SAP Security Solution Map. Nevertheless, it can be used by SAP partners to describe the security solutions they offer and to define the role that every single product plays as an element of this architecture.

Oracle Corporation offers infrastructure as well as superstructure solutions that can be and are used by SAP customers. The following article discusses operating system hardening (Part I) and Oracle Database security (Part I II) as essential elements of infrastructure security. It describes Oracle Identity and Access Management solutions (Part II) and how they help implement superstructure security.

O R A C L E S E C U R I T Y S O L U T I O N S F O R S A P E N V I R O N M E N T S — A H O L I S T I C A P P R O A C H

Introduction

More often than not, discussions about security solutions for SAP environments are talks about what are commonly called, “security silos”. Administrators discover a security hole and discuss how to protect their systems. Vendors promote new security products or features. Managers wonder how relevant news about security breaches or new compliance regulations apply in their particular case.

None of them can be blamed. There is no single solution that could provide complete security for SAP environ-ments. SAP tried to define what “complete security” means when they published the SAP Security Solution Map. But this architecture clearly shows why no single vendor – including SAP – will ever be able to build and offer a complete solution:

• The model contains a layer called Infrastructure Security. “Infrastructure” means everything underneath of which SAP applications run: from networks and ser-vers to operating systems and databases. Infrastructure security is essential for the security of SAP environ-ments: There is no point in spending a lot of time and money for SAP application security if the door of your data center is always open. On the other hand SAP cannot influence infrastructure security: SAP does not

Oracle Security Solution for SAP Environments – A led Approach l

Figure 1: General security model

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Operating System Security

Information is an essential asset for all companies and must be adequately protected. The information about the IT system (metadata), communication technology and organization should ensure that a server operating systemis deployed, configured and managed to increase the security and reliability of the information in all kinds (SAP and non-SAP) of data centers, which are the essential backbone of today’s work and business processes.

Today’s IT infrastructures reside on widely distributed cloud centers with their networks commonly linked to the Internet (for example, SAP Hybrid Cloud), providing intruders with readily available entry points to corporate systems and data.

Oracle offers two valuable and well-accepted operating systems for the SAP market: Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. Both provide a comprehensive set of tools and technologies to protect IT environments and reduce security challenges associated with remote access and administration including network firewall control plus access control security policies. Deploying SAP Business Suite on Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux platforms offers unparalleled enterprise-class functionality as well as performance, density, and energy efficiency.

The following general and special strategies in this article cover the hardening security aspects of Oracle Solaris used in SAP environments.

Figure 2: Infrastructure Security - Operating System Hardening (Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux)

The first step in creating a secure environment is securing the underlying operating system. Many security issues can be avoided if the operating system’s fundamental services are configured appropriately. Especially in the SAP world, it is essential to have a properly configured operating system environment in place, to be able to ensure that all business components are securely deployed on top.

As a leading supplier for IT hardware and software platforms, Oracle has also provided specialized solutions, integration, operating systems, networking, built-in virtualization features, performance and support for SAP applications for many years.

The first question is: Why use Oracle Solaris as an essen-tial backbone for today’s enterprise applications?

• Defending: With Oracle Solaris you can provide a strong assurance of system integrity and defend systems from unauthorized access (for example, a privileged SAP Admin Account)

• Enabling: Oracle Solaris provides secure authentication of all active subjects and protects communications between endpoints (for example, SSH, telnet, rsh, and rlogin)

• Deploying: Oracle Solaris offers an IT infrastructure stack that is well integrated; it is architected to inter- operate with other security architectures. In addition, it provides ease of management, use of security features, independent assessment of security, and built-in virtualization with Oracle Solaris Zones

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• Compliance Enforcement and Auditing: With Oracle Solaris, reports on configuration management for in-ternal and regulatory security policies can be created. These reports are fully integratable into the Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) stacks

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

The privileges are discrete rights that can be granted to a command, a user, or a role. Role-based access control (RBAC), a feature of Oracle Solaris, reduces the security risk of intruder or regular user actions by implementing administrative hierarchies, constraining applications to specific actions, isolating zones from each other, elevating administrative capabilities, and setting software restriction policies.

RBAC controls user access tasks that would normally be restricted to the root user. By applying security attributes to process and to users, RBAC can distribute administrative rights among several administrations.

Users or applications with root access can make major ch-anges to the Oracle Solaris operating system and SAP ap-plications. With Oracle Solaris, administrators can secure the system by granting fine-grained privileges to users and applications, giving them the minimal access rights needed to perform specific tasks. The root user account is defined as a role, and only users with appropriate privileges can assume that role. Any changes made are traceable to users, providing greater security and accountability.

Protecting Logins

Remote logins are initially limited to an authenticated channel through the Secure Shell (SSH) feature of Oracle Solaris for protected encrypted communications with other systems. Since administrators commonly use the Secure Shell (SSH) to communicate with other systems and it is an entry point into the system, it should be disabled if it is not needed. Oracle Solaris provides two building blocks as accelerated cryptography, the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework and OpenSSL. OpenSSL is typically used by open source applications and is the preferred library for secure HTTP traffic. Oracle Solaris components such as Secure Shell (SSH), ZFS, Kerberos, and Internet Key Exchange Protocol (IKE) use the cryptographic framework by default with no additi-onal configuration needed to take advantage of high-per-formance cryptography on platforms.

Oracle Security Solution for SAP Environments – A Holistic Approach

Virtualization—Increase Security, Flexibility and Scalability

Oracle Solaris server virtualization securely divides systems into smaller virtual servers, enabling adminis-trators to place more applications on a single system. Secure, built-in virtualization services enable system, network and SAP environments to be consolidated and used optimally for greater data center efficiency and thus take the advantage of a platform that constantly offers new features to address the difficult task of supporting large-scale mission-critical environments.

Organizational Security and Compliance

Security is expanding from primarily technical issues (such as changing telnet to SSH) to organizational issues. Oracle Solaris eases the burden of organizational security by providing a compliant base platform supported by an ecosystem that supports higher-level security goals and major trends such as compliance enforcement and auditing.

Comprehensive auditing on an environment can help detect unusual behavior before an event occurs. Under-standing the status of a running system can reduce the risk of a data theft event. Records generated are application defined and report on what applications developers decide to log. It is not appropriate to treat logs as fully trustedsources of data. Although logs can be used as a very help- ful diagnostic step, a compromised application can change generated log events.

Instead, analysis of risk should be performed using tam-per-proof auditing data that is administrator controlled and kernel mediated. By default auditing is enabled on Oracle Solaris for key events (such as login and privilege escalation). However, there are many classes of audit data available to record. A unique capability of Oracle Solaris is the ability to tag administrative files and record any changes in the audit log. This administrative edit command is a simple mechanism to record any privileged configuration edits.

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Configure and Manage the Software and Services

Eliminating unnecessary software packages, services, applications and network protocols minimizes possible avenues of attack. Installing new software packages or patches is a potential source of corrupting user provisi-oning, network services and libraries. When installing the Oracle Solaris operating system, users can reduce the attack surface by installing only the software packages needed for operation.

Similar to minimizing software, restricting services to only those required for the server to deliver application services can help to eliminate potential avenues of attack.

Identity and Access Management

Today‘s businesses demand an ever-increasing focus on identity and access management (IAM) solutions to be able to understand who has physical and logical access to their facilities, networks and information. The major drivers behind this security trend are mixed and virtu-alized OS, application and database deployments with different user management engines, B2B – service-ori-ented architecture implementations, cloud computing, mobile computing (such as BYOD), IT governance, risk and compliance policies/rules and new Internet paradigms such as Internet of Things. All of this needs to be seen in a coherent SAP ERP security approach with the needed flexi-bility to also integrate other third party platforms which are used to establish full end-to-end business processes and transactions over all available business layers.

Figure 3: Application Security - Oracle Identity and Access Management

The Service Management Facility (SMF) is a feature of the operating system that provides a uniform mechanism to manage system and application services (enable, disable, refresh, restart, and so on) on Oracle Solaris. SMF improves the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously even in the event of any hardware or software failures. SMF is one of the components of the wider Oracle Solaris predictive self-healing capability.

To increase the security on the operating system, remove or disable software packages associated with a service if the service is not in use.

Oracle offers an enterprise identity and access management suite that exactly fulfills this kind of demand, delivering a converged, comprehensive platform for identity admi-nistration, access request, role lifecycle management, access certification, closed loop remediation and privileged account management for mixed platform deployments. This product suite enhances regulatory compliance by enforcing and attesting to regulatory requirements (such as Sarbanes-Oxley, 21 CFR Part 11, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, and KonTraG) associated with identifying whohas access privileges to sensitive, high risk data on SAP and non-SAP system by offering a direct integration into the SAP GRC stack. It also eliminates potential security threats from rogue, expired and unauthorized accounts and privileges, which goes hand in hand with a privileged account management allowing root users (administrators) to gain access to sensitive applications in a timely manner, while providing sufficient audit trails about their activities. Oracle offers this converged solution with the Oracle Identity Governance Suite.

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Oracle Identity Governance Suite

Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), Oracle Identity Ana-lytics (OIA), and Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) work together to create a complete governance process for the enterprise. The suite offers a highly flexible and scalable enterprise identity administration system that provides operational and business efficiency by delivering centralized administration and complete automation of identity and user provisioning events across enterpriseas well as extranet applications. It manages the entire identity and role lifecycle to meet changing business and regulatory requirements and provides essential reporting and compliance functionalities. It ensures consistent enforcement of identity-based controls, reducing ongoing operational and compliance cost and offers dedicated connectors for SAP ERP (ABAP and Java), supports special SAP HCM scenarios, and integrates into SAP BusinessObjects Access Control (V5.3 and V10) for SAP specific Segregation of Duty validations.

The components of the Oracle Identity Governance Suite (OIG) provide enterprises with the ability to effectively achieve and manage access compliance and automate critical identity-based controls (SoD). OIG also allows business/functional roles to be defined, certified, and assigned, and then continues to deliver value throughout the user access lifecycle by direct integration into the SAP product stack. OIG also allows the usage of the SAP Org-Structures as the basis for the development of a central enterprise-wide business role model with integratable cross segregation-of-duty checks over all assigned systems accounts (SAP and non-SAP).

Oracle Access Management Suite Plus

In the last years, access management has covered application and web service security focusing primarily on authenti-cation, authorization and audit. This has extended to new levels of protection. For example, enterprises need to provide employees with access to company resources from personal mobile devices. Similarly, some organizations need to grant customers access to applications on the basis of the user’s identities on social networking sites. And most organizations need to manage sign-on to cloud ser-vices as they would for on-premise applications. Further, organizations are being transformed by the need to provide end-to-end, standards-based security services to their applications, data, web services, and cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Such business

demands are driving organizations to externalize security services, integrate with partners, and evaluate the risk of internal and external transactions. Oracle Access Management Suite Plus addresses these challenges with a complete solution for controlling access to applications, data, web services, and cloud-based services across and beyond the enterprise. The package includes features such as the “Pluggable authentication and WebSSO” service for the SAP NW Enterprise Portal which is able to provide a full WebSSO solution for SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal deployments which are used in conjunc-tion with other third party web applications. In ad-dition, Oracle Identity Federation offers a cross-domain and cloud-ready single-sign-on solution for a variety of application platforms including SAP ERP on the basis of highly accepted market standards such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus

Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus securely eliminates the need for users to remember and manage passwords for virtually any application, web or non-web. With OESSO Logon Manager, employees sign on to Windows and OESSO Logon Manager does the rest. As they launch their other applications, OESSO Logon Ma-nager automatically logs them on with each application’s password. It can be installed on corporate computers and is also accessible via a website from any non-corporate computer – anywhere, anytime. It also includes a secure, reliable, but also simple integration for all SAP power users on the basis of the SAP GUI for Windows.

Oracle API Gateway

Companies worldwide are actively deploying service-ori-ented architecture (SOA) infrastructures using web ser-vices, both in intranet and extranet environments. While web services offer many advantages over traditional alter-natives (such as distributed objects or custom software), deploying networks of interconnected web services still presents key challenges, especially in terms of security and management. Oracle API Gateway is a software solution that provides application-level routing (based on source, target, sender identity, and XML message type); XML conversion, validation and threat scanning; XML acceleration; security (selective encryption and signature of XML messages, decryption and signature validation); monitoring (response time, logging, and alerting); and


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outside of the office. This is a difficult security situation for every IT department because of the missing visibility and control over the devices. Oracle offers IT depart-ments a way to enforce data leakage protection policies while at the same time offering secure access to inter-nal applications – without the use of a virtual private network (VPN) connection jumping from one hot spot to the other without a re-authentication/re-authorization procedure. This software adds a complete new isolation level for all corporate data within an end-user-owned mobile device and allows companies to easily mobilize any enterprise data across iPhone, Android and Blackberry natively in just 30 minutes. It is based on a container concept by which the product sets up a secure sandbox on the end-user mobile device. Enterprise applications or other third-party applications can be trusted by Oracle Mobile Security Suite, and are considered at that point to be „containerized“ and secured the same way as are the native Oracle Mobile Security Suite apps. All applications will be accessed based on the included secure Web tunnel through the OMSS gateway, providing access to inter-nal-only applications including, for example, SAP AG ERP mobile apps which are specifically developed for mobile and smart devices.

Summary

Provisioning, privileged access request (including Single Sign On) and approval management, role management and compliance products evolved independently of each other, which led to companies implementing multiple products from multiple vendors as point solutions to address these needs. As regulatory and provisioning requi-rements continue to grow and change, such multi-vendor solutions only increase the complexity and costs ofmanaging and integrating these products. As a result, enterprises are in an inevitable position of having to rely heavily on each of these vendors for support and also committing significant resources to governance efforts for integration and manual processes with little assurance that they will prove successful. Recent research also has made it evident that organizations can save up to 48% in overall costs deploying a single-vendor platform solution when compared to deploying multi-vendor point solutions. Therefore Oracle with its single, converged IAM platform is the right partner for all heterogeneous multi-vendor applicati-on and operating system deployments. Oracle’s IAM suite of products can serve as a starting point and basis for a non-silo based and highly flexible SAP IAM solution.

governance (service access and usage). It can be deployed standalone or as an integral component of a strategic enterprise SOA infrastructure, interfacing with an enterprise service bus such as SAP NW Process Integration Engine (SAP SOA Engine), enterprise management, and identity management platforms.

Oracle Secure Global Desktop

Oracle Secure Global Desktop is a secure remote access solution providing access to applications running on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris and mainframe servers, from a wide variety of popular client devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, and tablets such as the Apple iPad and Android-based devices. Oracle Secure Global Desktop allows administrators the freedom to use a single solution to provide secure access to a variety of applications and desktop environments resident in the data center. It supports users connecting to the applications they need from inside and outside the corporate firewall (for example, SAP GUI or SAP NW Portal). This means users are free to work from any location.

But this freedom also extends to the device choice. With the broad supported client list that Oracle Secure Global Desktop offers, users are free to connect from whichever device they choose, without consideration to the client platform. So, for example, users can access Windows applications on iPads, or access Linux applications from Windows laptops. And because Oracle Secure Global Desktop offers session persistence, users can jump between devices, resuming sessions on different devices without interruption.

Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition

Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition is the only high-performance directory server to provide a core di-rectory service with embedded database, directory proxy, synchronization with Microsoft Active Directory, and a web console to manage your software all in one package. It includes key components that together provide a complete directory service and is certified for the integration with the SAP NetWeaver application stack.

Oracle Mobile Security Suite

More and more employees bring their own devices to work (BYOD) and use them to get access to internal and publicly available applications (apps) over the enterprise intranet. In addition they share files and data inside or

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Encrypting data in transit prevents this sort of activity. Therefore, the first data protection technology, imple-mented in the Oracle Database, provides Network Encryp-tion. In this context, network encryption means: Oracle software installed on both the SAP application server and Oracle Database server machines encrypts data before and decrypts them after they are sent over the network.

Attack Scenario 2: Database File Copies

Attackers could also steal a copy of the database files and read the files directly. Of course, these files are not simple text files, so a lot of knowledge about SAP’s data model and Oracle’s data storage algorithms would be required. So it is difficult, but it is not impossible.

Therefore data at rest need to be protected as well. Trans-parent Data Encryption – a set of technologies provided by Oracle Advanced Security – means that data are not stored as plain text, but in a coded form. Therefore the informa-tion in the data files looks like nonsense and is completely meaningless to everybody who tries to read the data files directly.

Especially if you decide to encrypt not all data, but only a few tables in your production database, you may want to increase the security level of your database backups, as it is generally much easier to steal backup copies of the database files than the production database itself. Backup Set Encryption – a second set of technologies provided by Oracle Advanced Security – allows you to encrypt the backup of your database files completely.

Database Security

If a user wants to read or update data in an Oracle database that is used as a data store by an SAP application, the first and obvious way is to use the interfaces provided by SAP’s applications. From an Oracle Database perspective, this is the easiest case, because all questions – which people should be able to access the data and which people should not? Which part of the data should a particular per-son be able to access? What exactly should this personbe able to do with the data? – are asked and answered by SAP’s user and privilege management with the possible support of identity and access management solutions pro-vided by Oracle. This means: All legal data accesses are managed by identity and access management, and there is not much the Oracle database could or would need to add, as long as there are only well-behaved users. Putting this statement the other way round, we get this rule: Oracle’s database-related security features and options help prevent data accesses which bypass the SAP applications, use non-SAP tools to access SAP data, and are at least potentially illegal.

Attack Scenario 1: Network Sniffing

Attackers could use a sniffer tool to capture the data while they are in transit. This would allow them to intercept sensitive data like logins and passwords, table and column names, and even actual table data (such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and other personally iden-tifiable information) going to or coming back from the database server.


Figure 4: Database Security - Oracle Database Vault - General Security Model

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Attack Scenario 3: Direct Database Connect

But there is yet another “unusual” way to the data. Privi-leged database users – like database administrators – can use DBA tools and directly connect to the database, thus bypassing SAP’s security checks. The first aspect that needs to be understood when considering this scenario is that encryption does not help against this kind of threat. If someone is able to connect to the Oracle Database using a sufficiently privileged account, and if he or she is then able to build an appropriate SELECT statement and send it to the database, then Oracle Database will gene-rously deliver the result set to this user. And if the data is encrypted on disk, then Oracle will even decrypt them, because from an Oracle Database perspective the request sent by this user seems to be a perfectly valid request.

