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Performance & Data Management Corner

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As SAP applications grow more sophisticated,

flexible, and integrated, the hardware resourcesrequired to support them have evolved as well.

To keep their software operating optimally, com-

panies must ensure that the right hardware is in

place early on. Thats why determining the sizing

requirements of your software before you pur-

chase new hardware is so critical.

In the past, companies tended to look at through-

put KPIs to determine which hardware resources

would be right to support their software installa-

tions. However, there is now a new KPI that com-

panies must also consider: single computing unit

(SCU) performance. This refers to the processing

power of a single computing unit within a system.

These SCUs could include a single thread within a

multi-threaded CPU, a core within a multicore CPU,

or any other individual unit that makes up a CPU.

Hardware that has good SCU performance helps

ensure faster business process response times.To help customers make informed hardware

purchase decisions, SAP has been working together

with its hardware partners to improve awareness

of the importance of SCU performance and to

make certain that customers recognize which SAP

solutions benefit most highly from hardware that

has good SCU performance. To that end, SAP has

added SCU performance recommendations into

our Quick Sizer tool (see sidebar below).1

SCU Performance KPI in Quick Sizer

From Quick Sizer version 24 (which went live on

May 31, 2011) on, SAP has added a new sizing KPI

1 See Spending Too Much on Hardware? by Sebastian

Schmitt and Dagmar Kirsamer in the October-December

2009 issue of SAPinsider (sapinsider.wispubs.com).

Do You Have the

Right HardwareforYour SAP Solution?Newest Sizing KPI Helps Determine Your Optimal Hardware Needs

by Sebastian Schmitt, SAP

Quick Facts About Quick Sizer

Quick Sizer has been available as a free self-service application since 1996. SAP

developed the tool in close cooperation with its hardware partners to help

customers determine the parameters of their hardware needs.

Approximately 30,000 users in about 35,000 sizing projects take advantage of

this tool each year.

Implementation, hardware, technology, and hosting partners, as well as SAPs

consulting, sales, and support organizations, all use this tool.

Customers can use Quick Sizer only for the initial sizing of SAP standard solutions.

Quick Sizer enables customers to size a wide variety of applications from SAP Business

Suite, SAP NetWeaver, SAP BusinessObjects, and SAP HANA.

Sebastian Schmitt(sebastian.

[email protected]) joined

SAP in 2007 after studying atthe Universities of Cologne,

Cceres, and Barcelona. He

has been a member of the

Performance and Scalability

team since 2008, and is

responsible for hardware

sizing from a product man-

agement perspective and for

the cooperation of SAP and

hardware vendors in the area

of sizing.

This article appeared in the Jul Aug Sep 2012 issue ofSAPinsider (http://sapinsider.wispubs.com) and appearshere with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.
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Class AAAmeans that the SAP solution ben-

efits from excellent SCU performance

For example, Figure 1 shows that a customer

would need a total of 9,200 SAPS2 to run SAP

CRM and should run the system on hardware

that falls into SCU performance class AAA.Once customers are aware that a certain appli-

cation would benefit from hardware that has good

SCU performance, the next challenge is to find

the right hardware (see sidebar). A good place

to start is to check the SAP Standard Application

Benchmarks (www.sap.com/benchmark).3These

benchmarks run on partner hardware configu-

rations to certify what these configurations can

handle. However, these benchmarks define only

the throughput power of the total system without

explicitly measuring the SCU performance. Thats why, as with any results from Quick Sizer,

it is also very important that customers discuss their

SCU performance requirements with their hard-

ware vendors to ensure that the SCU performance

of the hardware is sufficient to fulfill response time

expectations. You can find more information about

SCU performance and how hardware vendors can

be contacted in SAP note 1501701.

Its also important to keep in mind how hard-

ware considerations, like SCU performance, clock

rates, throughput, and other metrics, are continu-

ing to evolve.

Evolving System Performance

Considerations

Nowadays, the fastest SCUs have a capacity of

roughly 2,000 SAPS. However, for some years

now, the performance of an individual SCU has

remained stable or has increased only very slightly

(see Figure 2). At this point, it seems unlikely that

individual SCU performances will become signifi-

cantly faster in the foreseeable future.

In addition, as you can see in Figure 3, system

clock rates have decreased since 2005. In the past

2 SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) is a

hardware-independent unit of measurement that describes

the performance of a system configuration in the SAP

environment. More information is available at www.sap.

com/benchmark.

