Easier storage for SAP - only from HP StorageWorks

[#1]

By Scott Edwards, XP Disk Array Product Manager

Earlier this month, HP announced two new solutions that will greatly benefit SAP customers seeking ways to reduce time and costs when creating copies of their SAP instances, and those seeking greater uptime or availability in their SCM environments.

The two new solutions, HP StorageWorks System Copy Software for SAP and HP Hot Standby for SAP SCM liveCache (hss) are unique to HP and work exclusively with the HP XP Disk Array storage platform.

 HP System Copy Software

This new software solution is a "customer-installable" product that automates many of the multiple steps that are needed in the copy process.  Automating these steps, such as creating the copy, renaming and reconfiguring of the SAP instance, and presenting that new copy to the host, can save customers hours, if not days, of time.   Plus, it eliminates the need to have three different administrators relying on each other to make the copy occur.  With HP System Copy Software, only the SAP admin needs to be involved in the process. 

This software product is an HP developed solution, which replaces the service HP used to offer known as ExSID.  No other vendor offers an "off-the-shelf" product like this; rather, they bring in their services group to help create the custom scripts for each environment. 

HP System Copy, which begins shipping mid-June 09, is currently only supported on the HP StorageWorks XP family of disk arrays, but will be available on other HP arrays (like the EVA disk arrays) in the near future. 

For more information on System Copy (including the technical whitepaper), visit www.hp.com/go/systemcopy. 

HP Hot Standby for SAP SCM liveCache (hss)

On May 8^th, HP announced a new feature in HP Serviceguard Extension for SAP (SGeSAP) known as HP Hot Standby for SAP SCM liveCache (hss) - a feature unique to the HP Serviceguard (SGeSAP) offering that extends high availability protection to SAP's supply chain management (SCM) application.

According to the HP Serviceguard web page: "HP Serviceguard Extension for SAP now includes HP Hot Standby for liveCache, the first and only high availability solution for SAP liveCache that is proven in production and co-developed with and recognized by SAP. An off-the-shelf solution means you have no nasty surprises when you see the bill. You are completely covered with a solution that evolves as you do and is fully supported by HP. Using HP Hot Standby for liveCache, Serviceguard Extension for SAP slashes SAP liveCache recovery time from days or hours to as little as two minutes and is recognized by SAP as the first solution of its kind on the market."

The Hot Standby protection is only available with HP StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays. In addition, HP is the only vendor offering an off the shelf product of this type.  For more information about this Hot Standby Solution feature in Servicegaurd, please view their solution brief at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA2-5823ENW.

These two, HP unique, solutions (HP System Copy Software and HP Hot Standby for SAP SCM) offer great benefits to SAP customers in terms of cost and time savings, as well as high availability protection to keep their business running.  

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[#2]

Nice post,

this solutions are looking pretty handy and may come in particularly useful, this is a great article that you have shared

Thanks for writing about it

[#3]

While I'm glad that HP is helping SAP users, claims such as

No other vendor offers an "off-the-shelf" product like this;

Seem to be somewhat innacurate. While I dont have exact details on the HP offering, the functionality mentioned in the post has been offered by NetApp in our SnapManager for SAP product for about two years now. Details can be found here

www.netapp.com/.../snapmanager-sap.html

[#4]

Every other solution we’ve seen on the market offers replication software (most of the time some backup tool) alongside a services contract, not a customer-installable application specific solution.  

Creating space-efficient snapshots is by nature, and should always be, a very fast operation on any storage system.  The ability to create these spaces-efficient copies, along with the necessary integration into database systems to ensure a transactional consistent and recoverable copy, is a given for any solution.  HP has several application solutions that enable users to create these types of copies at any point in time, but most of them are focused on the array replication point of view and not the application specific point of view.

The difference (and exceptional value) that SAP users get with HP System Copy Software for SAP is an SAP specific solution that is user installable.  You do not need any specialist or services contract to install and configure this solution, or to develop some custom scripts.  HP System Copy automates the entire processes of creating and renaming a copy of an SAP system.  This includes automatically:

• Discovering the source SAP system Storage layout

• Creating the point-in-time copy of the sources system data devices (either space efficient snapshots or full copy replicas (and both of these are created within a few minutes - even a full copy can be accessed long before the actual disk copy is complete). And yes in a lot of cases customers still wants a full copy of production too.

• Importing and renaming the file systems on the target server

• Renaming the database and the SAP instance

Each of these steps is automated, and it can be done from a single management GUI.  

HP had a Services/Scripts based solution for many years.  The learning from this offering is what went into the System Copy offering.

With this customer installable software, HP simply takes SAP system copy automation to a higher level, making it a fast commodity operation for the customer's SAP administrator (no other admins required). Customers (or services) do not need to maintain scripts. Scripts generally offer a cool solution at installation time, but tend to cause customer headaches later in the IT lifecycle. Not to mention knowledge dependencies for all layers of the stack (storage, O/S, DB, SAP, script languages). HP solves this issue now by offering an end-to-end engineered and qualified software product, which offers great ROI for many of our customers.