The second aspect that needs to be understood is the rea-son for Oracle’s behavior. As a database user, you can be granted object privileges and system privileges. There are many different kinds of objects in a database, but average database users as well as people who want to steal data are only interested in tables, so for simplicity’s sake we will assume that database “objects” means just “tables”. An “object privilege” for a table, then, means that you are allowed to access the data in that table. A system privilege, on the other hand, means that you are allowed to manipulate the database structure. You may add disk space to (or release it from) the database, you may create new tables (or drop old ones), you may add an additional column to an existing table. Now, in traditional databases (including the Oracle Database), if you were explicitly granted a sufficient number of system privileges, you implicitly received object privileges for all tables as well. For decades people found this quite natural and unpro-blematic. Only recently companies began to ask: Is it really necessary and is it really desirable that a database administrator, who is supposed to manage the database structure, is by default able to read (and even change) all data in the database?

So the third aspect that needs to be understood is that the third scenario requires a new privilege management strategy in the database. This strategy should continue to provide system privileges and object privileges, but it should get rid of implicitly granted object privileges. In other words: A “normal” database user needs object pri-vileges only, and a database administrator in most cases needs system privileges only. If there is a reason why thedatabase administrator should be able to access the data as well, then he or she – as everybody else – should be granted the required object privileges explicitly.

This is exactly what Oracle Database Vault does. It elimi-nates all implicit grants and instead provides a means to explicitly define access rights as well as the circumstan-ces under which they are effective. This goes far beyond traditional user-privilege or user-role correlations. Oracle Database Vault allows companies to implement and enforce concepts such as the segregation of duties or the four eyes principle.

Putting the Pieces Together

Putting the pieces together, it can be said that all data accesses using SAP’s applications are handled by SAP, so there is not much Oracle can or needs to do. However, if people use other strategies to access the data in your database, there is not much SAP can do, and this is exactly when the security features implemented in Oracle Database and Oracle Database options can help you protect your data. Encryption prevents people from directly reading the database files. Database Vault prevents people from accessing the data via standard database tools.

Additional Information

The SAP Security Solution Map can be downloaded from http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-17098.

The goal of this article is to provide a simple, but complete picture of the security solutions which Oracle provides for SAP customers. A more detailed version of this text is available as a white paper at http://www.oracle.com/us/so-lutions/sap/oracle-security-for-sap-2148703.pdf

A complementary, but not SAP-specific, white paper on Oracle Linux hardening is available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/tips-harden-oracle-linux-1695888.html.


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What is the mutual background between Oracle and SAP ?

Oracle Corporation and SAP AG have had an ongoing commitment to our tens of thousands of joint customers for 26 years. A growing majority of SAP customers in every industry, from mid-size to large enterprises, entrust their applicati-on deployments to the Oracle database. And look around you: many companies are running SAP applications with Oracle databases on all major operating systems and environments, including Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.

You state that Oracle technologies make SAP applications run

better. What are the main differentiators provided by Oracle

and Exadata Database Machine ?

Yes, we consider that only Oracle is providing a proven general purpose database and infrastructure platform for SAP customers. There are six major differentiators

1 - Best Performance & Scalability: first we consider that Exadata Database Machine for SAP is a unique, complete, pre-built, balanced and secure database-cloud-based ready system consisting of hardware and software for mission- critical standard Oracle Database with built-in high availability and offering high performance

• With Oracle Exadata Database Machine you can scale up/out incrementally and on demand. You can start with the appropriate Oracle Exadata size: One Eighth, quarter, half, or full rack. The solution is upgraded to the next larger size before you need additional speed or capacity. There is no need for a forklift upgrade, simply scale the existing system up to 18 full racks

• Oracle Exadata Database Machine provides outstanding performance for transaction processing and dataware- housing. SAP transactions happen against data likely to be in‚ flash memory for ultra-fast retrieval. Reporting and batch users will not interfere with SAP transactional users. SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse will return queries to users orders of magnitude faster

2 - Best Deployment Flexibility: Oracle Database is provid-ing the widest range of supported platforms: Unix, Linux, and Windows. Regardless of the platform selected, Oracle uses the same code base across all operating systems, this means that the same features, tools and functionality are deployed on all hardware platforms and operating systems. So, our customers can choose the most appropriate plat-form for their implementations.

Q&A Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP

Customers

Gerhard Kuppler, Vice President SAP Alliances at Oracle Corporation, discusses the six main differentiators describing

why the

O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E I S T H E B E S T P L A T F O R M F O R C O N S O L I D A T I O N A N D P E R F O R M A N C E F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

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• Oracle Clusterware (i.e. SAPCTL) protects SAP critical services making the SAP application highly available

• Oracle Data Guard complements Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), providing disaster recovery solutions.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management is a volume manager and a file system for Oracle database files that supports both single-instance Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters configurations

• The Oracle Cloud File System complements Automatic Storage Management for Oracle Databases

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP customers is a highly engineered and pre-validated configuration. It provides built in High Availability, ‘out of the box’. Oracle Exadata Database Machine is pre-built, reducing time and costs for deployment, installation, and config-uration (HW, OS, DB, RAC, Clusterware etc.).

4 - Best Support for Very Large Databases: Oracle’s solution consolidates multiple dispersed Oracle databases into one Exadata Database Machine environment and reduces your overall database costs. Exadata Database Machine frees IT personnel to focus on the business needs of their enterprise rather than component integration and testing. Many environments are reaching the end of their useful life and are costly to maintain. Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic provide a cheaper and easier-to-manage environ-ment – a viable option for a private database cloud.

How can SAP customers benefit?

With SAP Business Warehouse, you can see the following drawbacks:• huge and complex infocubes, queries or transactions

requiring long database response time

• large daily extracts with a limited time window

• large extracts that can flood the network

And with SAP ERP, you can observe the following points: • large tables in OLTP environments

• HR tables are growing larger and larger over time• transaction tables require constant archiving

Whenever customers require a change in operating systems, Oracle offers fast and efficient solutions like Oracle-to- Oracle (O2O) migration services. Many large customers cannot afford an offline migration, Oracle is then offering Triple-O, which means Online Oracle to Oracle migration requiring a very short downtime independent from the database size. It reduces the migration downtime from hours to minutes.

Oracle has provided Oracle Database Server software to be installed on systems made up of third-party hardware and operating systems.However, in addition Oracle now provides “Engineered systems”, where Oracle manufactures the machine, the operating system and the database. As a result, Oracle can move all functions to the layer where it works most efficiently.

A new option for Oracle Database 12c*, Oracle Multi- tenant helps customers reduce IT costs by simplifying consolidation, provisioning, upgrades, and more. It is supported by a new architecture that allows a multitenant container database to hold many pluggable databases. An existing database can be simply adopted, with no change, as a pluggable database; and no changes are needed in the other tiers of the application.

Traditionally, Oracle has provided Oracle Database Server software to be installed on Systems made up of third-party hardware and a third-party operating system.

This approach is still possible. However, in addition Oracle now provides “Engineered systems”, where Oracle manufactures the machine, the operating system and the database. As a result, Oracle can move all functions to the layer where it works most efficiently. E.g. in Oracle Exadata Database Machine a substantial amount of SQL and data analysis is moved to the storage layer, and Flash memory is used for logging.

3 - Best Availability and Reliability: With Oracle Exadata’s redundant architecture, all single points of failure are eliminated. Familiar features such as mirroring, fault isolation, and protection against drive and cell failure have been incorporated into Exadata Database Machine. This ensures continual availability and protection of data

• Oracle RAC for SAP removes the database server as a single point of failure because the database remains online, provided at least one database instance is up and running

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In Oracle Database 12c*, several new features have been added to the Advanced Compression Option (ACO) which enhance the storage management capabilities of the Oracle Database. A heat map automatically tracks modification and query timestamps, providing detailed insights into how data is being accessed. Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) automatically moves and compresses data based on the information collected in the heat map. Together, these capabilities help to implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies. Hybrid Columnar Compression – available on Oracle Engineered Systems and Oracle Storage – enables the highest levels of data compression and provides enterprises with tremendous cost-savings and performance improvements due to re-duced I/O. Average storage savings can range from 10x to 15x depending on which Hybrid Columnar Compression level is implemented.

You said 6 major differentiators. What are the last 2 ?

5 - Best Database Security: Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP is a highly engineered and pre-validated configu-ration. It provides built-in high availability, ‘out of the box’.All Oracle security features are available for all database configurations (single instance and RAC) and all hard-ware/OS platforms – including the Exadata Database Machine. So, Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP satisfies even the most stringent security and high availability requirements. It provides a complete, pre-built, balanced and secure cloud-based machine for mission-critical databases with all available high security features of Oracle, like Advanced Security.

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.

6 - Best Database Manageability & Self-Management for SAP. Our Oracle Exadata for SAP solution:

• eliminates complex integration work and manual tuning (database, storage, network, and server)

• optimizes the support of implementations, migrations, and consolidations for fast, inexpensive project runtimes

Q&A Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP

• makes it easy for users to implement a highly efficient centralized data pool featuring a multitude of system databases. Bundle Patches are created and certified in conjunction with SAP and bundled for simplicity

What kind of services can Oracle offer to SAP customers ?

Our Oracle for SAP Services & Support team offers Advanced Customer Services (ACS) that include health checks, workshops, database migrations, performance tuning etc.And ACS Oracle Solaris Services for SAP include Assisted Services Engagements: these services provide analysis, enhancement and SAP Readiness Service for IT infra-structure.

How could you summarize the advantages of Oracle Exadata

Database Machine ?

Our Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an engineered system that has been optimized to achieve best-in-class enterprise performance. This is the benefit of pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. We consider that a single-vendor infrastructure stack simplifies and reduces the costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments.Our solution is engineered to consolidate all of SAP Databases and non-SAP Databases into a private Database Cloud environment. Oracle Exadata delivers extreme performance for all types of mixed database workloads including Online Transaction Processing (like SAP ECC 6.0), or Data Warehousing (like SAP BW 7.0 and higher).Customer references prove that Oracle Exadata Database Machines can run up to 10x times faster or even more.

* Oracle Database 12c

SAP will support Oracle Database 12c for their applications. More details will be available in the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM). Currently we are testing (among others) the following Oracle Database 12c options and features for SAP: In-Memory Option, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) / Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) [requires Oracle Advanced Compression] Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC), Oracle Multitenant.

https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-15887

DATABASE 12c

38

INTRODUCTION

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability. Customers can choose either clustered or single-servers that run Windows, all major Linux distri-butions or any major vendor UNIX distributions. It pro-vides 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 world’s #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_EX2, 7.x and higher are certified with Oracle Database 11gRelease 2

• A general release of Oracle Database 11g Release 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 10g Release 2, there is only a temporary 11.2 release in direct connection with an SAP upgrade project for these older SAP versions

• The SAP release of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 11g Release 2 occurred at the same time as the general release of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 in the SAP environment. For information about Oracle RAC support, (see SAP Note 527843). It contains important details about the released RAC configurations

• As of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.2), SAPfully supports Oracle Automatic Storage Management Oracle (ASM) and its extended functionality to manage ALL data: Oracle Database files, Oracle Clusterware files and non-structured general purpose data such as Oracle and general purpose data such as Oracle and SAP kernel binaries, external files and text files. Oracle ASM sim-plifies, automates and reduces cost and overhead by

O R A C L E D A T A B A S E 1 1 g R E L E A S E 2 F U N C T I O N A L I T Y A D O P T E D B Y S A P C U S T O M E R S

providing a unified and integrated solution stack for all file management needs, eliminating the need for 3rd party volume managers, file systems and cluster-ware platforms. Oracle ASM has two major enhance-ments that are important for running SAP

• Oracle Cluster Repository (OCR) and voting files can be stored on Oracle ASM

• Oracle Database Home can be stored on Oracle new cluster file system ACFS

This makes Oracle ASM the preferred storage platform for SAP running on Oracle Real Application Clusters as well as for SAP systems running on a single instance Oracle Database (for more information about Oracle ASM:SAP Note 1550133).

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 SAP applications. The following provides a list of important features available for SAP customers today and many of them are unique to Oracle.

Index Compression

The Oracle Database provides a highly efficient technology for storing regular indexes in an efficient manner. For performance and throughput reasons almost every access to SAP data in the Oracle Database happens via indexes. Therefore indexes in the database are critical for the throughput of an SAP system. The more efficient indexes are stored in the database the more efficient the SAP application will run. By using index compression in the Oracle Database the performance of the SAP appli-caton will be improved. Queries may run three to four times faster using compressed indexes. Index compression will reduce the total disk space for the Oracle Database by up to 20%.The use of index compression in the Oracle Database for SAP Applications is described in SAP Support Note

1109743 and fully integrated in the BR*Space utility of SAP.

39

Compressed Index Organized Tables

The Oracle Database provides another important and ideal technology for SAP applications. Many tables used by the SAP application have only a single unique index (primary key). These tables with a single unique index can be stored much more efficient in the Oracle Database by using compressed index organized tables (IOTs). By using compressed IOTs queries may run up to five times faster. Insert and Delete operations against com-pressed IOTs will perform up to twice as fast. The use of compressed IOTs will reduce the total disk space of the Oracle Database by up to 25%. The implementation of compressed IOTs provides the capability to keep single index tables entirely or almost entirely in-memory avoi-ding any disk I/O and therefore providing extremely fast access to data in the Oracle Database.The use of compressed IOTs in the Oracle Database for SAP Applications is described in more detail in SAP

Support Note 1856270.

OLTP Table Compression

Oracle Database 11g introduced a new feature calledOLTP Table Compression that allows data to be com-pressed 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 environ-ments as well. OLTP Table Compression, therefore, extends the benefits of compression to all application workloads.

Oracle’s OLTP Table Compression, part of AdvancedCompression, 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 compres-sion meta-data. 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, Oracle’s unique approachoffers significant performance benefits by not introducing additional I/O when accessing compressed data.The benefits of OLTP Table Compression go beyondjust on-disk storage savings. One significant advantage is Oracle’s ability to read compressed blocks directlywithout having to first uncompress the block.

Therefore, there is no measurable performance degrada-tion 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 Database Rel. 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 re-organization has taken place, an additional 20% of total disk space reduction for the whole database can be achieved using index compression.

SecureFile Data 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, manage-ability, 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 I/O, 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-offline LOBs that are unique to the Oracle database.

RMAN Backup Compression

The continuous growth in enterprise databases createsan 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 RMAN’s tight integration with Oracle Database, RMAN backup (widely used by SAP customers) data is compressed before it is written to disk or tape and doesn’t need to be uncompressed before recovery – providing an enormous reduction in storage costs.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP

40

Data Pump Compression

The ability to compress the meta-data associated witha 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 in-line operation, so the reduced dump file size means a sig-nificant 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 Data-base Administrator.

Data Guard Network Compression

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 infor-mation 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).With Advanced Compression, redo data may be transmitted in a compressed format to reduce the network bandwidth 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 destina-tion is compressed.

Deferred Segment Creation

Beginning in Oracle Database 11g Release 2, whencreating a table in a locally managed tablespace, table-segment creation is deferred until the first row is inser-ted. 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 forcustomers running Oracle database underneath theirSAP 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 a 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

Before Oracle Database 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.Now in Oracle Database 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 sub- seconds and independent of the existing data volume,it also consumes no space. Especially for large tables,updating table column results in reduced executiontime and space saving.Because ADD column is very common within SAPBW applications and SAP upgrades, enhanced ADDColumn Functionality leads to:

• Factor 10-20 performance improvement for SAP BW during ADD column process

• Saving large amount of disk space compared to Oracle Database 10g, the listed OracleDatabase 11g features give the following results:

Without Compression

With Compression and other space optimizations

Space Savings

Database (fully reorganized)

SAP ECC 6.0 SAP BW 7,0

SAP CRM 7.0

RMAN Backup (for compressed database)

Export Data Pump

4,782 GB 1,413 GB 950 GB

2,817 GB

973 GB

1,976 GB 543 GB 334 GB

667 GB

156 GB

59%62%64%

76%

84%

41

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 content – both semi-structured and unstructured – is 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 archi-tecture attributes for storing unstructured content.

SAP customers benefit from SecureFiles because of:

• 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)

Overall transaction throughput increases when LOB data is stored in SecureFiles (see figure beside). LOB data stored in SecureFiles delivers equal or better performance compared with LOB data stored in LONG or BasicFiles (LOB implementation prior to Oracle Database 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 recom-mendation is given to migrate all existing LONG and Basicfile LOB data to Secure-Files.

Tablespace Encryption

On many agendas, security is in the forefront and be- coming much more important for customers. 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 Security Option (ASO) is the technology to encrypt all data in a tablespace. Prior to Oracle Database 11g, Oracle provided security features such as Column Encryption through Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Client Server (SAP Application Server) Network Encryption.

Additional Encryption

Advanced Security Option (ASO) within Oracle Database 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

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

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.

BR*Tools Support for Oracle Database 11g

As of version 7.20, BR*Tools support the new features provided by Oracle Database 11g Release 2 which makes it very easy to implement them even in existing systems (see SAP Note 1430669).

In particular, the following operations are possible:• BRSPACE provides special options for online reorgani-

zation, which allow you to activate the new OLTP table compression


SAP VBDATA Throughput (Insert/Read/Delete)

Per

form

ance

Imp

rove

men

t Fa

cto

r

row size in KB

LONGs (9.2,10.2) LOBs (10.2,11.2) Securefiles 11.2

42

• To convert the “old LOBs” (data type LONG or LOB) to the “new LOBs” (data type SecureFiles), BRSPACE provides a new action “lob2lob” within the reorganiz-ation function “tbreorg”

• As of patch 3, BRSPACE 7.20 supports the manage-ment of the index compression for Oracle Database 10g as well as Oracle Database 11g (see SAP Note 1464156)

• BRSPACE allows you to set the compression and encryption attributes at tablespace level when you create a new tablespace. Tables that are created in (or moved to) such a tablespace then implicitly adopt these attributes, except if they are set explicitly at table level

• BRSPACE is aware of columns which contain data that are compressed by SAP. It makes sure that the

useless overhead of an additional compression is avoided

Real Application Testing (RAT)• Database Replay provides DBAs and system admin-

istrators with the ability to faithfully, accurately and realistically rerun actual production workloads, including online user and batch workloads, in test en-vironments. 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 administra-tors can test: Database upgrades, patches, parameter, schema changes, etc.

• Configuration changes such as conversion from a single instance to Oracle RAC, Oracle ASM, etc.

• Storage, network, interconnect changes

• Operating system, hardware migrations, patches, upgrades, parameter changes statistics by running the SQL statements serially before and after the changes

• SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) can predict andprevent 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

The Oracle/SAP Development Team recently concluded comprehensive testing of SAP applications using 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 Oracle Database Rel. 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. The test results can be read in the newsletterhttp://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/volumes/

volume19-en.pdf

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 ope-rating 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.

SAP customers can benefit from Direct NFS in thefollowing 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

43

Online Patching

A regular RDBMS patch is comprised of one or moreobject files and/or libraries. Installing a regular patchrequires 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 repor-ting database – A physical standby database can be ope-ned 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.

