Today, roughly 75 percent of SAP software installations are deployed on Intel® processor-based servers, including many large enterprise implementations. In most cases, these implementations are deployed on relatively large numbers of distributed four-socket or smaller servers. How can this install base benefit from the latest technology trend, including more powerful hardware, virtualization, and lower-cost open source operating systems?

SAP co-innovation Lab has just completed a PoC with 4 partners, HP, Intel, SUSE (a business unit of the Attachmate Group), and VMWare to investigate on this topic. The findings are documented in a 5 company joint whitepaper (link:  http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/e0eb1f0b-15b6-2e10-69ad-f5f54c43222c?quicklink=index&overridelayout=true )   

The paper describes key hardware and software advances that are especially relevant for supporting mission-critical SAP software deployments, as well as the key results of the COIL PoC.   The following figure shows the high level deployment architecture of the COIL enviroment.

The PoC showed Near-linear scalability for a heavy ERP workload deployed to virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical server. A two-socket server based on the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series was shown to support up to 2,100 concurrent users
with an average response time of less than one second. An eight-socket HP ProLiant™ DL980 server based on the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series was able to support
up to 8,000 concurrent users with a sub-second average response time.

Much more details about the environment, the test setup, and the results are available in the paper. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Mark your calendar for Wednesday, May 4 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m to join our Eco-innovation forum with Teradata. As usual, it will be hosted at Palo Alto Building 1, SAP Co-Innovation Lab, and will be broadcasted online at the same time. If you have to join remotely, register here https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/857596390 to get the dial-in numbers and passcode to attend online.

What will be shared?

Working at COIL since 2009, Teradata is a long time Technology Partner for SAP and SAP BusinessObjects.

Developed jointly with SAP and Teradata experts and with the help of COIL, the Teradata foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW product is in ramp-up and is planned for general availability in May 2011 with NetWeaver BW 7.3. The session will provide a live demo and overview of Teradata as an underlying database to support SAP NetWeaver BW and Business Warehouse Accelerator

Who will be speaking?

 Two Teradata colleagues will share with you the idea behind the jointly developed Teradata foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW product and their first hand experiences working with COIL.

Ellen Boerger is the Global SAP Program Director for Teradata, responsible for setting the strategic direction of the Teradata and SAP partnership and driving to realize the partnership goals. Her 25+ years of experience spans a wide range of technologies, industries and roles including data warehousing solutions, self-service solutions, Retail POS systems, software development, engineering management, professional services, demand chain management, electronic commerce analytics and RFID. Ellen holds multiple patents in ecommerce and data visualization. Her specialty is maximizing the value of BI by delivering information that drives the business. This is accomplished by utilizing the right strategy, data, technology, and business process integration.

Taylor West is a Senior Consultant for Teradata SAP Center of Excellence for the Americas, who focuses on seamless integration between SAP BW and Teradata, including the Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW. Prior to her currently role, Taylor worked at Teradata R&D in Engineering designing Java based applications and connections between SAP and Teradata. She has over 7+ years technical and business experience developing integration solutions for all vertical industries and has lead several large implementations.

Didn't make it?

We hope you have joined us live on site at COIL or join us online. However if you missed the session on May 4th, SAP employees can still check out the recordings from the following links:

1. Live session recording (with speakers)

2. Online sesison recording (slides with voices)

If you are not an SAP employee, please get in touch with Ellen.Boerger@teradata.com directly for more information.

If you are interested in the SAP sustainability offerings, I am sure that you already know our Carbon Impact OnDemand solution which can help you analyze and report carbon footprint and provide recommendations on how to reduce it; what you may not know yet is that together with a partner solution, you may extend Carbon Impact solution into data center management.  Adding BusinessObjects Explorer into the mix, real time data center carbon analysis and reports becomes readily available with a few clicks.  

That’s what we found out from a recent proof-of-concept (POC) test conducted by SAP and Sentilla at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in Palo Alto, California. The POC uses Sentilla Energy Manager 3.0, SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand 5.0, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer 5.0, and a defined set of servers, storage, network, and facilities equipment and appliances at the COIL data centers.

Leveraging SAP and Sentilla software, CIOs gain visibility into operating expenses, energy performance, carbon impact, capacity, and service efficiency in the data center. Additionally, CIOs will be able to measure, analyze, and manage the data center energy capacity and carbon consumption, achieving not only carbon footprint reduction but also lower energy consumption and cost – by 25% or more as claimed by Sentilla executives.