3 See Take the Guesswork Out of Your Next Hardware

Purchase: Depend on Experienced, Impartial SAP Stan-

dard Application Benchmarks to Find the Technology that

Best Fits Your Business Needs by Dr. Ulrich Marquard

in the April-June 2008 issue of SAPinsider(sapinsider.

wispubs.com).

FIGURE 1qQuick Sizer results

include SCU performance class

A Look at the Quick Sizer Sizing Process

When a customer is ready to begin a sizing project, or is simply in the plan-

ning stages of one, they can access Quick Sizer at http://service.sap.com/

quicksizingand fill in the sizing questionnaire (see figure below). The in-

puts for this questionnaire are typically provided by people from the busi-

ness side, who define the business needs and timeframe requirements for

regular and peak usages. The more detailed information regarding pro-

jected software use and volumes of processed data that the customer can

input, the more accurate Quick Sizers sizing answer will be.

Based on Quick Sizers calculated resource requirements, customers cancheck SAP Standard Application Benchmarks to see what kind of hardware

might meet their needs and can then have an informed discussion with

their hardware provider to determine the best hardware type and configu-

ration for their solution.

Access Quick Sizer,

create a sizingproject, and fill in thesizing questionnaire

Quick Sizer verifies the

input and providesthe sizing result

Check for samplecomputer system

configurations at

www.sap.com/benchmark

Provide hardware vendor

with sizing project name;hardware vendor proposes

a configuration

for SCU performance. Now, each time customers

conduct a sizing in Quick Sizer, they will see in

the result view a new column that contains SCU

performance class recommendations (see Figure

1). In close cooperation with our technology part-

ners, SAP defined the three classes accordingly:

Class Ameans that the SAP solution benefits

from good SCU performance

Class AAmeans that the SAP solution benefits

from very good SCU performance

A high-level look at the sizing process using Quick Sizer
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FIGURE 2The development of single computing unit performance from 1996 to 2010 (Source:www.sap.com/benchmark)

Time

1996: ~200 SAPS

2010: ~2,000 SAPS

NumberofSAPSpersing

lecomputingunit

First multicore systems

1995 2003 2010

2,000

200

it was possible to significantly increase SCU per-

formance by increasing the processor clock speed;

now, increasing clock speed has become much

more difficult and that workaround is no longer

possible. Instead, hardware vendors are investigat-

ing and investing in other areas, such as the intro-

duction of multicore architectures.These factors mean that future improvements

to system performance will likely depend on other

factors rather than on a continued performance

improvement in individual SCUs. For instance,

software developers will be challenged to write

software that scales with the number of cores

in a system and ensure that their solutions are

designed in a way that the speed of hardware will

not become a limiting factor.

In addition, for several years, a computer sys-

tems ability to handle more and more through-put has continued to grow (mainly due to the

introduction of parallelization and multicore

technologies). We compared internal and pub-

lished benchmark results from 1996 to 2011 and

found that the total number of overall SAPS is

increasing (see Figure 4).4

The general trend is that developers will con-

tinue to design computer systems with more and

more cores and threads per CPU. So while indi-

vidual SCU performance is not likely to increase,

the overall number of SCUs will. However, it is

important to remember that adding these cores

and threads might not speed up the existing SAP

software in a significant way, depending on the

SAP solution that is being used.

Conclusion

In addition to its throughput KPI, SAP has now

introduced the SCU performance classes, which

are crucial metrics for those who are looking

for the right hardware to optimally support

their software and solutions. I recommend

that you explore the Quick Sizer tool, which

evaluates both KPIs, and become familiar with

its functionality before your next hardware

implementation.

For more information about Quick Sizer, visit

the SAP Service Marketplace at http://service.

sap.com/quicksizing.

FIGURE 3The development of system clock rate (Intel processors) from 1970 to 2010 (Source:information publicly available at www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm)

Intels highest clock rate released each year

ClockrateinMHz

1970 1980 1990 20102000

4,000

3,000

2,000

1,000

0

FIGURE 4The development of the performance of complete computer systems between

1996 and 2011 (Source: www.sap.com/benchmark)

Time

1996: ~1,600 SAPS

2011: ~1,016,000 SAPS

TotalnumberofSA

PS

1996 2011

4 The Sales & Distribution (SD) Benchmark was used to

compare the throughput ofthese different systems. More

information can be found at www.sap.com/benchmark.
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