Out-of-place Upgrade

Starting with the first patch set for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.2), Oracle Database patch sets are full installations of the Oracle Database software. In past releases, Oracle Database patch sets consisted of a set of files that replaced files in an existing Oracle home. Be-ginning with Oracle Database 11g Release 2, patch sets are full installations that replace existing installations.

This is Oracle’s recommended way to apply a patch set. You install the patch set into a new, separate Oracle home location. After you install the patch upgrade, you then migrate the Oracle Database from the older Oracle home. The patch set upgrade is now the same process to upgrade from one version to another. Oracle recommends that you perform an out-of-place patch set upgrade, because this patch set application option requires much less downtime, and is safer because it does not require patching an ORACLE_HOME that is already being used in production. However, you must ensure that you have sufficient free disk space to accommodate two Oracle home directories at the same time (for more information check SAP Note 1524205).

SAP Bundle Patches (SBP)

Oracle database patches for UNIX-platforms are now delivered in form of so-called SAP Bundle Patches (SBP) as of Oracle Database Rel. 10.2.0.4. SBPs are based on Oracle Patch Set Updates (PSUs) that are proactive cumulative patches containing recommended bug fixes and Critical Patch Updates (CPU) that are released on a regular and predictable schedule. A SAP Bundle Patch consists of Current Patch Set Update (PSU), SAP specific necessary Single and Merge-Patches which are not con-tained in the PSU, current SAP specific Optimizer-Merge- Patch, README.html: installation manual for SBP, bugs_fixed.html: list of patches contained in SBP. SBPs are cumulative and the current one contain all previous patches and additional new patches. In other words, customers always need to install only one, the most current, SBP using MOPatch.

Oracle Database 12c for SAP customers


SAP will support Oracle Database 12c for their appli-cations. More details will be available in the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM). Currently we are testing (among others) the following Oracle Database 12c options and features for SAP: In-Memory Option, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) / AutomaticData Optimization (ADO) [requires Oracle Advanced Compression] Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC), Oracle Multitenant.

https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-15887

44

O R A C L E D AT A B A S E 1 2 : O R A C L E M U LT I T E N A N T

Oracle Multitenant – an Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition option – introduces a new architecture that enables customers to easily consolidate multiple databases, without changing their applications. This new architecture delivers all the benefits of managing many databases as one, yet retains the isolation and resource prioritization of separate databases. In addition, Oracle Multitenant enables rapid provisioning and upgrades, and fully complements other options including Oracle Real Application Clusters and Active DataGuard.

Architecture Overview

Oracle Database 12c supports a new architecture that lets you have many “sub databases” inside a single “super database”. From now on, we shall use the official termi-nology: The “super database” is called container database (abbreviated as CDB); and the “sub database” is the pluggable database (abbreviated as PDB). In other words, the new architecture lets you have many PDBs inside a single CDB. We shall refer to this new architecture as the multitenant architecture, and we shall refer to the old (pre-12.1) architecture as the non-CDB architecture.

From the point of view of the client application connec-ting to the database server via Oracle Net, the PDB is the database. A PDB is fully compatible with a non-CDB – a rule also known as the PDB/non-CDB compatibility guarantee. In other words, the installation scheme for an application backend that ran without error against a

non-CDB will run, with no change, and without error, in a PDB and will produce the same results. And the run-time behavior of client code that connects to the PDB holding the application backend will be identical to that of client code that connected to the non-CDB holding this appli-cation backend.

Benefits

Standardizing on fewer moving parts in the data center helps to maximize the benefit of consolidation, and consolidating databases is a key step in the journey to the cloud. It provides the opportunity to make more efficient use of available hardware and administrative resources. However, it can be a challenge for IT organizations to achieve high levels of database consolidation density without incurring major development and administrative overheads.

High Consolidation Density

IT organizations have traditionally used virtualization and clustering technologies to consolidate their data-bases, and many have embarked on major application redevelopments to consolidate database schemas. This has typically resulted in limited consolidation density, increased management costs, and in many cases high development costs.

Oracle Multitenant simplifies the consolidation process by plugging multiple databases into a multitenant container database without changing applications. In this new architecture, memory and background processes are only required at the multitenant container database level, enabling IT organizations to achieve a greater level of scalability and consolidation density without compromising the security of previously separate database silos.

Rapid Provisioning and Cloning

Rapid provisioning and cloning of databases for various purposes including testing, development and problem diagnosis can be a challenge for many IT organizations. Database administrators typically devote a significant portion of their working days to creating new databases, cloning databases and moving databases between different servers.

Figure 1: Oracle Multitenant Architecture

c

45

Table and Index Compression

In addition to simplifying database consolidation, Oracle Multitenant also enables rapid database provisioning and cloning. For example, database administrators can easily copy production databases and plug them into develop-ment and test containers. In addition, if the underlying filesystem supports copy on write (e.g. ZFS Filesystem, ASM Cluster Filesystem) cloning of pluggable databases can occur almost instantaneuosly.

Finally, you can unplug a PDB from one CDB and plug it into another CDB. It is this, of course, that gives the pluggable database its name.

Rapid Patching and Upgrades

Every database administrator has to apply upgrades and patches to keep their databases current of software releases and fixes. Currently, such updates are applied to each individual database, including production, test and development databases throughout an organization.

With Oracle Multitenant, upgrades and patches are applied to the multitenant container database only (i.e. not to each pluggable database) thereby simplifying and speeding up the entire process. However, administrators require the flexibility to perform selective updates andmay not want to concurrently update all pluggable databases in any container. In this situation, administrators simply create a new updated multitenant container database and selectively unplug databases from existing containers and plug them into these new ones with the latest release levels.

Manage Many Databases as One

An obvious benefit of consolidating databases is that administrators have fewer databases to upgrade and patch, but the benefits of managing many databases as one don’t end there. For example, instead of executing separate database backups, administrators only require to back up

their database at the multitenant container database level. In other words, all pluggable databases consolidated into a container will be backed up as one, and administrators retain the flexibility to perform recovery operations at individual pluggable database level if required.

Similarly, administrators maintaining standby systems in another data center (e.g. using Active Data Guard) will need to set up a standby configuration, only at the multi-tenant container database level, to replicate all pluggable databases consolidated in that container.

Resource Management

While there are undoubtedly many benefits from consoli-dating multiple databases, customers should consider all aspects of database consolidation. An obvious question to ask is “how can I guarantee the prioritization of resources in this new multitenant architecture?” After all, many of the benefits of managing many database as one will be quickly lost if database applications are continually vying for available system resources, and user performance service levels start to drop off.

Using Oracle Database 12c’s resource management fea-tures, database administrators can easily define resource utilization priorities at the pluggable database level. The database server pro-actively monitors database usage to ensure that each pluggable database in a container stays within pre-defined minimum and maximum resource thresholds. For example, at quarter-end, a high priority ERP application can automatically pull system resources from low priority applications in the container to ensure users performance service level remain consistent even at peak demand.

Figure 2: OLTP Benchmark ComparisonOnly 3 GB of memory vs. 20 GB memory used for 50 databases. Multitenant architecture scaled to over 250 DBs while separate database instances maxed at 50.

Oracle Database 12c: Oracle Multitenant

46

Information today comes in a wide variety of types. It could be an email message, a photograph or an order in an On-line Transaction Processing System. The amount of data that enterprises are storing and managing is growing rapidly - various industry estimates indicate that data volume is doubling every 2-3 years. The rapid growth of data presents daunting challenges for IT, both in cost and performance.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is intended to address these challenges by storing data in different storage and compression tiers, according to the enterprise’s cur-rent business and performance needs. This approach offers the possibility of optimizing storage for both cost savings and maximum performance. The challenge therefore before all organizations, is to understand how their data evolves, determine how it grows, monitor how its usage patterns change over time, and decide how long it should survive, whilst adhering to all the rules and regulations which apply to that data.

This article discusses, how the Oracle Database helps customers implement ILM strategies for the effective management of information throughout its useful life. It starts with a look at the features which are available as well as the features which are missing in Oracle Data-base 11g (today used by the majority of SAP on Oracle customers). After that it discusses new and improved features in Oracle Database 12c which are relevant for the implementation of ILM strategies. Finally it describes three simple use cases.

Oracle Database 11g: Existing and Missing Features

The Oracle Database comes with many standard and optional features designed to make efficient use of disk space and store data efficiently, i.e. with respect to appli-cation needs. The most prominent examples are compression and partitioning.

Table and Index Compression

The goal of data compression is a reduction of the disk space needed to store a certain amount of data. Ideally com-pression algorithms are not concerned with the sequence of the data to be compressed; practically, however, different sequences may result in different compression ratios.

In other words: Ideally compression is completely in-dependent of partitioning; practically, however, storing related data in partitions may result in higher compression ratios.

An Oracle database which is part of an SAP system com- prises tables, indexes, and optionally index-organized tables (IOTs). Tables in turn can contain structured data (first name, last name, birthday, …) as well as unstruc-tured data (e.g. a PDF file stored in the database). These different types of data require different compression algorithms:

• OLTP Table Compression compresses structured table data, thereby reducing the disk space needed for tables

• SecureFiles Compression compresses unstructured table data, if present, thereby reducing the disk space required for table storage even more.

• Index Compression compresses B*Tree indexes (as opposed to bitmap indexes), thereby reducing the disk space to be allocated for indexes

• The Creation of an Index-Organized Table (IOT) combines a table and an index in one single object. This reorganization alone reduces the disk space consi-derably. In addition, an IOT can also be compressed

For more information on these algorithms and tool support in SAP environments see SAP Notes 1436352, 1464156, 1431296, and 1856270.

Oracle Database 11g takes the concept of data compression to a new level with Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC). Traditionally, data has been organized within a database block in a ‚row‘ format, where all column data for a par-ticular row is stored sequentially within a single database block. Having data from columns with different data types stored closely together limits the amount of storage savings achievable with compression technology. As the name Hybrid Columnar Compression implies, this tech-nology utilizes a combination of both row and columnar methods for storing data. This hybrid approach achieves the compression benefits of columnar storage, while avoiding the performance shortfalls of a pure columnar format.

O R A C L E D AT A B A S E 1 2 : I N F O R M AT I O N L I F E C Y C L E M A N A G E M E N Tc

47

Hybrid Columnar Compression is available on Oracle Engineered Systems (Oracle Exadata, SuperCluster, ZFS Storage Appliance). As of Oracle Database 11g, however, it cannot be used in SAP environments.

Table and Index Partitioning

The goal of table and index partitioning is to store related data as closely together as possible. It divides tables and indexes into smaller units (called partitions) and forces all data to be stored in the appropriate unit. Here „efficient use of disk space“ has nothing to do with the amount of disk space. Partitioning as such does not reduce the disk space needed for tables and indexes. Nevertheless, it can help other mechanisms (such as compression or archiving) to be more efficient.

In most cases, however, partitioning is used, because it can improve the performance of applications dramatically. This means that the efficiency of partitioning strategies is determined by application requirements: If, e. g., the majority of your batch jobs is based on the data created during a particular month of the year, the most efficient strategy is to partition the relevant tables and indexes by month. If, on the other hand, the majority of your reports is based on the data coming from a particular country, it is more efficient to partition tables and indexes by country.

Apart from making mechanisms for disk space reduction more efficient and improving the performance of applica-tions, table and index partitioning is also a base technology for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). The central idea of ILM is that the life of all data can be divided into several phases characterized by different usage patternsand that therefore during different phases data can be stored differently. This obviously requires that data in phase 1 (frequently called „hot“ data) can be separated from data in phase 2 („warm“) or phase 3 („cold“). Parti-tioning by date ranges (e.g. by month), which is available in Oracle Database 11g, makes this separation possible.

However, two essential ILM features are still missing in Oracle Database 11g:

• Tool support for determining relevant tables: There is probably no need to set up an ILM strategy for a ZIP_CODES table, as inserts or updates are extremely rare. On the other hand, an ORDERS table looks like a good candidate, because once an order is fulfilled the data will be needed in a few exceptional cases only

However, as of Oracle Database 11g, administrators need to find the candidates manually

• Tool support for ILM data handling: Once hot data have cooled down, you may want to move them to cheaper storage or to apply stronger compression. Again, as of Oracle Database 11g, administrators need to do this manually

Oracle Database 12c: New and Improved ILM Features

In Oracle Database 12c, two new ILM-related features have been added to the Advanced Compression Option. Heat Map automatically tracks modification and query timestamps at the row and segment levels, providing detailed insights into how data is being accessed. Auto-matic Data Optimization (ADO) automatically moves and compresses data according to user-defined policies based on the information collected by Heat Map.

Heat Map

As mentioned before, the heat metaphor is often used to describe frequency (frequently vs. rarely) and type (read-write vs. read-only) of data accesses: current data are „hot“, historical data are „cold“. That is why the first new ILM feature available in Oracle Database 12c is called Heat Map.

Heat Map automatically tracks usage information at the row and segment levels. Data modification times are tracked at the row level and aggregated to the block level, and modification times, full table scan times, and index lookup times are tracked at the segment level. Heat Map gives you a detailed view of how your data is being accessed, and how access patterns are changing over time. Programmatic access to Heat Map data is avai-lable through a set of PL/SQL table functions, as well as through data dictionary views.

Figure 1: ILM support in Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Database 12c

Oracle Database 12c: Information Lifecycle Management

48

Automatic Data Optimization (ADO)

Automatic Data Optimization allows you to create policies for data compression (Smart Compression) and data movement, to implement storage and compression tiering. Smart Compression refers to the ability to utilize Heat Map information to associate compression policies, and compression levels, with actual data usage. Oracle Database evaluates ADO policies during the maintenance window, and uses the information collected by Heat Map to determine which operations to execute. All ADO operations are executed automatically and in the back-ground, with no user intervention required.

Conditions on ADO policies allow organizations to spe-cify which criteria will initiate an ADO operation – such as no data access, or no data modification – and when the policy takes effect – for example, after n days or months or years of no modification, or n days or months after row or partition creation, or when the tablespace containing the object meets your pre-defined tablespace fullness threshold.

Example:

ALTER TABLE ORDERS ILM ADD POLICYROW STORE COMPRESS ADVANCED SEGMENTAFTER 30 DAYS OF NO MODIFICATION;

In this example, a segment-level ADO policy is created to automatically compress partitions using Advanced Row Compression (OLTP Compression) after there have been no modifications for 30 days.

Hybrid Columnar Compression

Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Engineered Systems comes with a new and improved version of Hybrid Columnar Compression. It is planned to certify this technology for SAP environments as an additional element of ILM policies.

Use Cases

In both OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) and DW (Data Warehousing) deployments, cost-effective Infor-mation Lifecycle Management solutions can be enabled using a combination of Data Partitioning, Advanced Compression and/or Hybrid Columnar Compression.

Storage Tiering

Using Data Partitioning, you can configure multiple types of disk drives in your storage array(s), creating a high

performance tier with the faster more expensive disks, and a high capacity tier with the slower less expensive disks. By partitioning tables based on the lifecycle of the information managed and then compressing data, IT departments can reduce their dependency on high end storage, reduce their incremental storage costs, keep more data online for longer periods of time and improve the performance of applications that access large databases. Storage tiering allows organizations to move tables or partitions from one tablespace to another or to free up space on a more expensive storage tier for more important data.

Compression Tiering

In addition to storage tiering, it is also possible to use different types of compression to suit different access patterns. For example, colder data may be compressed more at the cost of slower access. Oracle Database provides several types of compression to help move data through its lifecycle – from hot to active to less active to historical – while meeting performance and availability requirements for the application. We call this compression tiering.

In the following example, a segment-level ADO policy is created to automatically compress partitions using Hybrid Columnar Compression after there have been no modifications for 180 days. This makes sense when HCC is available, and when the data will no longer be up-dated, but will continue to be queried; moving to HCC will save a lot of storage and give a big boost to query performance.

ALTER TABLE ORDERS ILM ADD POLICYCOLUMN STORE COMPRESS FOR QUERY HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 180 DAYS OF NO MODIFICATION;

Deferred Compression

In some cases immediate compression of new data results in performance degradation. In data warehouse systems, e.g., immediate compression of the data loaded into the database slows down the load operation considerably. In most cases, therefore, the relevant tables are not com-pressed at all. However, using the mechanisms provided by Oracle Database 12c, it is possible to load the data without compression, but to create an ADO policy which tells Oracle that the database should automatically com-press the new data after 1 or 2 days. This solution allows customers to combine load speed and disk space savings.

Oracle Database 12c: Information Lifecycle Management

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O R A C L E D A T A B A S E 1 2 C I N - M E M O R Y O P T I O N

What is really new about in-memory databases?

All this does not mean that there is nothing new at all. It just means that the answer is neither to be found in the term „in-memory database“ nor in the majority of the marketing claims. Not one single of the technologies used in in-memory databases is new. What is new, however, is the idea to combine several technologies which so far were only available in separate products.

In the past, there were “disk-based“ OLTP databases and „in-memory“ Decision Support (DSS) databases. Customers who wanted to have both had to buy two separate pro-ducts, to build two separate systems and most probably also to figure out how to feed data generated by users of the OLTP system into the DSS system.

What is really new about in-memory databases is the idea to get rid of this separation and to combine both technologies in one single product. Or at least: this is the vendor‘s perspective. From the customer’s perspective, “one single product“ means: one single system (instead of two), less integration and administration effort, possibly new types of applications and real-time decision support.

Gravity

We are able to build rockets flying to the moon. However, this does not mean that we got rid of gravity. We need to overcome it. Similarly, there are two fundamental laws in the world of database architectures, which everybody who wants to fly to a pure in-memory architecture will experience as a kind of gravity:

• OLTP transactions, which operate on few rows, but many columns, work best on the row format, whereas analytics (DSS), accessing few columns of many rows, works best on the column format

• Data in memory are volatile. In order to guarantee not only performance, but persistence as well, a non-volatile (disk-based) storage must be available as a secondary storage tier

There is this famous character, called Mr. Jourdain, in The Bourgeois Gentleman, a piece written by Molière almost 350 years ago. When he learns that the word “prose” means all speech that is not verse, he suddenly realizes that he has spoken prose for more than 40 years.