How? Hear it directly from Eddie White of Sentilla from a recent eco-innovation forum at COIL. If you have missed the onsite session in March 31, 2011, don’t miss to check out the online recording from here SAP Co-innovation Lab Eco-innovation Forum

We also have a joint whitepaper published at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/50656265-e848-2e10-2ab3-fe5c6b928959 to provide more details for the business context of the PoC, the integration landscapes, and the deliverables from the integration. Feel free to check it out.

We enjoyed working with Sentilla for the PoC, but that certainly is not the end of our journey of exploring innovations with partners in the sustainability area.  Let us know if you have more innovative ideas for extending SAP sustainability solutions into data center management. COIL is an open lab, and our doors are open for all customers and partners to work with us to demonstrate how our customers can benefit from more joint solutions.  

I reported an exciting co-innovation project with Brocade and VMware in October A Self-tuning BOE landscape that dynamically adapts to load changes – a PoC with Brocade at COIL.

This Friday, we will have the honor to host two colleagues from Brocade to give us a live session at COIL Palo Alto (and online).

Register for the Webinar:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/233533694

I look forward to seeing you there.

Brocade OnDemand Resource Provisioning for the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform
Special presentation on a joint project from the SAP Co-Innovation Lab

Details:
Friday, December 10, 2010

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time

Building 1, SAP Co-Innovation Lab

Speakers: Chien Hua yen, Technical Marketing Manager, Brocade

               Ezra Yosef, Business Development Executive, Brocade

Host: Kevin Liu, Manager, SAP Co-innovation Lab

Abstract:
SAP’s Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) is where SAP and its partners and customers bring innovation to fruition. The Eco Innovation series presents COIL’s first-hand experiences working with our partners and introduces SAP internal audiences to the exciting co-innovation projects occurring in the lab.

This session will introduce a joint project conducted at COIL by a team of experts from Brocade and SAP which demonstrates automated resource provisioning solution that can dramatically increase operational simplicity while providing end-to-end visibility and control over virtualized application deployments. Developed in support of the VMware vSphere platform, the solution will be further developed to help ensure that enterprise customers can deploy the solution simply and efficiently

The presentation will introduce the newly tested Brocade’s Application Resource Broker providing dynamic resource scaling capabilities for use with the SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) platform and VMware vSphere. We’ll show you how you can dynamically allocates application resources to make the most efficient use of existing system infrastructure and safeguards a positive end-user experience without fluctuation in application availability.

We’ll also cover how to preserve application uptime during periods of fluctuating demand by providing increased network visibility, performance monitoring and automated resource provisioning. These capabilities enable enterprise and cloud customers to fully capitalize on their virtualization deployments, while improving application service level agreements.

The interoperability between the components of the solution deliver simplified orchestration and management capabilities to customers who are using virtualization and potentially cloud-based hosting to maximize the value of their IT assets.

When we started to work on a joint whitepaper, we realized that many of the work we did was already a part of the joint SAP and Sybase solution and plenty of papers were already available from both Sybase and SAP web sites.  Our Sybase colleagues, Jagdish Bansiya and Christopher Jobson, instead provided us with a few pages story about their experience working with COIL.   

I guess it makes more sense to have it available as a SDN blog rather than to produce yet another technical paper, so here I am taking the freedom to post the content Jagdish and Chris provided to me below.

Thank you, Jagdish and Chris!

1             Introduction

In November 2009, May 2010 and September 2010, Sybase (together with SAP) hosted a number of training and educational sessions, using the COIL facilities.

As well as providing a physical venue, the COIL lab provided a software landscape and support in terms of personnel (either located at COIL or remotely).  The attendees were also able to make use of the excellent catering facilities located at COIL.

The software landscape was hosted inside the COIL infrastructure, and access to it was provided through suitable gateway components.

2            Training Overview

The training was intended to provide an overview of and hands-on access to the Sybase-SAP Co-Innovation Platform.  It aimed to:

• Provide hands-on experience of configuring SAP’s CRM/DOE products, along with Sybase’s SUP platform
• Learn the technology powering the Co-Innovation solution
• Experience client (device) functionality on iPhone, iPad and Windows Mobile devices
• Discuss mechanisms supported by the platform to enable custom enhancements to the overall solution

The training was held in the COIL Facility at Palo Alto, using the main conference area.  Between 40 and 60 people attended each training session.

COIL also provided the software landscape on which the training depended.  The next section describes this in more detail.

3            Software Landscape

The software landscape was set up for the training by members of the COIL facility.  This required provisioning the VMs which were used, and establishing the various VPN gateways and internet access points, all of which was done efficiently and as quickly as possible.  COIL personnel also assisted in setting up the CRM and DOE/Netweaver systems.

