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jana_richter
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Within this blog I would like to make you aware of an exciting SAP NetWeaver product that is planned to go into Ramp-Up in July 2008 – just a few weeks to go. It is called Accelerated Application Delivery for SAP NetWeaver (short abbreviation AccAD). Probably you might already know it by its internal project name ADoW - Application Delivery over WAN.

What is Accelerated Application Delivery?

AccAD can help you to overcome performance issues when accessing webbased systems like the SAP NetWeaver Portal within a wide area network. If you are not sitting close to your companies’ data center, bandwidth, latency and network congestions have a negative impact on the response times when working with the portal or any other webbased application.

In some custom implementations we have seen means to overcome those performance issues by copying the portal system and providing a local system in all remote locations. This option of course might be viable; however it is usually involving quite some costs for maintaining the worldwide application servers. Moreover, it might be tricky to enable a kind of synchronization mechanism to keep all systems in the same state and with the same content.

Thus SAP thought of an alternative solution to this issue which is AccAD. The idea is easy to understand and quite appealing: In each remote location where end users need access to the portal an AccAD device is installed on a relatively “cheap” hardware (in comparison to real application servers). An AccAD device is needed in the data center as well. These devices then mainly have the tasks to compress and cache traffic and content. Basically a tunnel between the devices in the remote location and data center is established, where traffic is compressed and parallelized. Moreover, as soon as one user in the remote location has accessed some content, this is cached and made available for other users accessing the same content - this saves a lot of roundtrips. Especially the application awareness of AccAD is very beneficial here: since we know our applications best such as SAP NetWeaver Portal, Knowledge Management, SAP Learning Solution … we can do a more efficient caching and compression on top of standardized mechanisms. This leads to near-LAN user experience in terms of performance.

And there’s an important remark here: We don’t aim to provide an application delivery solution per se that covers all kinds of applications and data traffic. Instead it really focuses on and accelerates SAP scenarios and applications. Thus it will help to implement the vision of central SAP systems accessed by users in your cooperation – no matter where they are located and what their specific tasks are.

Where can I find more information?

Of course this was just a short introduction into a quite interesting topic. You can find an overview presentation with more details on the AccAD SDN page. It’s worth to check this page regularly or to subscribe to it’s RSS feed since we will place a lot more info there in the next weeks and months.

Moreover, in the next few months various Live Expert Sessions will take place:
• 10. June 2008: Introduction to Accelerated Application Delivery
• 24. June 2008: Planning your Accelerated Application Delivery Landscape
• 01. July 2008: Accelerated Application Delivery – Questions & Answers
Of course there are more sessions to come … You can find more details on those sessions as well as the option to register in SMP - Live Expert Sessions AccAD.

What about Ramp-Up?

Ramp-Up is SAP's standard process for launching its solutions on the market. The Ramp-Up process is a joint effort of field, support, and development to offer a program for secure and cost-effective implementation. More infos about Ramp-Up are available here: SMP - Ramp Up. AccAD Ramp-Up is planned to start in July (aligned with the overall Ramp-Up for enhancement package 1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0). From now on you can apply for participating in it. If you wish to do so, then it’s best to contact your SAP Account Manager who can enter the submission for you.

What if I have a question?

In case the current information here in SDN still leaves some open questions, we have created an form in which you can enter your questions. You can reach it here and of course we intend to provide timely answers and will incorporate your questions into a general FAQ document and the Q&A Live Expert Session.