In a way, in-memory is prose, too. Many people today claim that the in-memory database is a revolutionary architecture. It turns out, however, that it is surprisingly difficult to tell what exactly makes this architecture revolutionary:

• The name suggests considering the fact that data to be read or manipulated are kept in memory. However, this is true for all databases. Data may be stored on disk to guarantee persistence, but whenever a user wants to read or update existing data they are loaded into a database cache and kept there as long as possible. In well-tuned Oracle systems, 95% or more of all data requests find that the data they need are already available in memory. Which means: That is „almost in-memory“, and a difference of 5% is certainly not a valid reason to speak of a revolution

• “Traditional“ databases store data as rows, whereas in-memory databases use a columnar format. But again, that is nothing new. For many years columnar databases have been available from several vendors

• Finally, certain vendors provide the option to create stored procedures, which allow developers to push down application functionality to the database in order to reduce the data traffic between client (or application server) and database server. This is certainly a good idea, but it is nothing new, nor is it an in-memory-specific feature. The Oracle Database introduced stored pro-cedures more than 20 years ago, and state-of-the-art applications have always made use of them

Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option

The Top Tier of a Multi-tiered Database Architecture

c

50

Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Architecture

Oracle is and wants customers to be aware of the two fundamental laws just described. Nevertheless, Oracle wants to help customers fly as well. Therefore the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option is based on a dual-format data store:

• Data are persistently stored on disk, and they are stored in row format only

• Whenever data are requested for read/write operations (data manipulations), they are loaded into the traditional Row Store (Buffer Cache)

• Whenever data are requested for read-only operations, they are populated into a new In-Memory Column Store. This population, of course, includes a transformation from row to columnar format

• Whenever a transaction that includes inserts, updates, or deletes is committed, the new data will immediately and simultaneously appear in both the row store and the in-memory column store. Therefore both stores are transactionally consistent

Note that this approach does not necessarily require more memory. There is no need to populate the same data in both stores. If they are required for OLTP only, they will not be populated into the column store, and if they are used for DSS only, they will not be kept in the row store. In addition (as we will see shortly) it is possible to restrict the data populated into the in-memory column store to subsets of the table data.

This approach has many important benefits for customers:

• There is no need to modify applications. All existing applications run unchanged in the new architecture

• There is no need to modify the database. The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option can be implemented without a database migration or a table reorganization

• There are no limits for database or table sizes. The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option can be used with databases and systems of any size

• Therefore there is no need to change the infrastructure. The new in-memory feature can be implemented on the existing hardware

The first law actually explains, why the project to combine the disk- and row-based database technology with the memory- and column-based technology in one single product is worth the effort. If one technology were able to handle all kinds of transactions optimally, the combi-nation would not make any sense. Here “gravity“ means: If the goal is the consolidation of OLTP and DSS in one single product/system, then a columnar-only architecture is not possible.

The second law explains, why even the latest in-memory database systems must run on traditional computers and make use of disk storage. This is the second meaning of “gravity”.

The marketing teams of the different vendors put this in different ways. Some talk primarily about in-memory columnar computing, while silently adding support for row format and disk storage. Others describe in-memory computing as an extension of traditional, disk-based computing. In all cases, however, they really say: We want to fly, but we cannot neglect gravity.

Figure 1: Oracle 12c– dual format in-memory database

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And that’s it!

… and fine-grained control

An easy start based on intelligent defaults for typical situations – this is what Oracle customers expect. In addition, however, Oracle customers expect mechanisms, which allow for fine-grained control and tuning in special cases. The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option provides such mechanisms. Let us look at three examples.

(1) Even if you use the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option, all data is stored in row format on disk. The ALTER TABLE statement does not change this, nor does it populate the table data into the in-memory column store. It only tells the database that you want the table data to be available in the in-memory column store at a certain point in time.

But at which point in time? Two basic options are available as an answer to this question: (a) on demand or (b) during database system startup. Option (a) is the default: Table data are populated into the in-memory column store, when they are first referenced by a query (see figure 2, tables T2 and T3). Whenever this behavior is not appropriate, the database administrator can specify that this job should be executed during database server startup (see figure 2, table T1). By using and combining these options, the population work can be distributed in time.

• Oracle‘s In-Memory Option is fully compatible with other optional Oracle Database features such as table compression, table encryption, and table partitioning. It is also compatible with the scale-out architecture provided by Real Application Clusters (RAC) and with all existing high availability technologies (such as Data Guard). These features work exactly the same way with and without the In-Memory Option

• Customers can decide how they want to implement the new architecture. If customers want a revolution: if they want to buy completely new hardware and store as many tables as possible in the in-memory column store – that can be done. If, on the other hand, customers prefer an evolution: if they want to keep the existing hardware, to keep just a few tables in the in-memory column store and see how it works – that can be done as well

An easy start …

There is yet another benefit: Oracle has made it very easy to get started with the In-Memory Option. Here is what needs to be done:

• Assign a value to the new initialization parameterinmemory_size in order to define the size of the in-me-mory column store

• Select the table(s) that you want to be available in the in-memory column store:ALTER TABLE T1 INMEMORY;

Figure 2: Population of the In-Memory Column Store


52

the population process. And again it is possible to make this happen, because the Oracle In-Memory Option allows administrators to specify different in-memory characteristics for different table columns.

The first lesson learned

However brief our discussion of subset building may have been – it should already be clear that the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option is based on a certain concept, which is not necessarily the concept of all other in-memory database products. If „in-memory database” is supposed to mean that all data must be stored in memory and if the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option is seen as HANA for the poor, then all attempts to implement

this new functionality will fail. Key to success is the insight into the fundamental difference between HANA and Oracle Database 12c.

There are two statements on which SAP and Oracle agree. The first one has already been discussed. It defines the goal of the current research and develop-ment efforts: It makes sense to combine row-based and co-lumn-based technologies in one single product, as this allows

customers to combine OLTP and DSS in one single system and to develop completely new applications. The second statement is about hardware and the progress made during the last 10 years by hardware vendors: The hardware which is available today allows us to build combined OLTP/DSS systems. Such a combination was a pure dream 20 years ago, but today the hardware is powerful enough to support such an architecture.

But from this common ground emerged two very diffe-rent approaches. SAP translates the statement about the progress made by hardware vendors as: Memory has be-come so cheap that whole databases can fit into memory. Oracle believes that this is an oversimplification and an unforced restriction of the options which are available today. Oracle‘s position can be summarized as: There is so much progress in so many different areas that it does not make sense to confine ourselves to one single technology.

(2) Tables can contain historical (in ILM terminology:“cold”) data, which are neither updated anymore nor accessed by queries. If those tables are very large, it would be a waste of memory to keep them completely in the in-memory column store. Therefore administrators may want to restrict the population process to the data really needed by DSS queries.

Table partitioning allows them to make this happen, because the INMEMORY attribute can not only be specified on the table level, but on the partition or subpartition level as well (see figure 3, left-hand side). If the table is partitioned in a useful way (e.g. by month), this internal structure can be used to define a horizontal subset of the table data to be kept in the in-memory column store.

(3) A CUSTOMERS table may contain the usual data (name, zip code, city, etc.), nicely divided into columns, and, in addition, a column which can be used by sales people to store customer-specific comments as text strings (see figure 3, right-hand side, column C5). The data in this column is unstructured, consists of unique values of very different lengths, and is most probably not relevant for DSS queries.

Again the database administrator may wish to restrict the data to be kept in the in-memory column store, but in this case the goal would be to define a vertical subset ofthe table data, i.e. to exclude one or more columns from

Figure 3: Defining horizontal and vertical subsets

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In other words: The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option is one of the building blocks of a multi-tiered database architecture (see figure 4). New ILM features (see article “Oracle Database 12c: Information Lifecycle Management”, page 46 of this volume) help customers separate “hot”, “warm”, and “cold” data and store them on different types of disks. Flash support allows Oracle Database 12c to store “very hot” data in an intermediate layer between disk and memory. And memory is divided into a row store for OLTP processing and a column store for analytical queries.

Unlike other vendors, Oracle does not require all of the data to reside in memory in order to be able to take advantage of the new in-memory capabilities. A query can execute on data that resides in-memory, on flash and on disk completely transparently, and this is exactly what enables the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory option to be used with databases and systems of any size.

Within such a framework the idea to keep all or at least as many data as possible in the in-memory column store makes no sense at all. The in-memory column store is the appropriate place for all data that are frequently accessed by analytical queries, and therefore the goal is to define this subset as precisely as possible. Or, as the author of an Oracle white paper about the Exadata Smart Flash Cache puts it: “Knowing what not to cache is of great import-ance to realize the performance potential of the cache.”

The fundamental difference between HANA and Oracle Database 12c, then, is the database concept. Traditional-ly, a database was a set of data stored on disk. For SAP, a database is a set of data that should rather reside in memory. In other words: SAP proposes a different storage medium, but still relies on the traditional concept of a database as one single „thing”, which must be stored here or there as a whole. For Oracle too, a database is a set of data, but this set can be divided into subsets, which are defined by certain characteristics such as age of the data or usage patterns. And Oracle believes that for those dif-ferent subsets different technologies are most appropriate.

Figure 4: Oracle‘s multi-tiered database architecture


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Runs Oracle10x Faster*

The World’s FastestDatabase Machine

• Hardware by Sun

• Software by Oracle

But you have to be willing tospend 50% less on hardware.

10x faster based on comparing Oracle data warehouseson customer systems vs. Oracle Exadata Database Machines.

Potential savings based on total hardware costs. Oracle Databaseand options licenses not included. Actual results and savings may vary.

Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

*

55

Oracle Exadata Database Machine provides a solution to significantly speed up an existing SAP application landscape while leaving the running of the existing SAP systems unchanged.

Dongfeng Motor (http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/custstory-exa4sap-dongfeng-updated-1877515.pdf) used Oracle Exadata to improve their SAP system perfor-mance 15x with a private cloud database for rapid busi-ness development. Accenture deployed the databases for the spare parts logistics management system on Oracle Exadata and took part in the performance tests.

Accenture has deep experience in Oracle Exadata Data-base Machine implementation projects and has a broad Oracle Exadata asset portfolio. Over the past year, our Accenture Engineered Systems team has built the follo-wing assets that are accelerating delivery and removing effort as part of our projects with Oracle Exadata.

A C C E N T U R E D E L I V E R S O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E I M P L E M E N T A T I O N S E R V I C E S F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

Accenture’s Oracle Exadata Migration Toolkit:

• Migrates databases to Oracle Exadata Database Machine

• Combines Accenture proprietary methodologies and

third-party tools

• Utilizes 50% less effort Accenture Applications on Oracle Exadata Accelerators:

• “Golden” images of Oracle ERP pre-configured,

integrated and tested for enterprise scale projects

• SAP on Oracle Exadata toolkit

The key benefits of deploying SAP on Oracle Exadata are:

• Better Performance

• Better Availability

• Better Consolidation

• Better Security

• Highly Engineered and Standardized

• Harmonized environment

• Lower cost On April 16th 2013, Accenture launched the Accenture Engineered Systems Center of Excellence. This center provides clients with a “try before they buy” opportunity to prove their workloads through a series of tests run by our Engineered Systems experts. The center is powered by Oracle’s Exalogic, Oracle Exadata & Exalytics along with our Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle (AFPO) offering, our Oracle accelerator, as a PaaS – which is available to our clients globally. For more information please contact:

Julian Dontcheff Head of Database ManagementAccentureMobile: +358-408018836Email: [email protected]

Oracle Exadata Database Machine Implementation Services for SAP Customers

Runs Oracle10x Faster*

The World’s FastestDatabase Machine

• Hardware by Sun

• Software by Oracle

But you have to be willing tospend 50% less on hardware.

10x faster based on comparing Oracle data warehouseson customer systems vs. Oracle Exadata Database Machines.

Potential savings based on total hardware costs. Oracle Databaseand options licenses not included. Actual results and savings may vary.

Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

*

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Solutions

• Deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine as the foundation for the company’s SAP applications and saw a significant improvement in SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) response time from day one – from just over a second to 800 milliseconds – while managing 30% more

• Eliminated unplanned down time for its business- critical SAP ECC environment

• Gained ability to run the company’s 100,000 daily batch jobs 25% to 75% faster, depending on the job, to ensure service level agreement (SLA) compliance and improve customer service

• Ensured that the SAP data infrastructure can scale for an increase of more than 2x the throughput to support a new business opportunity with a national retail pharmacy

• Ensured system availability, improving business continuity and avoiding lost revenue potentially associated with enterprise-resource-planning system down time

• Used Oracle Advanced Compression to reduce the storage footprint for the company’s SAP ECC application and SAP business warehouse environment by up to 60% with no negative impact on performance while significantly lowering storage-management costs to achieve a return on investment in six to nine months

A M E R I S O U R C E B E R G E N O P E N S N E W B U S I N E S S O P P O R T U N I T I E S B Y D O U B L I N G T H R O U G H P U T O F O N E O F W O R L D ’ S L A R G E S T S A P E N V I R O N M E N T S

AmerisourceBergen Corporation is one of the largest global pharmaceutical sourcing and distribution-service com-panies, helping healthcare providers and pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers improve patient access to products and enhance patient care. With services ranging from drug distribution and niche premium logistics, to reimbursement and pharmaceutical consulting services, AmerisourceBergen delivers innovative programs and solutions across the pharmaceutical-supply channel. It is ranked 28 on the Fortune 500 list.

Challenges

• Improve stability of the company’s SAP data infrastructure – one of the largest in the world, which processes over 1 million line items daily and adds 1 TB of data each month • Gain scalability needed to support a new contract with a national drug store chain that will more than double throughput requirements for the company’s SAP environment and reduce peak processing from eight to four hours, daily

• Implement the new environment rapidly to support new business opportunities

• Reduce footprint across two data centers, 60 miles apart, and cut associated costs

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine is helping to transform our business. Our SAP environment, one of the world’s largest, can now support twice as much throughput with improved stability, which opens new business opportunities. We’ve also simplified our environment and cut the total cost of ownership. We can put more databases in a smaller footprint and enjoy a streamlined support model, thanks to a single and optimized Oracle technology stack.”

– M I L T S I M O N D S , ‎

Director, Enterprise Platform Delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

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• Simplified the company’s data infrastructure with Oracle Engineered Systems built on an optimized Oracle technology stack

• Streamlined IT management, ensured high performance, and accelerated issue identification and resolution for the operating system and storage layers with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services and its Advanced Monitoring and Resolution services

• Accelerated database back-up time with existing backup infrastructure, completing full Oracle Recovery Manager backups of 27 TB in 7 hours instead of 24 hours

• Gained the capability to continue consolidating more than 95 database hosts and 230 TB of storage in 2014 and beyond

Why Oracle

AmerisourceBergen chose Oracle Exadata as an SAP con-solidation platform. The company viewed Oracle Exadata as the most comprehensive technology solution – from end-to-end data lineage, to simplified architecture – with the ability to scale up to meet future needs. It also considered Oracle as the best provider of a comprehensive support model with combined SAP Center of Excellence and Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services offerings.

Implementation Process

AmerisourceBergen had a short implementation window. It tested Oracle Exadata in a staging environment for two months and took the system into production three months later for its SAP ECC environment. Amerisource-Bergen completed the cut over in four hours.

The second phase will involve migrating the rest of the company’s Oracle databases – supporting its enterprise portal and customer-relationship-management and process-integration applications. This phase will go live in 2014. Eventually, all systems that run on an Oracle Database will be running on Oracle Exadata – in pre-production and production environments.

“Oracle Advanced Customer Support services has pro-vided critical value and support throughout our Oracle Exadata initiative. It is a big positive to have support from all levels at Oracle. When you take on a big project, you will run into bumps along the way, and having Oracle’s undivided attention has been very important,” said Milt Simonds, director, enterprise platform delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

www.amerisourcebergen.com

Location: Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, United States

Industry: Life Sciences/ Pharmaceutical

Employees: 13,000

Annual Revenue: Over $5 Billion

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine • Oracle Advanced Compression • Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services • Oracle Active Data Guard

“Oracle Advanced Customer Support services has pro-vided critical value and support throughout our Oracle Exadata initiative. It is a big positive to have support from all levels at Oracle. When you take on a big project, you will run into bumps along the way, and having Oracle’s undivided attention has been very important,” said Milt Simonds, director, enterprise platform delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at AmerisourceBergen

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W H Y M O R E S A P C U S T O M E R S W O R L D W I D E D E P L O Y O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E

Performance Boosts and other important benefits right

out-of-the-box, no changes required

Oracle Exadata Database Machines deliver extreme performance boosts for all customer workloads like SAP Business Suite (i.e. SAP ECC 6.0, SAP CRM 7.x) and SAP BW 7.x. Oracle Exadata customers can also run Oracle databases with multiple workloads, SAP and non-SAP, on a single Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Fact is: Simp-le and fast to implement the Exadata Database Machine is ready to tackle the largest and most important database applications and often run them 10 times faster or more. The key is system engineering, using industry standard hardware from Sun and the intelligent database and storage software from Oracle.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine is certified by SAP since July 2011 and SAP customers can use Oracle Exadata Database Machine for their SAP applications. Exadata is as an easy-to deploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database and runs SAP unchanged providing better performance out-of-the-box, consolidates SAP NetWeaver applications, and reduces the number of vendors to just two; SAP and Oracle. Oracle Exadata also allows better support, fast online migration, DBaaS deployment platform, advantages of the Enterprise Database Cloud Solution with a rapid deployment of its infrastructure, and lower costs through consolidation.

Over time many more SAP customers worldwide have purchased and deployed Exadata Database Machines. The following shows some customers around the world that have implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine across different industries and highlights some challenges and solutions they faced in various environments.

Expansion requires a “Datacenter of the Future”

The challenges for a chemical and fertilizer company in India with approximately half billion USD in revenue listed the following: Implementing a new future oriented and scalable solution that helps to force planned expansion into the APAC region. Hardware reaching end of life and was not supporting growth. In addition, the need for increased storage requirements was also an issue.

So, the company realized a detailed comparison of tradi-tional systems versus engineered systems was required. A PoC which focuses on SAP ECC and BW running on Exadata Database Machine cleared up any last doubts and the benefits for the company are enormous. A company spokesman said, “Oracle Exadata Database Machine is central for us building up a datacenter of the future. As a high performance platform to support our user growth we are able to fulfill our plans ideally”. Other benefits in-clude an efficient database consolidation, storage savings and significant performance gains.

Next example, a core consumer finance company in Japan gets advantages by deploying Exadata Database Machine. In this case the management expects cost reduction in IT through consolidation of databases and a migration from Unix to Linux for SAP ECC. A smooth migration process to Oracle Exadata (with R/3 Load) is in the plan and also the replacement of the Itanium HP UX system. It is clear that with the new platform the finance company is able to continue the growth and consolidation of SAP, increasing the performance of processes and enabling more complex data queries.

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Another customer example in Japan involves the import and export sales of Japanese chemicals, plastics, electro-nic materials, cosmetics and health foods. Oracle Exadata Database Machine was first used successfully for the company’s non-SAP environment and now is also used for the SAP environments. “Due to very good results in non-SAP decision was made to go for SAP ECC with Exadata Database Machine with X3 Half Rack”, a spokesman said. The main goal was to consolidate all databases and to benefit from the return of investment through cost reduction and replacement of the Windows platform. In summary the ECC system was facing various demands to increase performance, minimize downtime and ensure business growth.