This landscape is only possible because COIL provides the physical hardware on which the VMs are hosted, and ensures the necessary resources in terms of disk space and bandwidth, and intra-VM I/O bandwidth, required by the particpants.

Actual access to the COIL landscape was provided via a Citrix Gateway VPN solution, provided by COIL via an externally accessible web page.

Inevitably, a few technical hurdles had to be overcome, as the deployment architecture was quite complex (see the diagram), but all roadblocks were removed with the help of the COIL personnel.  Support was required in some cases very fast, and was forthcoming, often out of normal working hours.

The following list shows some of the setup and configuration tasks that were done either by COIL personnel themselves or in close cooperation with Sybase and/or SAP trainers responsible for setting up the training:

• Provisioning VMs and ensuring appropriate OS versions/patch levels installed
• Configuring internal COIL network for use by the training
• Installing and configuring the CRM and Netweaver/Mobile Gateway systems (this was a particularly extensive task)
• Setting up the access gateways into the COIL network, including establishing the VPN users
• Creating some external (internet) gateway ports into COIL (including the ability for external devices to access COIL VMs directly, not shown in the diagram)
• Help configuring local wireless access for participants

For one of the sessions, we actually used 2 additional copies of the COIL network over and above the one shown in the diagram.

4            Off-site Training use of COIL

In addition to the training run in Palo Alto itself, additional an training course was run in Frankfurt (in Sybase’s offices), but using the COIL landscape described above.  Again, the COIL personnel provided much appreciated assistance in ensuring that the deployment landscape was available and configured correctly, and again ensured the resources (in terms of disk space and I/O) were available to support the needs of the training.

5            Summary

The sessions held in COIL were very successful.  All participants appreciated the opportunity to learn about the new architecture provided in the SAP-Sybase Co-Innovation platform.  The fact that the COIL facility provided excellent support, and wonderful facilities, was a significant contributing factor to the success of the overall training.

Everyone also appreciated the free ice cream provided on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s in the restaurant!

6            Special Thanks

The following COIL personnel were particularly helpful in ensuring the success of the training:

• Kevin Liu
• Peter Aeschlimann
• Sival Gopal Modadugula
• Irakli Natsvlishvili
• Igor Khurgin

As usage of the SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Business Intelligence (BI) platform increases, maintaining application performance while trying to meet varying levels of demand has become more challenging.

The traditional approach to addressing varying demand on the application is to reserve significant hardware resources, and over-provision the infrastructure to cater to anticipated demand spikes. However, that approach not only requires additional capital for hardware, as well as increased maintenance cost and energy consumption.

To maintain service-level agreements (SLAs), the system should instead adapt dynamically to load changes by providing accurate load monitoring and an on-demand resource provisioning service to the application.

Brocade's ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker (ARB) automates on-demand resource provisioning with visibility into application traffic and load level. ARB connects to VMware vCenter through a VMware vSphere client plug-in, performing on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines (VM) based on performance metrics from the ServerIron ADX and VMware vCenter. If a load metric reaches a predefined threshold, ARB communicates with vCenter and with ServerIron ADX to initiate appropriate actions, such as powering on a virtual machine and adding the VM to the load-balancing pool.

Do ARB and BOE get along with each other? Well, we tried them together at SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto. A team with experts from Brocade, SAP, and VMware has just jointly performed a proof-of-concept (POC) at COIL to demonstrate the on-demand computing services provided by ARB with a BOE landscape.  

For our testing, we set up a layered BOE landscape as described in the following diagram.

The BOE components were deployed as virtual machines and were brought into resource pools managed by Brocade ARB. ARB was configured with rules to bring up or down these VMs based on CPU usage. HP LoadRunner was used to generate load to the system. 

We started the testing with only 1 Tomcat servers and 1 CMS server running. As load increases and CPU usage of existing Tomcat VM(s) reached a configurable threshold, additional Tomcat VM was provisioned by ARB and load was distribute to the new VM by ADX, the Brocade load balancer. Similar settings were applied to the CMS server.

Once we reached a peak load and stay there for a while, we started to reduce the load. When CPU usage dropped to the threshold value for de-provisioning, ARB started to remove the VMs one by one until the system had just sufficient capacity to handle the reduced load.

Interested?

Check out a Brocade ARB demo here and see yourself how it works. http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/806cb3d6-d4b8-2d10-5e89-94b896898240

Still want to know more technical details?

