Solution Brief
From the office of the Mid-Atlantic / South Division CTO
John Cooper
Isilon for the SAP landscape
Driving efficiency and consolidation in SAP Landscapes
Challenges:
Many of today’s SAP environments have seen a slowdown in growth of the structured portion of the
landscape. However they have seen an explosive growth in un-structured and semi-structured data. As
the complexities of these landscapes have continued to expand, access to common transport files have
placed unnecessary performance and scale restrains on the landscape. Finally the need is rising to
provide a replicate-able and media durable archive repository.
Un-structured data is straight forward. General files shares that act as repositories for data ranging from
purchase orders, sales orders, invoices and log files. A large amount of this data is spun off and seldom
deleted.
Semi-structure data is that information that is best explained as data that is referenced via a DB or index
and access from a standard file system. The best examples are SharePoint, Documentum, Opentext or
any other ECM. Many SAP landscapes rely on ECMs to provide fixed business information
Common Transport files are unique files, shared between the different SAP modules from a common
accessed point or common store (Filesystem). This store can out grow the limits of the Inode structure
of a traditional filesystem or the I/O traffic to the Transport files becomes so high, that the filer cannot
provide an adequate response time. Slowing access to the common transport files will slow the entire
landscape. To resolve these issues, the common transport files must be placed on replicated file systems
to spread out the I/O. This increases cost and complexity.
Archiving is becoming a fact of life, even with the slowdown is database growth; existing databases are
becoming unwieldy and difficult to manage. Customers overcome this by archiving data from the DBs
using tools like Documentum or Opentext. Many times these repositories are exploiting removable
media like optical or tape. This media may be inexpensive to acquirer, but it does come with a
management and migration cost that can be considerable overtime.
Many Customers now see these archives as business critical and replicating them is a requirement.
Solution:
The first step is to tier the primary Databases, driving less accessed data down tier and out of
the way of the highly accessed data. By doing so, in many cases we see an overall increase in
primary store performance. Tiering will also drive a reduction of 30 – 40% improvement in the
TCO of the primary store. A side benefit is the opportunity to introduce (where needed) Solidstate technologies into the environment, insuring the most critical data is on the solid-state
media at the ideal time in the business cycle.
EMC Confidential
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Solution Brief
From the office of the Mid-Atlantic / South Division CTO
John Cooper
There is a reluctance to introduce tiering technologies into the primary store. As an alternative
and an evolutionary step, tiering technologies can be introduced into the Unstructured, semistructured data space. To do this we need to move and or consolidate this data into a common
and scalable infrastructure like Isilon.
Whether tiering has or has not been introduced in the primary store, introducing it in the unstructured store can drive significant value by reducing the TCO of this store, and driving much
of this data down tier to a NearLine media like SATA or NL-SAS.
By creating a shared tiered and scalable repository, you can now consolidate all of the flat file
space into one common platform and apply tiering technologies to this data. Much of this data
is residing on tier one media that could be better used for the primary and business critical
data.
The secondary benefit for those Customers that have not introduced tiering in the primary tier,
they can experience this technology in a less critical data space like the unstructured data.
For those Customers experiencing the Common transport file problem or those that want to
avoid it in the future. As the Inode or access requirements increase, the Cluster can and will
grow to support these needs without adding additional complexity and cost to the landscape.
And lastly, where to put the Archive? Many of the removable media option are reaching the
end of the technological useful life. The reliability of these medias has reduced as the
continuing downward cost pressures have been applied to these solutions.
Customers must consider management, storage and transcription cost of these solutions in
their TCO. Also what is the real business need to access this data? And if so, how quickly can
they access it.
Many customers are making a trade off, they are keeping data in the primary store longer than
it makes practical business sense to do so, due to the (not Sure factor) Not sure if we’ll need it.
This not sure factor drives up cost of the primary store and as noted earlier in this brief, this
data slows down the overall landscape by getting in the way of business relevant data. This
problem is made worse if the primary store is not tiered.
By using industry accepted archiving tool like Documentum or OpenText in combination with
NearLine media like NL-SAS drives in the Isilon. A Customer can avoid the cost and complexity
of traditional archiving solutions. Since this data is more rapidly accessible, a more aggressive
archive policy can be implied.
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Solution Brief
From the office of the Mid-Atlantic / South Division CTO
John Cooper
Additionally most of this data does not require the data replication provided by enterprise class
platforms like Symmetrix. Moving this data to Isilon allows a right sizing of this replication
needs. The Isilon replication facilitates the replication of the archive at an acceptable cost level.
Summary:
By introducing Isilon as a Common shareable and scalable repository that is also media durable.
You can offload the primary structured data platform, moving these data types to a right sized
platform that eliminates much of management and migration costs. Lowering Storage
administration cost by more than 75%. These data types lend themselves to tiering as most of
this data is stored once and seldom referenced, so an aggressive downward tier strategy can be
deployed lowering acquisition costs by more than 50%.
Finally, whether the Customer is using tiering technologies or not Isilon with Smart pools can
serve as a top down tiering strategy, affirming the Customers belief in ILM and providing a
complete and innovated tiering and right sized landscape strategy.
Or it can provide an opportunity to introduce and demonstrate the value of tiering,
consolidation and right sizing on Isilon in a bottom up approach.
Call to Action:
Understand your Customer’s Data placement
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Have they tiered their VMAX?
Are they storing un-structured data on the on the VMAX or another filer.
If they are, position Isilon as a better choice to consolidate all of their flat files
This will free up the VMAX to deliver transactional requests.
Are they tiering their un-structured data?
They should be and Isilon can provide a trieing solution unmatched in the industry
Are they archiving? If so what tool are they using?
Position Isilon as the best TCO platform for active archive.
Isilon also provides a RESTful interface into Cloud Storage appliance and solutions.
By positioning Symmetrix as the right platform for structured data and Isilon and the right
platform for un-structured data. EMC has created the best performing and lowest cost solution
available with the least complexity.
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