Customer requires Real-Time Business

Meanwhile, in North America, an US media and enter-tainment company has different challenges which Oracle Exadata Database Machine perfectly solved. First the customer requires a kind of real-time business. Second there are I/O problems or issues with the current infra-structure and especially demanding SLAs. The customer was looking for a suitable IT architecture with a future growth path, inclusive private cloud offering DBaaS with charge-back and rapid provisioning. “Before making our final decision we checked SAP HANA as an alternative. We clearly saw that Oracle Exadata Database Machine fulfills all important demands, which we built up”, a spokesman from the company said.

Another US customer from the health care sector decided against the same solution. In this example a technology refresh for SAP BW was needed. The IT staff wanted to make sure they had a very dense database consolidation platform that would scale for a global roll-out. The company was happy that Exadata, which was so fast, provides the ability to have an optimal platform for consolidation including standardization.

Next example in the US, a global consumer packaged goods company selected Exadata for their SAP BW. There were significant performance problems running BW on x86 and Microsoft Windows. The IT team from the Fortune 500 Company evaluated Oracle AWR reports and recommended Exadata for SAP BW. The statement from the company spokesperson: “Now we are able to continue the growth and can consolidate SAP workloads, increase the performance of business processes and reduce the overall platform cost.”

In other parts of the Americas, SAP customers deploy the Oracle Exadata Database Machine to solve other challenges and requirements. For example, a company from the energy sector in Brazil is using Exadata to deliver better performance and provide a smoother integration of their SAP environment. Query time improved by a factor of 25 as compared to the previous hardware and the load time decreased by a factor of 10.

Faster Time-to-Market

EMEA Region, a large insurance and financial services company wants faster time-to-market with new products. From an IT perspective they needed to reduce the complexity of dozens of databases running on multiple operating systems (IBM AIX, Linux, MS Windows and Solaris). With Exadata Database Machine the customer is now able to realize database consolidation of their SAP and non-SAP systems, with less effort and a decreased number of licenses. Oracle Exadata helps the company to achieve greater success by requiring less time-to-market and reducing IT complexity.

Another example from EMEA, a B2B retailer with 10,000 employees has the task to reduce IT costs and solve business problems. The company minimized costs by consolidating 46 databases into two Exadata Machines. User I/O is no longer a major wait event and batch jobs now run in one-third the time, with no changes required. At least the retailer gets, as a spokesperson said, “much better performance of the out-of-the-box”.

The last example from our many SAP customers, which buy and deploy Exadata Database Machine, is a large French company from the electricity sector. The main point being that the company had performance issues while running ECC batch jobs. Trying to solve this problem Oracle Exadata and two other alternatives were evaluated. A PoC to validate Exadata convinced the customer. The SAP customer is clearly benefiting from the new Oracle IT infrastructure, “Thanks to Exadata for SAP the IT landscape is now highly consolidated and optimized and also compatible with our future demands”, a spokesman stated.

Why more SAP Customers worldwide deploy Oracle Exadata Database Machine

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“Oracle Exadata provide us a bundle of benefits running together with SAP ERP. We see clearly that the Database Machine was the best choice for us to optimize or improve our IT infrastructure on long term for ECC, but also for Non-SAP applications.”

– DEPUTY CIO FROM LG FASHION

S A P E C C R U N S W I T H O R A C L E E X A D A T A X 3 - 2 D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E A T L G F A S H I O N

LG Fashion is a part of the LG Group and it is a Korean- based company engaged in the manufacture and distribu-tion of men’s and women’s apparels with reported sales of 1.8 billion US-Dollars (LG Fashion Group, 1.47 trillion Korean Won, end of December 2012). The company provides its products through several categories: man’s apparels, woman’s apparels, accessories, sportswear and outdoor wear – with prominent brand names such as Hazzys, Maestro, Mogg, Towngent, TNGT, TNGTW, and so on. LG Fashion successfully distributes its products through department stores, Internet shopping malls and other channels.

To sustain its leading retail-industry position, LG Fashion needed to respond quickly to changing industry requirements including increased online business, generating a mobile app service and growth of customer requirements for customized services. In whole IT usage the SAP ERP system or the ECC applications are critical and a productive system in good shape is needed. Crucial all the time is a powerful and efficient working IT infrastructure for today and tomorrow. The highly successful migration to Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database Machine SAP ERP ECC runs better for all intents and purposes at LG Fashion.

Single Server DB: Upgrading limited

The company was using for years on ECC Database Layer a single server system. Last year DB Server resource problems were growing to a point which was no longer acceptable DB volume was rising faster than expected. “We’ve had performance issues on the DB server side. Periodically we upgraded the CPU, memory and disks, but on our single server system there were no more extensions possible”, a member of LG Fashion IT states. So, the company was looking for an adequate solution to solve the problem on the long term.

LG Fashion IT team defined a list of criteria for the voting process. At least Oracle Exadata Database Machine was a step ahead against other possible solutions for many good reasons. First: The extreme performance of the engineered system from Oracle. DML performance and performance of frequent transactions also reduced response time for long running transactions or batch jobs. The IT team identified that with Oracle Exadata Database Machine 96 percent of all transactions response within 1 second.

Second: With Oracle Exadata Database Machine LG Fashion was able to reduce storage space significantly. Third: DB license cost for new system could be minimized. Fourth: For extension there will be no downtime. Fifth: Oracle Exadata reduced hardware problems and impro-ved customer satisfaction sustainably. And finally sixth: the company can run applications with mixed workloads on one system.

Prominent Korean Apparel Company migrated to new Infrastructure Architecture / Speed up Transaction Processes and Performance / Significant IT Cost Savings and higher User Satisfaction

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www.lgfashion.co.kr

Oracle Customer:

LG Fashion (Group)

Revenue:

1.8 Billion US-Dollars

Location:

Seoul, Korea

Industry:

Retail Fashion

Oracle Product and Services:

• Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 Half Rack

• Oracle Database 11g R2 (RAC, ASM, Partitioning)

Migration to Oracle Exadata – Benefits:

Oracle Exadata Go Live at LG Fashion together with ECC was on 10th of August 2013. All have been running from the start without any service down and it was suc-cessfully completed within only 6 hours of down-time. The migration was done with Oracle SAP CC developed Triple-O migration method (tool). Support comes from Oracle (SAP CC) and partners (LG Nsys, Daesang IT Technology).

LG Fashion purchased for the project an Oracle Exadata X3-2 Half Rack, Oracle Database 11g R2 (four X3-2 Database Server, seven X3-2 Storage). The company is using on Oracle Exadata Database Machine Oracle RAC (ASM) and Oracle Advanced Compression, also parti-tioning. At the start CPU utilization was 20 percent. The DB server is isolated from the CI server. Production system is in one RAC-Cluster, in another one QA and DEV systems.

“Oracle Exadata provides us a bundle of benefits running together with SAP ERP. We see clearly that the Database Machine was the best choice for us to optimize or improve our IT infrastructure in the long term for ECC, but also for Non-SAP applications”, a spokesman from LG Fashion IT says. As planed Oracle Exadata provides great improvements for LG Fashion: From better performance, faster transactions and processes up to IT cost savings and minimized hardware problems in general.

Great Improvements for Business, User and IT

In Details (Examples, measured): 300 up to 800 times improvement on DML processing, maximally 20 times Batch processing improvement (5 times in average), frequent transaction improved up to 270 times, 96 of transaction response within 1 second, storage space reduced to 54 percent (10 TB to 4,4 TB), reduced TCO for next five years by 20 percent, improvement of the Shopping Mall DB server (Non-SAP) up to 270 times, more time for data loading to BW system and more time for SCM Data Loading (previous finished at 9:00 AM., now at 4:00 AM), more usable time of BW system (9:00 AM, now 7:00 AM) or minimized hardware problems or downtimes by using RAC (no downtime for extensions).

If it is necessary LG Fashion is able to upgrade Oracle Exa-data at any time – today and tomorrow.

Advertising Brand Mogg from www.lgfashion.co.kr

Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 at LG Fashion

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“All looks fine and our high expectations were fulfilled. With Oracle Exadata our SAP IT infrastructure is now a step ahead. Exadata Database Machine is able to consolidate all of the SAP databases and non-SAP Databases into private cloud environment; and the extreme performance for all types of database workloads gives Mengniu the ability to run applications faster than ever with lower TCO.”

– IT member, China Mengniu Dairy Company CIO

O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E F O R S A P A T C H I N A M E N G N I U D A I R Y C O M P A N Y : M A N Y B E N E F I T S F R O M E N G I N E E R E D A N D I N T E G R A T E D S Y S T E M S

China Mengniu Dairy Company Limited and its subsidia-ries manufacture and distribute quality dairy products in China. It is one of the leading dairy product manufacturers in China, with MENGNIU as its core brand. The Group’s diversified products range includes liquid milk products, such as UHT milk, milk beverages and yogurt, ice cream and other dairy products such as milk powder. Mengniu’s liquid milk products ranked first, in terms of sales volume and sales value, among similar products in China in 2012, according to China Industrial Information Issuing Centre. The fast growing company, founded in Hohhot (Inner Mongolia) reported 2.04 Billion US-Dollars in revenue 2012.In early days of using SAP ERP, CRM, NetWeaver BW, APO and other SAP Systems at Mengniu all looks fine so far with the underlay IT infrastructure. The sizing of the components was right to fulfill several defined Service Level Agreements. And the chosen hardware systems were state of art at this time.

Challenges for traditional SAP IT Infrastructure

The company’s IT challenges rose over time. The main reasons for this are: Business and the company were growing more than expected. Also the usage of enterprise applica-tions speeds up, with rising data volume as a consequence. Last, but not least the need for an adequate extension or re-positioning of the existed SAP IT Infrastructure was inevitable. Under the line Mengniu have to be focusing on an optimization of the hardware and storage systems with a long term perspective in different terms. The prominent company solved a bundle of challenges at once with Oracle Exadata for SAP and reached many benefits from engineered systems from Oracle. “This was the best choice for us”, a spokesman from Mengniu states.

Mengniu IT was faced with big challenges. Batch per-formance and also interactive performance were not fast enough to fulfill the company’s needs. Batch workload was growing – but jobs that used to complete in hours were precariously close to exceeding the overnight window. And the interactive performance frustrated the users. A member from the Mengniu IT team underlines: “Nothing ever seems fast enough for them.” At this point the five year old hardware systems seemed slow and obsolete. The database volume was growing at a rate of 100 GB per month. At this rate the data choked the current systems within 18 months. And on top of that: “Every time we want to build a new application, we had to acquire and manage a new piece of hardware and software. So we asked ourselves, why do we need a new piece of hardware and software for everything?” says an IT member.

Bundle of Challenges mastered at once / Pros from faster Workloads and reduced End user Response Times, minimized Risk Mitigations and at least cost savings / First SAP CRM, then SAP ERP on new Oracle IT Infrastructure

63

So, the Mengniu IT-team decided for a re-engineering of the existing SAP IT Infrastructure. Different alterna-tives were in focus. Oracle Exadata for SAP provides one integrated system with all the required hardware (servers, network, storage) and software (OS, Oracle database and Options). Oracle Exadata won the race – providing a single architecture for Business Suite, BW and other SAP solutions. Additionally, it’s a consolidation platform for the solutions from the German software provider and also non-SAP systems in a private database cloud.

Step by Step Switch: SAP CRM, then SAP ERP

The result for China Mengniu Dairy Company is clear: “Oracle Exadata as an intelligent engineered system that masters the IT challenges faced by organizations and pro-vides numerous benefits. The Oracle Database machine avoids and removes database and storage silos and makes all workloads faster – not only SAP. In addition Oracle Exadata Database Machine includes future compatibility in many ways.”

Mengniu IT together with the selected Consultant Company (IBM) set up a step by step migration from the traditional SAP IT infrastructure to the new one with Oracle Exadata. First a switch to one Quarter Rack Exadata (1, X2-2) forthe CRM production databases environment with planned live schedule on September 5th. Second a switch to another Exadata (2, X3-2) Quarter Rack (in the same datacenter) with ERP/ECC 6.0 production databases. Oracle Data Guard is used as desaster recovery solution for ECC and CRM as well.

Beside the two Oracle Exadata Machines Mengniu runs Intel standard servers. One for DEV and QA running virtualized with Oracle VM, and another one for the SAP application server with VMware.

There was a precision landing of Oracle Exadata for SAP CRM, on September 5th when the SAP CRM Go Live on Exadata took place. The Exadata hardware and software installation was completed at the end of June 2013, followed in August by the SAP CI installation, CRM database installation on Exadata (ABAP + Java/dual stack), and the DI installation and testing. Preliminary plans for the SAP ERP migration are in place and the Go Live on Oracle Exadata is planned for early 2014.

Infrastructure now a step ahead

The change from traditional SAP IT Infrastructure to engineered and integrated Oracle Exadata systems gene-rated great benefits and a lot of opportunities for China Mengniu Dairy Company. All challenges were superbly mastered, from faster workloads and reduced end user response times, minimized risk mitigations and greater cost savings – with great flexibility, reliability, scalability and minimized complexity today and in future.

“All looks fine and our high expectations were fulfilled. With Oracle Exadata our SAP IT infrastructure is now a step ahead”, a spokesman from Mingniu explained. He also mention that Oracle Exadata Database Machine is able to consolidate all of the SAP databases and non-SAP Databases into a private cloud environment; and the extreme performance for all types of database workloads gives Mengniu the ability to run applications faster than ever with lower TCO.

www.mengniu.com.cn

Oracle Customer: China Mengniu Dairy Company

Revenue: 2.04 Billion US-Dollars

Location: Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

Industry: Dairy Products

Employees: 30.000

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine (X2-2, X3-2) • Data Guard• Oracle VM

Oracle Exadata for SAP at China Mengniu Dairy Company

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Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark (RICS), known as Raiffeisen Rechenzentrum, is the IT service provider for Raiffeisen Banking Group in Austria. It supplies a complete range of IT services to Raiffeisen banks to support day-to-day operations. The company also serves a growing number of industrial customers and other mid-size and large enterprises. In mid-2013, RICS opened Austria’s most high-tech data center.

Raiffeisen Banking Group was expanding the use of its SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP BW). As loads increased, RICS faced challenges in meeting service level agreement requirements. It looked to optimize online analytical processing and ensure high data availability for the SAP BW and associated applications to enable approximately 40 users to rapidly produce various management and planning reports, including sales by region and product group.

“We saw response times increasing steadily, with some reports timing out. We had to make a move. It would not have made commercial or technical sense to expand our Power7 AIX database server by adding more memory. Our technical architecture had reached its limits,” said Heiko Held, data center infrastructure manager, RICS.

The company began searching for a solution to significantly improve SAP BW performance. After extensive analysis and evaluation, RICS selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The company went live on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 in just eight weeks. Achieving 10x to 20x Database Performance

Improvement

RICS is very satisfied with its Oracle Exadata deployment. SAP BW performance is now 10x to 20x better than the legacy environment, depending on the use case.

“It’s not every day that you receive e-mails from users thanking you for improvements. But, that is exactly what happened after we optimized SAP BW response times and increased productivity thanks to Oracle Exadata. This kind of feedback is very gratifying and shows that Oracle Exadata was the right choice for us,” said Dietmar Schlar, manager, RICS.

Thanks to Oracle Exadata’s combined hardware, software and scalability, RICS can now effectively and efficiently consolidate or simplify its existing database environment (it uses some 40 Oracle Databases for SAP and non-SAP environments). The IT company also laid the foundation to migrate its SAP ECC databases to Oracle Exadata, which will yield additional efficiency and performance improvements.

“This cuts transaction times and speeds up FI/CO usage, as well as reduces the outlay involved in database or SAP operations. We intend to promote our use of Oracle Exadata. One of the biggest projects we currently have at the Raiffeisen Banking Group is a comprehensive bank control system implementation – powered by Oracle Exadata,” Held said.

R A I F F E I S E N I N F O R M A T I K C E N T E R S T E I E R M A R K I N C R E A S E S D A T A B A S E P E R F O R M A N C E 1 0 X T O 2 0 X W I T H O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E F O R S A P N E T W E A V E R B U S I N E S S W A R E H O U S E

65Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at Raiffeisen Informatik Center

Why Oracle

“The bottom line was that our test and analysis showed Oracle Exadata to be a better solution for us than SAP HANA – from a technology, business, and conceptual viewpoint. The final factor that swung the decision in favor of Oracle Exadata was a visit to an Oracle Exadata customer in Germany, whose experience with the product satisfied our expectations and confirmed that it was the right choice,” Schlar said.

During the evaluation stage, RICS thoroughly investiga-ted the performance enhancements that Oracle Exadata could deliver. The company was also impressed with Oracle Exadata’s versatility. The engineered system can support the company’s SAP environment as well as other banking applications. In addition, the solution’s maturity and impressive price-performance ratio – including the time and costs involved in implementation and conversion – also factored heavily into the decision process.


“The implementation process was completely painless. Essentially, after installation and setup, it was a standard database export and import followed by testing, except for the fact that we had to increase the network connec-tions between the AIX application server and Oracle Exadata Database Machine to support 10 gigabits per second, simply because Oracle Exadata processes and supplies data so fast,” Schlar said.

During the implementation, RICS worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services as well as SAP’s support team. Today, the company’s total database volume is around 500 gigabytes.

Oracle Customer: Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark

Location: Graz, Austria

Industry: High Technology

Employees: 140

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine • Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services

A word from Raiffeisen Informatik Center

Steiermark

“Oracle Exadata was a long-term invest-

ment decision for us. Using the Oracle

solution, we increased database perfor-

mance 10-to-20 times depending on the

report, which improved user productivity

and customer satisfaction. With its con-

solidation options, Oracle Exadata also

enabled us to accelerate both SAP and

non-SAP application use, which translates

to additional cost savings.”

– Dietmar Schlar, Manager, Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark

Dietmar Schlar, Manager, Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark

66

Godfrey Phillips India Ltd. (Godfrey Phillips), a flagship company of KK Modi Group, is one of India’s largest premier tobacco manufacturers and a distributor in the cigarette industry. The company’s India operations span the country, with prominence in northern and western part of India and recent forays into West Bengal and countries South of India.

Godfrey Phillips manufactures some of India’s most popular cigarette brands, like FS1, Four Square, Red and White, Cavanders and Tipper. It manufactures and distributes the iconic brand Marlboro under a license agreement with Philip Morris, successfully launched the Symphony and Super Cup Tea City brands, and is active in the highly competitive confectionary segment with Fundamint and Fundagoli. Godfrey Phillips India has also spread its footprint into international markets. Today, its international division collaborates with some of the top players in the global tobacco industry.