The participating companies have just published a joint whitepaper in SDN. Feel free to check the paper out from here http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/e0096305-8bbd-2d10-beb0-b756ed2b6854#rating

You can't control what you can't see. This is especially true when we are talking about energy consumption and its carbon impact. The electricity we use every day is not visible to our eyes, but its impact shows up in our utility bills (which we can see quite clearly!) and further contributes to the carbon footprint we have on the environment. How then, can we gain insight to our energy consumption, analyze trends, and identify areas for improvement?

This was a key topic of interest when I first met Carol Jackson from OSIsoft, and my SAP colleagues Peter Huyen and Raj Valame. Customers ask the same questions, and many of them turn to SAP and OSIsoft for answers.  We all know that our solutions work and they may provide even more value to our joint customers when combined. But what's the best way to "combine" them? What does it take to provide an integrated landscape to showcase the "combined" value? We found that even though many of our customers are already using solutions from both companies, it's oftentimes difficult to find a proof point where we can confidently show to our customers how the joint solution should work.

After a few rounds of exploration, our team worked to build a showcase at COIL to provide a proof point that could demonstrate energy management joint capability for our customers.

The synergy between SAP and OSIsoft

OSIsoft's PI system is well-established in the market as a leader for real time energy data collection and analysis. It can effectively accept and manage data from multiple sources, be it a power meter, a smart PDU, a solar panel, or any device or application with a smart interface for reading power data; and OSIsoft also provide tools to analyze and present the data.

However collecting energy usage data is just the first step. Without putting this data into the right context, its value can become constrained. To fully leverage newly gained insights, we need to be able to aggregate the data in a configurable time frame, analyze it within an enterprise context, and then be capable of generating reports and visualizations to help us understand the trends of our energy consumption, conduct cost analysis and carbon impact analysis so we can achieve cost avoidance and reduce our carbon footprint. These areas are where SAP solutions play great roles:

• SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence), provides a direct connection between plant information systems and business systems. It ensures that all data that affects manufacturing is visible - including information about orders, materials, equipment status, costs, and product quality. When integrated with OSIsoft, MII assists to move real-time energy consumption data from PI system up into SAP and provide a platform for analytics combining real-time data with SAP transactional information.

• SAP CI (Carbon Impact) helps measure, mitigate, and monetize greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts across an enterprise's internal operations and supply chain. When MII feed the aggregated energy consumption data into CI, CI can translate it into how much CO2 equivalent is produced by such consumption.

• SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius provide powerful visualization and SAP Enterprise Portal glues everything together

Putting everything together, we came up with the integration architecture as shown in the following diagram:

The journey - it takes a great co-innovation team to build the integration

When we first met to talk about the proof point, it was in February 2010.

We decided the COIL Palo Alto data center is the logic choice to put the solution into life.

Having an architecture diagram is one thing, building a working solution out of it is another thing. It became an interesting journey for us all as we strove to build the landscape up at COIL - it took time to take care of the legal agreements, to get the right experts to work on the solution, and to get necessary equipment at COIL to display the dashboard. 

This is a project takes full advantage of successful knowledge brokering, tacit knowledge exchange and contribution of key complementary assets necessary to the project. Additionally, COIL is designed to facilitate co-innovation project that can be pursued from many locations worldwide. My colleague at COIL David Cruickshank teamed with Carol and lawyers from both companies to make sure that all IP provisions and legal terms were properly defined and sufficiently reflected the requirements of a co-innovation initiative.  The COIL data center team (Peter Aeschlimann, Siva Gopal Modadugula, and Irakli Natsvlishvili) played a key role in setting up the initial landscape. Equally contributing to the success of the project, Peter Huyen and Raj Valame worked very hard to keep the project momentum high and tracking to the larger sustainability and green IT initiatives at SAP. Along the road, we were fortunate enough to have Michael Appleby, David Branley, and Jeff West to join us to help with the Xcelsius, CI, and Portal development from SAP side, and Ken Morikawa, Michelle Kuiee, Danilo Ribeiro, Francois J. Gagnon, from OSIsoft side to help build the PI system.  Larry Morgan and the Palo Alto facility management team are also tremendously helpful in giving us access to the solar panel and building 1 energy consumption data sources.

The live dashboard at COIL Palo Alto

Fast forward to October

Today the COIL data center Energy Management for Sustainability Reporting dashboard has now gone live at Palo Alto. If you are based in Palo Alto, check it out from building 1 first floor adjacent to the EBC staircase. The dashboard consists of two LCDs with rotating reports.

To give you a taste of what you can get from these dashboards, here is a snapshot of the dashboard which provides insight into how much cost avoidance the data center is achieving from using solar power in the last 24 hours.

Further details will be provided in a whitepaper which we will release in a few more days.

Stay Tuned.

