Why Solaris for SAP?
I’m happy to announce the release of a new whitepaper: "Platform Design, TCO, and Cost-Effective Flexibility: The Role of Solaris in Support of SAP Enterprise Applications." What excites me about this new paper is that it really outlines the imperatives facing the CIO today and then provides answers to those challenges:- CIOs are being asked to cut costs for computing platforms, but must also increase flexibility to better meet business needs.
- New versions of enterprise applications, such as SAP Business Suite 7, are driving companies to upgrade and consolidate.
- CIOs are also under pressure to implement Green IT: that means less power demand and less heat generation in the data center.
- Server consolidation and virtualization are increasing trends that require deft management of increasingly complex and diverse machine arrays across the enterprise.
- Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service (Cloud Computing for short) are driving decisions such as when it makes sense to move applications and infrastructure to the cloud to lower costs and provide faster provisioning.
Under these conditions, scalability is necessary. You need that scalability across heterogeneous existing hardware and you need a truly top-tier operating system to orchestrate the pieces effectively. In Hasso's keynote speech - The Power of Speed - at Sapphire last month, he used a few vivid examples of how the data retrieval paradigms used by most enterprise's operating systems vastly underutilize the capacity of the hardware you already have. He compares the cycle time of one processor to the number of cycles needed to retrieve data for business applications to “going to Mars to get a sip of water.” It’s quite astounding when you think of it that way, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
This paper tells the story of how the Solaris and SAP combination is ideal for meeting these challenges I have described above. It will make the SAP community more aware of how Solaris solves a lot of problems that people are seeking to solve by using lots of separate technologies, which can run you into hazardous and expensive territory when support and integration issues arise. In addition to racking up some of the most impressive SAP performance benchmarks, Sun has facilities based in Walldorf – The Solaris Lab for SAP that allows other HW vendors to certify their platform for SAP on Solaris and also provides partners and customers questions for any related Sun and SAP question for Solaris (saponsolaris@sun.com). Of course you can always visit our wiki too!
Many people know Solaris is the leading enterprise software operating system. What many people don’t realize is that Solaris is supported on over 1000 x86 and SPARC platforms—delivers the performance, stability and security that users and customers demand. Solaris has a platform for virtualization, for security, and for a related file system all in one package that is engineered to meet the needs of the enterprise. Solaris is a one-stop shop for meeting all of these challenges. The recent blog by Andre Bogelsack gives a great overview of how the University of Munich uses Solaris and it's built in virtualization capabilities to serve 82,000+ students. Pretty Impressive!
You can get the paper by going to https://www.sun.com/offers/details/Solaris_for_SAP_Enterprise.xml, but I’d like to summarize some of the highlights.
This paper demonstrates the big trends I’ve outlined here: cloud computing, virtualization, server sprawl, and the need for Green IT. It then demonstrates how Solaris delivers a stable, reliable, scalable and innovative solution for all of these demands.
Customers benefit from the singular vision and engineering muscle that created Solaris, while, through OpenSolaris, they can also capitalize on the flexibility of open source.
The paper describes how easy it is to migrate your SAP installation to Solaris (which has binary compatibility, by the way, which many other operating systems don’t – so if you need to run a Solaris 8 application on Solaris 10, you can).
Then you can see how Solaris is optimized for virtualization and high-availability computing, even on ordinary commodity hardware. Customers who switch to Solaris have recorded an average 30 to 40% decrease in downtime.
Solaris is free. You can get started today. Solaris can run on the full range of hardware available. Additional details about Hardware Certification for SAP on Solaris x64 can be found at saponsolaris.com.
Again, I encourage you to download the paper and see for yourself. It’s a succinct document that illustrates clearly why the Solaris platform is ideal for running your SAP installation, and indeed your entire enterprise.