Challenges

• Improve decision-making by enabling faster access to reliable, accurate sales, manufacturing, and production data across multiple applications, such as inventory management and reporting

• Increase speed and accuracy of business processes through tools, such as daily stock, inventory, invoicing, tobacco sales and production reports

• Consolidate servers and databases into an integrated hardware and software platform for tobacco, tea, pan masala, and confectionary manufacturing to improve operational efficiency and reduce operational costs

Solutions

• Created reports – such as for auto invoicing, daily sales tax, debtors and creditors ledgers – up to 50% faster, delivering real-time business intelligence to staff and enabling faster business applications running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine

• Cut inventory reporting times by 50%, enabling faster and more accurate production schedules for tobacco, tea, and confectionary products

• Gained the ability to create invoices 84% faster – in just one minute instead of six minutes – by implementing a high-performing database machine to manage mul-tiple applications, such as human resources, inventory management, and reporting

• Deployed a single database machine solution for tobacco, tea, Twenty Four Seven convenience stores, and confectionary manufacturing business units by consolidating databases onto one platform, streamlining vendor management and reducing costs

A word from Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.

“We chose Oracle Exadata Database Machine

for its unique offering of a single point of

contact through its combined hardware and

software solution. It has improved our business

performance, slashed invoicing time by 84%,

and reduced the time for daily reporting by 50%.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine has strategically

positioned us with the business agility we need

to achieve further savings and performance

benefits in the next five years.”

– VENKATA RAO, CIO, Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.

G O D F R E Y P H I L L I P S I N D I A I M P R O V E S B U S I N E S S R E P O R T I N G B Y 5 0 % A N D R E D U C E S I T C O S T S A F T E R C O N S O L I D A T I N G D A T A B A S E S O N T O A E N G I N E E R E D S Y S T E M

67

• Cut system downtime and administrative costs by consolidating sales, management, inventory, and reporting data onto one, high performing, reliable platform, improving staff productivity, and reducing operational and IT management expenditure

• Achieved a single vendor solution with unprecedented integration of three applications databases on one Oracle Exadata machine by using Oracle’s InfiniBand Network technology, supporting more than 2,000 users

Why Oracle

Godfrey Phillips India selected Oracle for its unique combined hardware and software solution, delivered pre-tested and configured for streamlined implementation and rapid adoption.

“We chose Oracle as we wanted a pre-engineered, single vendor solution for hardware and software. Oracle Exadata was the only solution to meet our requirements. Approxi-mately 80% of Godfrey Phillips India’s applications are Oracle products, and strategically it makes sense to partner with a high-performing, quality provider that will con-tinue to deliver business benefits in the long term,” said Venkata Rao, CIO, Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.


Godfrey Phillips India began preparing the business case for server and database consolidation in 2011. After selecting Oracle Exadata, it decided to implement the database machines in two phases.

The company went live with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2 Quarter Rack on August 15, 2012 – in just eight weeks with the help of Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services and Oracle partner M/s Path InfoTech. The first Oracle Exadata machine delivered immedi-ate performance benefits, so the company decided to implement another Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3 Eighth Rack for its SAP and nonproduction Oracle database environments in December 2013.

With three applications operating on the Exadata plat-form, Godfrey Phillips experienced significant perfor-mance benefits as a result of the consolidation.

Oracle Consulting managed the implementation, inclu-ding installation, deployment, and data migration from the extraneous servers.

“The experienced local Oracle team explored different options to meet the needs of the business, established and documented the deployment, and provided a concise and valuable process management system. We were very happy with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, and we are proud to work with Oracle,” Rao said.

Oracle Customer: Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.

Location: New Delhi, India

Industry: Indusrial Manufacturing

Employees: 1,386

Annual Revenue: $500 Million to $1 Billion

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine

• Oracle 11g R. 2 Enterprise Edition

• Oracle Real Application Clusters

• Oracle Consulting

• Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services

Oracle Exadata for SAP at Godfrey Phillips India

68

Multiple benefits: Enhanced performance, faster SAP processes, cost savings, new consolidation tool, and a completely

new usage experience

O R A C L E E X A D ATA D ATA B A S E M A C H I N E R E P L A C E S T R A D I T I O N A L I B M A I X D AT A B A S E S E R V E R S AT A C Q U E D O T T O P U G L I E S E – W I T H N U M E R O U S B E N E F I T S

Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A. is the largest water supplier in Italy, servicing over 8 million households. It manages a network comprising twenty-two thousand kilometers of pipelines, mainly in the region of Apulia in southeast Italy. Acquedotto Pugliese, which has its headquarters in the famous coastal town of Bari, has revenues of almost € 0.5 billion and employs around 2,000 people. In addition to its water supply activities, the company is increasingly moving into the field of renewable energy.

For the past 10 years Acquedotto Pugliese has been using the proven combination of SAP applications and Oracle Database. As with other SAP customers, both the appli-cation environment, including the necessary IT infra-structure, and the applications usage have changed in many ways over the years. In response to ever-increasing application usage and a fast-growing data volume, Acquedotto Pugliese had to carry out occasional hardware optimizations in the form of database server upgrades. This happened in 2006 and again three years later, when (IS-U) ECC 6.0 landscape was extended by SAP BW.

Profitable change thanks to Oracle Engineered

Systems for SAP

Late in 2012, it was time for another major database server upgrade for the IBM AIX hardware hosting Oracle Data-base version 11.2 databases, which Acquedotto Pugliese had been using since first starting to work with SAP. As Pasquale Sciacovelli, System and Database Administrator at Acquedotto Pugliese, explains, “Performance problems were increasing, and this was impacting business processes. The response times for accounting and important reports were not acceptable in the long term, and this was having a negative impact on business process efficiency.”

Acquedotto Pugliese was able to resolve this performance issue with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The Oracle Engineered System proved to be a versatile opti-mization tool that delivered profitable change, including beneficial side-effects.Oracle‘s Database Machine combines hardware, networ-king and software in one optimized system to deliver maximum performance for little cost, and is an ideal platform for customized company-wide database use. Oracle Exadata Database Machine significantly improves system performance where SAP applications are used. Exadata is also ideal for the cost-saving consolidation of both SAP and non-SAP database landscapes.

Oracle comes out on top in evaluation

Before opting for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Acquedotto Pugliese carried out an in-depth evaluation, appraising various possible solutions. “We concluded that the Oracle Exadata Database Ma-chine offered the greatest benefits quickly and without an unreasonably expensive upgrade project. That‘s why we chose the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.” Working with the SAP Oracle Solution Center in Walldorf, Acquedotto Pugliese then carried out an “Exadata SAP Acceleration Pre-Check” to confirm its own results and provide a rough plan for the planned migration of the AIX database servers to Exadata. „The work was completed in a very short time, so we were quickly able to start the migration to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine,“ says Sciacovelli.An Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 for SAP has been running smoothly at Acquedotto Pugliese since mid-February 2014, replacing several IBM AIX p770 database servers. The data migration was handled with the RMAN. From the company‘s point of view,

“Through the IT infrastructure reorientation with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine we achieved all our optimization objectives relating to SAP, and there were several of them. The overall benefits were significant –

from accelerated business processes and substantially increased performance to cost savings and the fact that Exadata delivers a completely new usage experience.”

– P A S Q U A L E S C I A C O V E L L I ,

System and Database Administrator, Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A.

69Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Acquedotto Pugliese

“The conversion was easier than we expected. Whenever anything was unclear Oracle always offered their help right away.”

All SAP Oracle databases now run on Exadata

All SAP Oracle databases (a total of eight including productive, development and QA databases in Version 11.2 for SAP) were transferred to Exadata. The database volume amounts to 10 TB (productive systems: 2.5 TB for ECC 6.0 and 1.7 TB for BW). Before the migration, a database reorganization was implemented with the Oracle Advanced Compression option, which Acquedotto Pugliese was using for the first time. According to Acque- dotto Pugliese, the data volumes were reduced by an average of around 50%. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) was also used with Exadata for the first time, with two nodes, to further increase availability. “Through the IT infrastructure reorientation with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine we achieved all our optimization objectives relating to SAP, and there were several of them. The overall benefits were significant – from accelerated business processes and substantially increased performance to cost savings and the fact that Exadata delivers a completely new usage experience,” concludes Sciacovelli. New usage experience for SAP users

Thanks to the power of the Oracle Engineered System, Acquedotto Pugliese has achieved a massive performance increase in terms of both ECC 6.0 and BW usage. The performance problems previously experienced with SAP accounting and various reports (queries) have been resolved and business processes have been optimized. Accounting processes (billing and invoices) are now 75% faster and performance in relation to queries has also dra-matically improved. Important reports are now available to users immediately or much more quickly. Performance for BW is now 4 to 10 times faster depending on the queries. As for the users, they benefit from a new usage experi-ence: „The migration was completed over the course of a weekend in mid-February. When the team came back to work on Monday morning, they were amazed at the response times of the SAP applications. The IT teamreceived nothing but positive feedback, which we were obviously very pleased about,“ says Sciacovelli. According to Acquedotto Pugliese, Exadata has enabled the company to achieve further performance optimizations in the processes of Java applications that directly access the SAP database. A total of around 450 users work with SAP applications.

Database license costs halvedIn addition to the benefits of dramatically improved per-formance, according to Acquedotto Pugliese, “The Oracle Exadata Database Machine makes it possible to minimize IT costs and TCO. Oracle database licenses are calculated by the number of CPU cores used. With the Exadata Database Machine on an Engineered System, the number of cores is reduced by 50% compared with AIX systems. As a result the database license costs are cut in half.” Acquedotto Pugliese achieved further cost savings by reducing its AIX servers by a factor of 3. The SAP-AIX application servers will continue to run in the long term. Thanks to the Engineered System, patch implementation is now faster and easier, saving both time and money.The company will also use Exadata to consolidate its entire Oracle database landscape. All 40 existing Oracle databases, including both SAP and non-SAP, will be con-solidated on the Exadata system in the long term, with the associated cost and efficiency benefits. All the Oracle databases are managed with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Acquedotto Pugliese also is considering using Oracle Dataguard as part of its disaster recovery concept.Should the company ever need to enlarge the quarter-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 to a half or full rack, this can be easily implemented without the need for a complex upgrade project.

Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A.

www.aqp.it

Industry: Utilities

Revenue: Approx. $ 0.5 billion

Workforce: Approx. 2,000

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP; X3-2 Quarter Rack; • Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c • Oracle Real Application Clusters • Oracle Advanced Compression • Oracle Data Guard (planned)

Key benefits: • Modern scale-out infrastructure for SAP applications • faster business processes • high performance • high security • high availability • cost reduction • high scalability • future-oriented infrastructure with innovative technologies

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Entertainment/Media-Company optimizes SAP landscape and gains big advantages, great cost savings and also significant performance boosts

J U M P F O R W A R D B Y U S I N G O R A C L E S U P E R C L U S T E R S O L U T I O N

The company from the entertainment/media industry was expanding significantly during the last five years in a very dynamic way with activities in several countries throug-hout North and South America. With more than two thousand employees and approximately 800 Million USD in revenue, the media company owns several TV channels/stations and also offers entertainment services to their customers. In addition, the media specialist produces films and videos (also for the internet) and can be ordered by other companies across different industries.

For more than a decade, this entertainment industry com-pany covered a high amount of their different business pro-cesses with SAP applications (and non-SAP applications) based on Solaris based SPARC Servers and SAP application servers from other vendors. Since the beginning, Oracle Database for SAP was also in use. This combination was ideal for the company in order to fulfill the multiple requi-rements, from both a business perspectives as well as an IT perspective. While the original architecture served the re-quirements well, the decision was made in 2013 to put the whole SAP infrastructure within the company’s datacenter strict test bench. The trigger point was the need to imple-ment new hardware for the Solaris architecture because the contract was running out and the company was looking for cost reductions wherever possible.

Why Oracle SuperCluster?

“The objective given by the company management was to evaluate if we should change our existing SAP infrastructure or components of them in a proper way to reach cost savings and easier management and simpler or automated operations. Given this goal, we were focusing on three different alternatives. After a short evaluation time, two possible candidates were remaining. Oracle SuperCluster, engineered system based on SPARC Solaris, and an offer from IBM based on AIX Power”, the CIO from the media company explains.

After this pre-decision the two solutions were evaluated closer and even more intensive tests were carried out. Oracle SuperCluster was clearly a step ahead. The compa-ny’s IT team compared the two alternatives in detail and developed a pros and cons summary of ten criteria that they deemed “recommended highly important”. In all criteria, the Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 solution won. In some cases, the considered alternatives were not able to collect any points.

The main criteria included: consolidating SAP landscapes with cost reductions, faster time to production, efficiency with built-in virtualization, high performance (response times, data loads, queries, batch and others), multi-tenancy support, reduce risk to operations with full SAP and database high availability, manageability, simplifica-tion by reducing complexity, tuned architecture for SAP, future compatibility including scalability.

“We consolidated SAP and other applications that we were already using for a long time in one multi-purpose system with a great bundle of optimizations. We generated more benefits than we expected. Oracle SuperCluster helps us to realize cost savings, significant performance boosts and other very important benefits.”

– CIO from an Entertainment/Media Company,

located in Latin America

71Jump Forward by Using Oracle SuperCluster Solution

One standardized, highly effective environment instead

of chaos

The enterprise-wide deployment of SAP at this media company follow a pattern that is similar to many other customers. The complexity of modern SAP environments running on multiple hardware tiers and potentially separate environments for development, test, and production, be-come increasingly time-consuming and expensive to ma-nage. As the business grows and more SAP applications are added or upgraded, the complexity increases resulting in system sprawl, poor utilization, and additional costs.

The company is using four key SAP components: ECC 6.0 (Industry Solution for Media and Entertainment), Portal, BW and BI – on 6 different landscapes. Those are PRO, PRE-PRO, DRP, QA, DEV and TRAINING. Approximately 1.500 concurrent users are working with the SAP applications (there are also non-SAP-applica-tions which are used at the same time). In total, more than 4 Oracle DBAs have done a great job supporting those applications for a long time. The database size of the PRO system accounts with Oracle Advanced Com-pression are about 5 TB. Before implementing Oracle SuperCluster, the database instances and central instances were running on Solaris, the application tiers running on Linux with multiple hardware and storage systems.

A spokesman from IT said, “our total environment of SAP infrastructure we’ve implemented over the years was expanding more and more, as was the complexity of the multiple systems. We felt strongly we were drifting away from a cost effective SAP operation and from cost efficiency in general. Oracle SuperCluster helps us not only in one, but also in several focused optimizations, so we can jump forward in an enormously big step”.

By using Oracle SuperCluster T5-8, the media/enter-tainment company was able to realize big cost savings (TCO). First, by minimizing hardware costs; second, by reducing database licenses; third, in reducing operatio-nal cost; fourth, in faster and easier system deployment; and fifth in lowering the cost to reach high availability service levels. On the other hand, the company got a significant performance boost. Looking at response times, the system performs faster data loads for ECC but also for BW, Portal usage and BI processing including RFC processing, and also batch processing.

For example, the response time reduction achieved is approximately 50% compared to the prior hardware environment. Also, database license cost savings were realized due to needing around 50% less computing cores.

Oracle Engineered System – A complete optimized

solution

There are good reasons for those results: The Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP provides a complete archi-tecture that is designed, tested, and tuned to address the demands of mission-critical enterprise SAP application environments.

Built on the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster engineered system, which is validated and supported by SAP, this solution eliminates the need for complex, multi-tier, multivendor hardware configurations. Because the entire solution is engineered and optimized to work together with SAP, IT organizations can get SAP systems up and running 4x times faster than regular customer deploy-ments, further reducing costs and saving time.

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It combines the computing power of Oracle SPARC T5-8 servers, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris which comes with free, built in virtualization technology (Zones) for virtualization and optimization, and the optimized database performance of Oracle Data-base Oracle Database 11g accelerated by Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, with a high-bandwidth, low-latency InfiniBand network fabric – into a scalable, engineered system that is optimized and tuned for consolidating enterprise SAP applications.

Fast implementation – great benefits reached

Oracle Solution Center – SAP Competence team did provide an architecture blueprint for the implementation and access and training to the Oracle Optimized Solution implemented at OSC. Following the detailed imple-mentation instructions from the Optimized Solution technical guide, ACS and Deloitte as an implementation partner and consultant, with support from Oracle PreSa-les experts, the customer IT team was able to perform a complete migration from the old SAP environment to the Oracle SuperCluster solution in an 8 week timeframe in accordance to a very aggressive plan. After first con-figurations and testing, the final migration of the PRO systems was successfully completed in one weekend at the end of February, 2014.

“SAP and other applications we are using for quite some time are consolidated in one multi-purpose system with a great bundle of optimizations. We generated more benefits than we expected. Oracle SuperCluster helps us to realize cost savings, significant performance boosts and other very important benefits”, the CIO from the company satisfyingly says.

As he mentions “we’ve got great benefits from both a business perspective as well as an IT and technical perspective. So we can clearly say that this was the absolute right de-cision for realizing our focused optimizations with Oracle SuperCluster engineered system”.

The company underlines that the savings in hardware and minimized database licenses alone are quite signifi-cant. The company noted tremendous performance gains which generate a kind of new user experience. Besides the consolidation potential, optimized and easier operations and deployments, better security and high availability, and lower complexity with higher productivity.

In summary, it can be stated for Oracle SuperCluster: The Oracle Optimized Solution offers an efficient way for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure, rapidly con-solidate SAP landscapes, and manage more workloads in a reduced datacenter footprint that achieves significantly better performance and productivity, with reduced risk, and lower cost of ownership – all in one step.

Jump Forward by Using Oracle SuperCluster Solution

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“Using Oracle SuperCluster took us a big step forward: firstly with an extreme performance boost and secondly by reducing our costs, which enables us to maintain a business presence, acquire new customers and also help our customers to be successful.”

– E D U A R D K O W A R S C H ,

COO Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe,

Atos IT Solutions and Services.

N U M E R O U S B E N E F I T S F O R A T O S A N D S A P O U T S O U R C I N G C U S T O M E R S W I T H O R A C L E S U P E R C L U S T E R

Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is a leading international provider of IT services with an annual turnover last year of 8,6 billion and 76,300 employees in 52 countries. It offers a wide range of international services in three main areas: consulting and technology services, system integra-tion and managed services, and BPO and transaction-based high-tech services. As the undisputed market leader for managed services, Atos is one of the few companies to offer complete outsourcing solutions from design to operation. Atos is a long-term SAP and Oracle partner and operates several outsourcing centers worldwide. One of these is in Vienna, Austria, at Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH. The center provides managed services to around 230 customers in Austria and abroad (several thousand around the globe), the focus being on SAP outsourcing and hosting.