One challenge common to any feature-rich Web-based application is how to mitigate the wide area network (WAN) overhead for remote users accessing the application over long distances and low network bandwidth.  It's no exception for SAP BusinessObject Enterprise (BOE). Users typically enjoy excellent performance with a BOE application in LAN scenario, but when WAN is in the picture, the user experience often varies depending on how much performance degradation is introduced by network latency and bandwidth constraints.

Think about an enterprise BOE deployment where the system is installed in a central location such as California and accessed by end users around the world.  Take a very simple example, considering a user opening a 10000 row Web report using BOE InfoView from different locations.  Testing at SAP Co-innovation lab (COIL) shows that for a user in a LAN environment, it takes only 0.595 second to open the report, pretty good, right? Now let's consider a user connecting from Tokyo over a network with 5 mbps bandwidth and 200 ms latency, he or she has to wait 86 seconds for the report to open.  If that's not painful enough, put your feet in the shoes of a user connecting from India over a network with 1.5 mbps bandwidth and 350 ms latency, the response time shoots up to 298 second. The impact of network may be much more that many of us have really thought about it when we build applications. I for one was surprised to see the scale of the degradation.

There got be some way to fix such performance degradation introduced by WAN networks.    

SAP offers our own solution on accelerated application delivery. SAP AccAD overcomes bandwidth and latency issues  with caching, compression algorithms and special application aware optimizations. Currently, there are specific optimizations available for the SAP NetWeaver Portal, Knowledge Management (accessing and collaborating on documents) and the SAP Learning Solution. With the generic optimizations, web-enabled SAP applications can benefit from this technology with significant performance improvements as well (like SAP NetWeaver BW, web-based SAP Business Suite applications, SAP CRM, web-based Non-SAP applications).

For customers who would like to explore alternative solutions, we realize there are many choices in the marketplace. Here we would like to report to you a project we have done at the lab with Blue Coat, one of the providers in the WAN optimization space. We will report more solutions when they become available to us.

In a project we just completed at COIL, SAP and Blue Coat worked closely to develop a joint solution to mitigate wide area network impact on BOE global deployment. Blue Coat's WAN optimization solution is designed to address network overhead that impacts application delivery performance to remote end users. Using a combination of caching, compression, and TCP optimizations, their ProxySG appliance reduces the bandwidth required for WAN-delivered application. More critically, ProxySG reduces the amount of data sent back and forth across the WAN, dramatically reducing the impact of latency on application performance. With a lot of static data in the BOE solution, Blue Coat comes into play very nicely for the WAN issue we have in hand.

In LAN scenario, Blue Coat doesn't really make any difference for performance, but it's really a game changer for WAN scenarios. The diagram below describes the logical equivalent architecture of the solution with Blue Coat, where its appliances are symmetrically deployed in the central deployment site of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise and in all the remote locations to accelerate network performance.

Our testing shows that Blue Coat brings in a tremendous improvement in the BOE user experiences for all WAN conditions tested.

Let's go back to the example of opening a 10000 row Web report. With Blue coat, for the user in Tokyo, the waiting time was brought down from 86 seconds to 1.9 seconds. What about the poor guy in Indian who had to wait 298 second? Well, blue coat brought the response time down to 6.7 second. How better can you expect?

Intrigued? Well, the project team has published a whitepaper to share all the details of the BOE and Blue Coat landscape setup and the testing results. Feel free to download the paper from here (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/7074d8e5-fd45-2d10-2eb9-b5b21a9a5b35)

Of course, Blue Coat is not the only players in this space, there are quite a few other vendors who offer similar solutions. COIL is a membership based organization and we are open to work with all of our members to explore and validate their solutions in the context of SAP landscape. If other solutions are made available to us so we have the opportunity to test and validate how they perform with SAP applications, we will definitely share with you our findings here too. Stay tuned.

Last but most important, kudos to all the colleagues who have contributed significantly to the project. just to mention a few - Thanks to our friends form Blue Coat, Benjamin Rice, Chris Webber, Jonathan Bensen, Chris Wood, who have made numerous trips to COIL through the notorious Silicon valley commute time traffic;  The BOE colleagues Jay Thoden van Velzen, JC Raveneau and Sinisa Knezevic who contributed the business case and helped set up the BOE landscape, and the never-sleep COIL engineers Siva Gopal Modadugula and Igor Khurgin with the support of Peter Aeschlimann, and Irakli Natsvlishvili. Joerg Nalik, the in-team SAP network guru who offered numerous advises to the team and helped alignment with various SAP groups. Of course the great COIL operation master David Cruickshank who is also the master mind behind the project.