New Solaris platform

For Atos, using Oracle SuperCluster was a logical next step from the Solaris platform, which it had been using for many years. The high-profile service provider has been working with virtually all relevant SAP infrastruc-ture OS platforms for decades, and the technology they deploy is always kept up to date as a matter of principle. In 2012, as part of a regular system update, the company planned to implement Oracle SuperCluster as a possible future shared Solaris platform for both SAP and non-SAP operation or non-SAP workloads.

Atos carefully analyzed the possible business and techno-logy benefits of using the complete SuperCluster solution on the basis of the optimized Oracle Engineered System architecture concept. The achievable optimizations for Atos itself and its SAP outsourcing customers were evalu-ated and mapped out. This process started internally, with Oracle being brought on board at the PoC stage.

In general terms, the solution built on the Oracle SuperCluster combines the computing power of Oracle SPARC T-Servers (in the case of Atos T4-4), the perfor-mance and scalability of Oracle Solaris, and the optimized database performance of Oracle Database 11g along with Exadata Storage Cells accelerated by Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, with a high-bandwidth, low-latency InfiniBand network fabric – forming a scalable, optimized engineered system. Oracle SuperCluster is developed, tested and delivered with integrated hardware and software, in a consolidated system with SAP and Oracle database.

A whole range of benefits quickly became obvious: the use of an advantageous multi-tenancy or private cloud infrastructure, SAP landscape consolidation and Oracle database consolidation including a reduction of license costs, reduced TCO, significant performance enhance-ments in many areas, faster system provisioning and simpler IT operations, increased efficiency with built-in virtualization and management, higher availability, en-hanced productivity and efficiency thanks to tested, per-fectly matched, and integrated components from a single source, and significantly optimized support management – in addition to other improvements depending on the customer‘s individual optimization goals.

Optimized Engineered System: increase performance, create greater profits, enable cost reductions, provide higher

service levels to customers

Oracle SuperCluster at Atos

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PoC preselection and tough SAP tests

Atos realized that opting for Oracle SuperCluster would mean two things: firstly, the further development of the Solaris platform on the basis of the latest technologies, such as virtualization and HA and security features, and secondly, the option of using the engineered system to expand or push business opportunities in SAP outsour-cing.

If possible Atos wanted to transfer a large number of customer systems to the SuperCluster and harness the enormous efficiency and productivity benefits of an optimized engineered system for SAP deployment and operation – while helping its outsourcing customers to achieve tangible optimizations through these benefits. “With Oracle SuperCluster we have a multi-tenancy en-vironment so we can put more than one customer on one machine, and also reduce the number of servers and lower energy consumption in our data center. That’s easily done with engineered systems because you have everything in one box, they’re built together. From the firmware versions everything is tested upfront so it’s easy to use them and also to upgrade them,” explains Eduard Kowarsch, COO Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe, Atos IT Solu-tions and Services.

During the PoC, the multi-tenancy Oracle SuperCluster solution was equipped with five different SAP landscapes (central and database instances), all separately virtualized and all with Oracle databases, ranging from single to double figures in terms of number of terabytes. In the words of Atos Head of Application and Hosting Services Austria Stefanie Wessely, “During the PoC, when we looked at the before and after measurements of the Oracle SuperCluster solution, our expectations were entirely met, especially as far as performance, cost savings, and efficient system operation are concerned.”

There were no further obstacles to the acquisition of Oracle SuperCluster, or the acquisition of SAP outsourcing customers to benefit from the advantageous solution. The first SAP customer environment has already been migrated to Oracle SuperCluster and has been in production since February 2014. The customer is retailer bauMax (turnover approximately 1.2 billion, around 10,000 employees), a DIY pioneer operating in central and southern Europe and Turkey.

Migration of an IBM AIX platform

Atos implemented an SAP migration from the IBM AIX platform that bauMax had used for many years to Oracle SuperCluster using P-series servers – with the anticipated benefits for all parties concerned. Firstly, SAP system performance was improved, in some cases enormously. Secondly, cost savings were made, which further increased competitiveness.

The first benefit is due to the optimized system architecture of an integrated modern high-performance complete solution with sophisticated hardware and software on the basis of an engineered system. The second would come from the system architecture as well, but especially the fact that the migration to the SuperCluster architecture would mean lower database license costs than before could help in total to reduce the cost: in fact half the costs, which would have been a big plus for the user. Reduced number of cores mean fewer licenses are re-quired, and fewer licenses means lower costs for setting up database licenses. In case there is the opportunity to change or reduce the current licenses. The migration to Oracle SuperCluster has not altered the SAP applications used by bauMax in any way. The company still uses the same applications it has been using since 2005: ECC 6.0 (Retail Industry Solution; 60 million transactions per month), BI or BW, Netweaver 7.0, and PI. The ERP production system has 1,700 concurrent users and 2,100 peak users. The Oracle Database 11g Release 2 also re-mained practically unchanged. Its current size is around 3.5 TB (having been compressed with Oracle Advanced Compression a long time ago).

The Oracle database and SAP central instances now run on Oracle Solaris, on new, virtual (version 4), and much more powerful systems in one box. “The migration in production and testing were completed in about 12 hours in a weekend, by agreement with bauMax, and every-thing ran like clockwork. The migration was obviously planned down to the last detail and tested extensively in advance,” says Atos Head of Application and Hosting Services Austria Stefanie Wessely.

The tool used for the database export and import was SAP R3Load. To ensure the Data Recovery, Oracle Dataguard was installed. The Oracle SuperClusters also have built-in redundancy for optimum high availability.

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Enormous advantages, complete satisfaction

bauMax is extremely satisfied with the result of migra-ting to Oracle SuperCluster with Atos‘ help, “After a smooth migration we now not only benefit from a state-of-the-art hardware platform but also from the reduced cost. In that sense it’s imperative for our business and we appreciate the fact that Atos as a partner fully understood that and made it happen,” says Dr. Susanne Kremser, the head of IT at bauMax.

Atos is equally pleased about the Oracle SuperCluster solution. “I believe customers always expect more from an outsourcing provider and that gets harder and harder from year to year. Using Oracle SuperCluster took us a big step forward, firstly with an extreme performan-ce boost and secondly by reducing our costs, so that enables us to maintain a business presence, acquire new customers and also help our customers to be successful,” says Eduard Kowarsch, COO Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe, Atos IT solutions and Services.

Here, to briefly summarize, are the key improvements, results or savings achieved with Oracle SuperCluster compared with the previous IBM AIX platform: 50% savings on database licencsingwould be possible, 60% reduction in overall response time, 50% time saving for RFC processing and 40% for background processing, 50-fold improvement in Oracle Database Index Rebuild, 82% increase in I/O captures, and a 10-fold increase in IOPS.

Atos Head of Application and Hosting Services Austria Stefanie Wessely sums up, “With the Engineered System Oracle SuperCluster as a high-availability complete solu-tion from a single source, in terms of SAP operations and SLA delivery it‘s a significant benefit that our daily tasks like patching are now a lot easier. We no longer have to harmonize the individual components – servers, storage, database – which in the past could be very time-consu-ming. And if incidents do occur, only one ticket has to be opened instead of several as in a multi-vendor environ-ment. All the necessary support is provided by Oracle. It saves time and therefore money.”

Important Improvements / Savings with Oracle SuperCluster at Atos*

Database Licensing Savings - 50%

Backbone Processing - 40%

RFC Processing - 50%

SAP Dialog Response Time (overall) - 60%

Oracle Database Index Rebuild 50X

I/O Performance, I/O Captures + 50%

Bach Jobs Processing Time - 50%

IOPS 10X

*compared to former IBM AIX Platform

With the Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP, enterprises can modernize their infrastructure, consolidate SAP landscapes, and manage more workloads in a reduced data center footprint to achieve significantly better per-formance and productivity, reduce risk, and lower total cost of ownership. Oracle SuperCluster is supported by SAP. It runs the Oracle parallel database, the SAP central instance, application, or web server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Software, and all your SAP ap-plications. This is especially suitable for SAP customers who need a multi-purpose system to run SAP as well as additional enterprise applications, or have multi-tiered applications to consolidate and virtualize within their data center. The Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP provides a complete architecture that is designed, tested, and tuned to address the demands of mission-critical enterprise SAP application environments.

Oracle Customer: Atos (IT Solutions and Services GmbH)

Revenue (Atos worldwide): €8.8 billion

Location: Vienna, Austria

Industry: IT service provider

Employees (worldwide): 77,000

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle SuperCluster T4-4 Full Rack (Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Database 11g R2 for SAP, Oracle Exadata Storage X3-2) • Oracle DataGuard 11g • Oracle Enterprise Manager • RMAN Oracle Premium Services

http://at.atos.net/de-at/home.html

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O R A C L E Z F S S T O R A G E A P P L I A N C E B E N E F I T S B U S I N E S S E S W I T H D E M A N D I N G S A P D AT A S T O R A G E N E E D S

Highlights

• Improved SAP datacenter efficiency and lower costs with superior unified storage density

• Simplified storage administration with revolutionary storage analytics and browser-based management

• Integrated data services and storage management software included at no extra cost

• Built-in unique features, resources, and services designed specifically for SAP environments

• Higher performance at lower cost with Hybrid Storage Pool (HSP) technology

In the current volatile business environment, SAP data-center teams need to quickly respond to dynamic economic conditions. Competitor’s changing strategies, unexpected spikes in demand, and rapid data growth must be dealt with quickly and effectively. At the same time, smaller budgets and fewer staff make it more difficult for IT managers to meet these challenges. The need for cost-effec-tive, flexible storage solutions is greater than ever before.

Many IT managers attempt to create storage solutions out of an expensive and complicated combination of independently developed and supported products. In contrast, Oracle offers an integrated, end-to-end solution stack that includes Oracle’s Sun servers and storage, the Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux operating systems, and Oracle Database, middleware, and application software. Invented, integrated, and tested in-house, this appli-cations-to-disk infrastructure helps make Oracle the premier vendor of comprehensive IT solutions.

Oracle is a leader in storage solutions with the record-set-ting Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, the number one Fibre Channel disk array for UNIX®, record-setting tape drive capacity and performance, the world’s first Exabyte storage system, and leading market share for tape solu-tions. As of early 2011, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System are certified for SAP kernels 6.40_EX2 and higher on all UNIX and Linux platforms. With a complete line of fully supported storage systems from enterprise Flash drives to tape libraries, Oracle makes it easier to purchase and deploy the most cost-effective storage solution for your SAP environment.

Today’s businesses must contend with explosive data growth, a struggling global economy, and highly competitive

marketplaces. That’s why IT managers with SAP environments are looking for a new approach to storage solutions.

The innovative technologies in Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance offer industry-leading performance, high scalability,

easy manageability, and solid data protection at an affordable price point.

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Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance

As the world’s first open storage appliance, the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance provides a dramatically easy way to use storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. The appliance is based on industry-standard components, includes Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance software, and is supported by a global community of developers and ISVs. The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance offers the following benefits to SAP environments:

• Quick installation and configuration. Deploy storage solutions faster with a powerful installation wizard, click-and-drag administration, and Oracle provided installation scripts

• Flexible storage infrastructure. Non-disruptively change the storage infrastructure or move data from one SAP environment to another using Hybrid Storage Pools (HSPs)

• Rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting. Quickly locate

• Comprehensive service portfolio. Seamlessly integrate

and remedy hot-spots and bottlenecks with Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics. A RAID rebuilder also is provided, enabling the storage pool to be rapidly changed or rebuilt

the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance into SAP environments with the help of Oracle’s full range of integration, implementation, and installation service offerings

Hybrid Storage Pools for transparent optimization across multiple tiers of storage

DTrace Analytics to identify the source of performancebottlenecks

Built-in compression

Deduplication so that one physical copy can represent many logical copies of data

Thin provisioning, allowing physical space to be allocated on an as-needed basis

Automatic data integrity checking and correction

Flexibility to choose different RAID architectures, including triple parity RAID which protects against up to three drive failures

Triple mirroring

Snapshots

I/O multipathing to eliminate single points of failure

Broad range of RAID levels

Simultaneous access to both Windows and UNIX® environments

Browser-based administration tools

Shadow data migration

Active-active clustering with transparent failover between nodes

Powerful integration of SAP NetWeaver ACC, Oracle Solaris Containers, and Oracle Enterprise Manager OpsCenter

High Performance

Utilization

Data Protection

Manageability and Usability

Requirements Feature and Function Benefits for SAP Environments

Superior application performance and simplified storage management

Reduced downtime and improved application performance due to quick isolation of performance bottlenecks

Reduced storage costs without adding overhead to the server for compression and decompression processing

Reduced data storage costs by removing redundant data across a wide range of data types

Greater investment protection and more efficient utilization

Increased data integrity

Reduced risk of data loss and better ability to meet performance and reliability needs for different applications

Increased reliability and increased read performance

Rapid recovery and simplified backup to tape

Increased data availability

Users can choose from simple disk striping up to triple parity RAID in one system

Easier sharing of data between users

Simplified administration and reduced management costs

Reduced time and cost when migrating data from legacy storage devices without consuming additional resources on the hosts

Simplified management and increased data availability

Enables virtualization management of the full hardware and software stack

Table 1. The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Integrates Key Technologies to Benefit SAP Environments

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Benefits Businesses

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Broad availability of protocols. All major protocols like i.e. NFS, CIFS, WebDAV allow the usage within a heterogenous environment

Capabilities and Resources for SAP Environments

Storage is the most important facet of data hungry SAP deployments. As a result, SAP administrators spend a lot of time planning, deploying, and reconfiguring storage systems. Oracle takes enterprise storage solutions serious-ly and continues to drive innovation in this area. Some of the unique capabilities, services, and resources available to aid IT teams running SAP environments include the following topics.

Improved Productivity for SAP Development

Typical SAP environments utilize three or more systems to handle development, testing, and production. Holding anywhere from a complete copy of production data to just a small subset, these systems serve a limited purpose and are decommissioned once development is complete. In addition, it is not uncommon to move an entire SAP environment and its associated data set to other platforms to evaluate functionality and performance characteristics under various conditions.

Replicating SAP environments can be a complex and time consuming process. With Oracle Solaris Containers, IT teams can quickly build virtual run-time environments that are SAP certified. Created with Oracle Solaris Con- tainers – an integral part of Oracle Solaris – these isolated environments can be used to consolidate development, testing, and deployment environments on a single system without fear they will impact one another or impact per-formance. Used in conjunction with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances, virtual SAP systems can be easily moved among servers to optimize capacity and minimize down time.

Optimize Capacity and Reduce Costs

Traditional storage devices and file systems require a separate volume manager that implements a one-to-one mapping between the file system and its associated volumes, resulting in under-utilized storage arrays and limited flexibility. Oracle Solaris ZFS software decouples the file system from physical storage allowing for more efficient use of storage devices.

Using virtual storage pools, space is shared dynamically among multiple file systems from a single storage pool and is parceled out of the pool as file systems request it, simplifying storage management and reducing administ-rative errors. When capacity is no longer required by one file system in the pool, it becomes available to the other file systems, making the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance one of the most efficient and cost-effective storage sys-tems available.

Co-engineered with Oracle Database

Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 is co-engineered with Oracle Data- base, yielding unique features with impressive benefits not available to third party storage systems and filers: Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression and Oracle Intel-ligent Storage Protocol. With HCC, you can compress data by as much as 50X, reducing storage capacity requirements and footprint.

These savings multiply as RMAN backups of compressed data go much faster, use less network bandwidth, and take up less space as do snaps and clones of backups. In contrast to competitive products, the HCC compressed data is directly usable by dev/test users with no need for uncompressing. The same is true for the restore process.

Figure 1: Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 Appliance delivers flexibility and lower cost to SAP environments

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Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol opens a direct line of communication between Oracle Database 12c and Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 passing critical metadata to the storage with information about the incoming database data so that the storage can automatically and dynamically setup and tune itself, on the fly, optimizing performance for the precise incoming data. This automation reduces manual tuning by 65%, enabling you to deploy IT staff to revenue-enhancing projects.

Create Central SAP Repository

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance software includes a variety of protocols such as Common Internet File System (CIFS), NFS, and HTTP, and data services such as deduplication and replication. As a result, the appliance perfectly fits to effective support the Transport Management System used by SAP systems to exchange updates, patches, and so on, making it an ideal central storage repository for SAP landscapes.

Quickly Install and Deploy

Virtual systems and associated data sets can be cloned to create duplicate systems for simultaneous testing andevaluation. A new SAP system can be deployed in just minutes using built-in cloning technology that quickly creates copies and moves data. What’s more, the time to deploy an SAP environment can be reduced to days instead of weeks with available install scripts.

Moving data to a new storage platform is easily the most time-consuming and risky phase in the deployment process. When deploying Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances, the system facilitates data movement by using remote replication or shadow migration. Remote replication provides secure, asynchronous replication of the contents of one system’s storage to another appliance. Data movement can be initiated on demand, executed continuously between two appliances, or scheduled to occur on a regular basis. The shadow data migration capability is integrated in the appliance and does not require a separate physical machine. Data is transferred transparently in the backg-round, making the data migration fast and cost effective.

Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product family delivers leadership value for SAP-based organizations using unified storage to

implement cloud computing, virtualization, fixed-content serving, data protection, and storage consolidation environments.

Model Key Features Storage Capacity DRAM Cache Read FlashCache Cluster Option

Entry-level system with all software features

Entry-level option for high availability

Backup and Recovery for Oracle Engineered Systems

Best price/ performance

Oracle ZFS

Storage ZS-3

Oracle ZFS

Storage ZS-4

Oracle ZFS

Storage ZS3-BA

Oracle ZFS

Storage 7420

Appliance

6 TB to 768 TB

6 TB to 3.5 PB

176 TB to 3.4 PB

6 TB to 3.4 PB

Y

Y

Always

Y

512 GB

2 TB

1 TB

Up to 2 TB

0 – 12.8 TB

0 – 12.8 TB

0 – 12.8 TB

0 – 12.8 TB

Table 2: Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Configurations


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Take Advantage of Comprehensive Services

Because data storage is such an essential component of an SAP infrastructure, comprehensive and flexible service offerings are essential. Oracle’s services portfolio helps or-ganizations seamlessly integrate their Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance into their environment and optimize its use. Oracle offers a full spectrum of services to help organiz-ations along the path to open storage while simplifying and reducing the cost of managing IT infrastructure and delivering greater ROI.

Oracle solutions include integrated service packages that deliver comprehensive Sun hardware and software sup-port for SAP users with mission-critical and business-cri-tical applications. Based on a long standing relationship, Oracle and SAP collaborate to help companies optimize deployments and streamline IT operation. These services are designed to help customers increase service availabili-ty, reduce administration time, maintain storage system performance, and manage datacenter environments more efficiently.

Information Resources

Oracle offers a wide range of documents, Web sites, forums, and more to help IT teams deploy and operate Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances in SAP environments. Some of the materials available from Oracle include:

• Minimizing Downtime in SAP Environments

• Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems and XML-Based Archiving for SAP Systems

• Oracle’s IT Infrastructure for Optimizing SAP Environments

Additionally, many online resources can be found at oracle.com/sap, including SAP focused datasheets,

solution briefs, newsletters, and success stories.

Oracle Leadership in SAP Solutions

Oracle and SAP continue to offer innovative solutions for SAP run businesses, including cost-effective storage systems that are quick to install, easy to manage, and improve the SAP development and testing operations. Count on Oracle to be an SAP IT partner – keeping businesses running efficiently around the clock and around the world.


81Oracle Sun Collateral Reference List

Some key literature (Solution Briefs, Data Sheets and White Papers) can be found at oracle.com/sap

K E Y I N F O R M A T I O N A B O U T O R A C L E S U N I T I N F R A S T R U C T U R E F O R S A P ( S T O R A G E , S Y S T E M S , O S , V I R T U A L I Z A T I O N , A N D M A N A G E M E N T )http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/index.htmhttp://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/overview/index.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/infrastructure/index.html

Overview:

• Oracle’s Full Line of Integrated Sun Servers and Storage Systems

• Oracle Infrastructure Solutions for SAP Applications

• Oracle’s Platform for SAP Solutions

• Oracle’s IT Infrastructure for Optimizing SAP Environments

Solaris:

• Oracle Solaris 10

• Oracle Solaris 10: Performance Advantages

• The Role of Solaris 10 in Support of SAP Enterprise Applications

• Performance and Efficiency for SAP Solutions: Oracle Solaris 10 on Intel Xeon-Based Servers

• Leveraging the Power of Oracle Solaris 10 on Intel Xeon Processors for SAP Solutions


• Deploying SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management on Oracle Solaris Containers

Storage:

• Better Storage Solutions with Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance for SAP

• Oracle Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems and XML-Based Archiving for SAP Systems

Systems/Servers:

• Oracle’s Full Line of Integrated Sun Servers and Storage Systems

• Sun SPARC T5440 Server

• Configuring SAP Business Objects for Scalability and Performance on Oracle Systems

Virtualization:

• Oracle Virtualization Technologies and the SAP NetWeaver Adaptive Computing Controller

• SAP ERP in the Cloud, Using Oracle Infrastructure Technologies

• Minimizing Planned Downtime of SAP Systems with the Virtualization Technologies in Oracle Solaris 10


Other:

• SAP BWA on Oracle’s Sun Systems

• Oracle Sun Systems for SAP Mid-Sized Businesses

Here you can find the following and download additional documents:

82

Challenges

Support growing transaction volume without bottlenecks or downtime to improve customer service, enabling the leading brand to continue investing in quality and inno-vative products in the highly competitive fine-chocolate market.

Expand structure and improve the performance of its extranet, through which the brand’s 1,300 franchisees process purchase orders, track product delivery, and consult contract situations.

Manage hardware resources around peaks in production demand – such as during Easter and Christmas seasons – to ensure that all stores are supplied with more than 4,000 tons of products.

Solutions

Guaranteed supplies to franchisees and met chocolate-sales goals – which can reach US$2.5 million per day – by practically eliminating SAP enterprise application down-time and ensuring purchase-order receipts.

Reduced nonscheduled interruptions for the module that manages purchase orders – which are processed by fran-chisees through the extranet – ensuring that the company meets its timelines, optimizes logistical resources, and makes deliveries on time.

Used virtualization to direct more hardware resources to support the manufacturing department’s application during peak production periods, such as Easter and Christmas.

Improved service to franchisees by adding new services through the company’s website, such as financial tracking, invoice printing, reporting, order tracking, and contract control, thanks to the robust SPARC T4-1B platform and Oracle Database.

Replaced the legacy Microsoft Windows operating system with Oracle Solaris, gaining scalability, ease of maintenance, and security to support the company’s 30% annual growth, and reduced downtime to nearly zero.

Increased website availability and capacity to handle approximately 1,300 simultaneous accesses without slowing down. Accelerated data storage and backup processes considerably with Sun ZFS Storage 7120 appliance.

C A C A U S H O W I M P R O V E S S E R V I C E A N D S A L E S M A N A G E -M E N T F O R 1 , 3 0 0 F R A N C H I S E E S W I T H 1 0 0 % V I R T U A L I Z E D E N T E R P R I S E A P P L I C A T I O N E N V I R O N M E N T

“With Oracle’s SPARC T4-1B servers, Oracle Solaris, and Sun ZFS Storage 7120 appliance, we expanded our processing capacity and boosted enterprise application performance and availability which is helping us to drive business forward and support our 1,300 franchisees.”

– J O R G E D E V I T T E ,

Chief Information Officer, Cacau Show (IBAC Industria Brasileira de Alimentos e Chocolates Ltda.)

83

Why Oracle

“We needed a high availability infrastructure that would ensure business continuity for our corporate and franchise operations. Our Oracle solutions enable us to deliver the availability, scalability, and security our business requires,” said Jorge Devitte, CIO, Cacau Show.


“This project had the distinction of being one of the few completely virtualized SAP deployments in Brazil, with three Oracle SPARC T4-1B servers, Sun Storage 2540-M2, which is responsible for the database with Oracle Real Application Clusters. In addition, we have 32 virtual servers that are completely based on Oracle Solaris. This enabled us to improve resource management, facilitate data recovery, and boost the performance of our overall environment,” Devitte said.

Cacau Show Improves Service and Sales Management

for 1,300 Franchisees with 100% Virtualized Enterprise

Application Environment

Founded in 1988, Cacau Show is the world’s largest fine-chocolate chain, with 1,300 franchises in major shopping malls and other shopping destinations throug-hout Brazil. Specializing in truffles, the company has received several awards, such as “Best Franchise of the Year” presented by Editora Globo – a Brazilian business publication – in partnership with Fundacao Getulio Vargas – a regional university. In addition, Cacau Show was the “Top of Mind” brand for specialized stores for two consecutive years and the fine-chocolate brand most remembered by upper- and middle-class consumers, according to a DataFolha, a regional market research firm.

Oracle Partner

Starlink Informática

Partner

Cacau Show worked with Oracle partner Starlink In-formática to complete the project on schedule.“The key factor for this project’s success was the perfect synergy between our team, Starlink’s team, and Oracle’s team, as well as the high level of technical knowledge that our partners brought to the initiative,” Devitte said.

Resources

Cacau Show enhances customer sales management 1,300 franchisees with environment enterprise management system (100% virtualized).

More Reference Assets About Consumer Goods.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/custo-

mersearch/cacau-show-1-sparc-ss-20... 24.01.2014

Cacau Show (IBAC Industria Brasileira de Alimentos e Chocolates Ltda.)

Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil

Industry: Consumer Goods

Employees: 1,200

Annual Revenue: $500 Million to $1 Billion

Oracle Products and Services: • SPARC T4-1B • Sun ZFS Storage 7120• Sun Storage 2540-M2 • Oracle Solaris 11• Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition • Oracle Real Application Clusters

Oracle SPARC Server at Cacau Show

84

O R A C L E A D V A N C E D C U S T O M E R S E R V I C E S F O R S A PDatabase Services for SAP Environments

The services provide for three levels of annualized opera-tional 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, Data Guard, Partitio-ning 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

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 coordi-nates the efforts of a team of engineers who develop back-ground capabilities on your company and your IT goals, and then assist with ensuring a successful outcome for each of your projects.

Oracle Support for SAP

A key attribute to the deep customer focused partnership with SAP, is SAP’s requirement for a permanent onsite technical staff. These “Centers of Expertise” staff SAP’s 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 in-creasing 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

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 Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services (ACS) organization. Advanced Customer Services experts deliver personalized services directly to customers world-wide 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.

85

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 environ-ment.

Database Healthcheck/Performance Analysis

Performance is a primary key to success in the introduction and operation of a 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 applica-tion life cycle, Database Healthchecks can ensure proper configuration and tuning for optimum performance.

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 Ser-vice Requests and a range of proactive services including assessments and root cause analysis.

Oracle/SAP- Oriented Workshops and Engagements

To build your IT staff’s capabilities and confidence in optimizing the Oracle database in a 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.

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.

86

Database Migration Services 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 Oracle’s 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 Partitioning for SAP Customers

Oracle Partitioning is an option to the Oracle Enterprise Edition. 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 Euro-pean 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 per-formance, without an unduly increased need for hardware resources or administrative efforts. Oracle Partitioning is embedded into the core database engine and supported by Oracle’s administrative tools.

From a SAP application perspective, partitioning is com-pletely 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.

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 organiza-tions must pro actively 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 “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.

87

Oracle Database 11g

With the many new capabilities and enhancements of Oracle Database 11g, such as Advanced Compression, DirectNFS, Secure-files and Online Patching, enthusiasm and advanced demand continues to build for fast deploy-ment. In addition, Database Vault is 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 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.

Oracle Platinum Services

Oracle offers Platinum Services to SAP customersin-cluded with Oracle Premier Support at no additionalcost to its Exadata and SuperCluster customers.Oracle Platinum Services helps you maximize the availa-bility and performance of Oracle engineered systemswith 24/7 remote fault monitoring, industry-leadingresponse times at no additional cost for SAP customer,with Oracle Full use licenses.

Key Features

• 24/7 Oracle remote fault monitoring

• Accelerated response and restore - 5-Minute Fault Notification - 15-Minute Restoration or Escalation to Development - 30-Minute Joint Debugging with Development

• Included with Oracle Premier Support at no additional cost

Key Benefits

Unlock extreme value with Oracle Platinum Services

• Maximize Availability and Performance – Preventcritical issues and resolve them faster. Supportthe full performance potential of your Oracleengineered system

Please contact: [email protected]

EMEA:Michael [email protected] Support for SAP CustomersAltrottstr. 3169190 Walldorf

In North America:[email protected]

Japan, APAC, ANZ: Oracle Japan Eisuke Sekiguchi

Senior Manager, ACS Service [email protected]

• Reduce IT Resource Requirements –Reduce riskand administrative tasks while enabling higherbusiness productivity. Focus on innovation andnew projects instead of maintenance and support

• Reduce complexity – Single-vendor access tosupport and engineering expertise for completeOracle stack

For more information please see:

SAP Note 1983678 - Platinum Services for Exadata andSuperCluster running SAP and http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/oracle-platinum-services-ds-1653256.pdf

88

Let’s Get Started with Oracle Solution Centers

In order to meet future business challenges, organizations are regularly updating the architecture of their enterprise applications (EAM) and adjusting the IT infrastructure portfolio (server, storage, network). As such decisions are quite often directly affecting the operational business they require careful preparation, decision taking and validation.

Let‘s assume in the following example that a company wants to harmonize their regionally dispersed SAP systems by a system merge into one ECC installation for global logistic operations. The requirements on IT infrastructure is going to change dramatically: not only that the per-formance of the one but larger system must be sustained, data compression techniques needs to be established, maintenance windows must be decreased further, recovery point and time objectives are to be sharpened. In additionto these core IT services, middleware components might and access management are now deemed to be mandatory by the global use of the SAP system.

Although organizations are usually practiced in the selection process of single products they have a discomfort when multiple technology layers from application to disk are affected and products from different vendors needs to be integrated for their enterprise applications:

• will all products interplay seamlessly together?

• can the required performance be achieved and if so,

which size/capacity do I need?

• does the new technology stack scale when my demand

is changing (up/down-scaling)?

• which skills do I need for implementation?

• how to operate the new technology stack?

Oracle Solution Center (OSC) is an organization which is exactly focusing on answering these questions. It can be engaged during solution design and validation phase.

The unique assets from Oracle Solutions Center are:

• operates eleven facilities around the globe equipped with IT infrastructure to run customer POCs and performance tests, demonstrate the value of Oracle products and to host customer workshops

• provides in-depth technical expertise on core functional areas (i.e. backup, data replication, database migration...)

• drives an ecosystem of partner software solutions including SAP

• integrates with Oracle‘s SAP Competence Center making the expertise of certified NetWeaver technology and development consultants available for validations

-1-Contact your

Oracle representative anddetermine your needs

-2-Within 48hours after OSC

engagement, Oracle will startdiscuss SOW & planning with

you

-3-Lead-time 1-2 weeks, to kick-off project and environmentbuild-out for your biz needs

-4-Lead time 1-4 weeks to get

validated ArchitectureBlueprint and

Recommendations

V A L I D A T E Y O U R „ S A P O N O R A C L E “ S O L U T I O N W I T H O R A C L E S O L U T I O N C E N T E R S

EXADATASOLUTION CENTER

89Oracle Solution Center: OSC Services

infrastructure proposal validations and capacity planning exercises can be requested by customers when engaging with Oracle sales.

Just recently, SAP Competence Center introduced a new customer on-site service to investigate the impact of Oracle Engineered Systems on total SAP global performance (SAP Acceleration Pre-Check).

During two half days, the SAP Acceleration Pre-Check is evaluating SAP statistic data (STAD, ST03) along with workload information from the underlying Oracle database (AWR report). System usage-specific parameters will be extracted and combined with key performance metrics from Oracle Engineered Systems. At the end of this analysis session, a projection will be provided reflecting the expected new performance for each transaction, batch job and query.

Interested in SAP on Oracle?

Email: [email protected]

Ask for a SAP OSC Service

In other words: at Oracle Solution Center, all the pieces from application down to the disk come together and can be installed, integrated and tested in a fast and easy way.

Besides the in-center activities, SAP architectural consultancy is also offered for remote and customer on-site execution: sizings according to the SAP Quicksizer methodology,

Be part of the OSC experience

EMEA Team locations

Broomfield,

Global OSC,Santa Clara

Reston, VA

Mexico City,Mexico

Walldorf-SAP, DE

Sao Paulo,Brazil

Linlithgow, UK

Reading, UK

Sydney,Australia

Tokyo,Japan

Beijing,China

EMEA Team locations

Frankfurt, DE

Walldorf-SAP, DE

Munich, DE

Milan, IT

Linlithgow, UK

Manchester, UK

Colombes, FR

Lyon/Grenoble, FR

Reading, UK

3 Predictive & comparative sizing based on Quicksizer methhodology3 Certzified architecture proposals3 3-5 days

3 Measure current resources utilization3 Estimate future demand 3 3-5 days

3 On site analysis of expected gain with Oracle Engineered System

3 5 days

3 Technology updates3 Trends in customer adoption

3 1-2 days

3 Validate IT infrastructure solutions 3 Eliminate Risk

3 2-4 weeks

Sizing and Architecture

Design

Customerbriefings &workshops

Capacityanalysis andforecasting

Proof ofconcepts,

performancetests

EngineeredSystems

Accelerationpre-check

5000+ hi-touch customersgo thru the Global OSCexperience each year

90

For Oracle Solaris and latest DB Notes please see: service.sap.com

Note Number Note Title DB Version

Overview: Feature Support

Overview:License & Maintenance Information

DB Option: Compression (+Disc Space)

DB Option: Partitioning

DB Option: Real Application Clusters (RAC)

DB Option: Real Application Testing (RAT)

DB Option: Security

105047

720886

828268

1398634

1426979

1430669

1431800

1434131

581312

740897

1028068

1110995

1339724

1654734

1109743

1289494

1431296

1436352

1464156

1583303

742243

859841

1333328

527843

1550133

1426980

973450

974876

1324684

1355140

1597194

1502374

Support for Oracle Functions in the SAP Environments

Oracle Database 10g Integration into the SAP Environment

Oracle Database 10g – New Functions

Oracle Database 11g Integration in SAP Environment

SecureFiles – The New Way to Store LOB Data

BR*Tools support for Oracle 11g

Oracle 11.2 Central Technical Note

Oracle Database 11.2 for SAP versions

Oracle Database Licensing Restrictions

Oracle License Scope & Required Oracle Options

Required Oracle Options for DBA Cockpit

Extended Maintenance for Oracle Version 10.2

Oracle 10.2 Extended Support

Extended Support contract required for 10.2.0.5 PSU and SBP

Use of Index Key Compression for Oracle Databases

FAQ Oracle Compression

LOB Conversion and Table Compression with BRSPACE 7.20

Advanced Compression for SAP Systems

Support for Index Compression in BRSPACE 7.20

Deferred Segment Creation

General Table Partitioning

Deinstallation of Oracle Partitioning Option (SAP BW)

Partitioning Engine for Oracle

Oracle RAC Support in the SAP Environment

Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

The Real Application Testing Option

Advanced Security – Network Encryption

Advanced Security – Transparent Data Encryption

Advanced Security – Backup Encryption

Using Oracle Database Vault in an SAP Environment

Installing Oracle Database Vault in an SAP Environment

Database Vault for SAP Policy Scripts

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 10g

Oracle DB 10g

91

Note Number Note Title DB Version

DB Administration: Tools

DB Administration: Backup & Recovery

Exadata I Exalogic

OS Platforms: General

OS Platforms: Virtualization

Technical Details: Installation, Upgrade, Patches

355770

386413

1589924

937492

966117

1590515

1617188

1619343

1508271

1565179

1567511

1575609

1002461

1173954

1426182

1431751

1431793

1431794

1431795

1431796

1431797

1431798

1431799

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) in the SAP Environment

SAP Workload Management via Oracle Resource Manager

Oracle Flashback FAQ

Oracle Flashback Database Technology

SAP Software and Oracle Exadata

SAP Software and Oracle Exalogic

SAPinst for Oracle Exadata on Oracle Linux and Solaris X86

Oracle to Oracle Online Migration (“Triple O”)

SAP Software and Oracle Linux

Oracle Linux 5.x SAP installation and Upgrade

Future HP-UX Support

Support of IBM Dynamic LPAR and Micropartitioning

Support of Oracle for VMware

Support of Oracle Database for XEN and KVM

Quick Reference for ADRCI and ADR

Upgrade Scripts

Instant Client

Patches/Patch Collections

Troubleshooting the Software Installation

Troubleshooting the Database Upgrade

Database Parameter Settings

Current Patch Set

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB and ES related Notes for SAP

92

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

[email protected]

Altrottstr. 31

69190 Walldorf, Germany

Tel. ++49 (0) 6227 356-0

Fax++49 (0) 6227-3847366

Email: [email protected]

Photos: Gross Art,

Shutterstock, USA

Internet:

www.oracle.com/sap

http://scn.sap.com/

community/oracle

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 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 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 and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, StreamWork, and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. 0410.

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