Oracle SuperCluster T5-8: The Right Solution for Running SAP

Oracle SuperCluster T5-8: The Right Solution for Running SAP ORACLE WHITE PAPER

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LAS T UPDATED JUNE 2015

Table of Contents How Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 Benefits SAP

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Maximize SAP Efficiency, Resource Consolidation, and Availability

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The Best Deployment Choice for SAP

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1 | ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER T5-8: THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR RUNNING SAP

How Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 Benefits SAP Running a large-scale enterprise SAP environment can be complex and challenging. Over time, the infrastructure can become unmanageable as data centers expand bringing new servers online to provide multiple application, development, test, sandbox, reporting, and production environments for users. The biggest concerns are security, high availability, performance, and the need to consolidate infrastructure. For these reasons, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 offers an ideal solution for Oracle Database and database-as-aservice (DBaaS) implementations, SAP database and application consolidation, and private cloud deployment.. Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 integrates powerful, pretested components into a single system engineered to deliver high availability, extreme performance, extreme scalability, efficient resource consolidation, enhanced security, and rapid deployment to enterprise data centers running resource-intensive SAP applications. Officially supported by SAP, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 combines clustered compute and storage servers with high-speed networking and integrated Oracle Solaris virtualization to reduce data center footprint, simplify operations, minimize initial and ongoing support and maintenance efforts, and drive down the total cost of ownership (TCO). Designed and optimized for high performance, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 increases SAP interactive performance and accelerates workload throughput. » High Performance: Oracle’s SPARC T5-8 servers, which are used as compute nodes in Oracle SuperCluster T5-8, set the record for a SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark1, providing high performance and high throughput. Compute nodes run Oracle Solaris, which is designed to take advantage of their massive threading, batch processing, and fast I/O capabilities. Databases stored on Oracle Exadata Storage Servers further accelerate performance, while the integrated Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance on a high-speed InfiniBand network provides fast data backup/restore, transfer operations, and shared storage. Optimized at all levels and building on the innovations of Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 delivers faster core technology, more contiguous server memory, lower latency, and greater I/O performance. » Environment Security: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as SAP can integrate and unify an increasing number of business functions and core processes. This aggregates business-critical and confidential data into a single location, making it a prime target for both cyber criminals and internal attacks. Through functional security guidelines and best practices, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 helps protect confidential information, preserve data integrity, and enforce user accountability. » High Availability: Full hardware redundancy provided by Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 and Oracle Solaris Cluster protect the complete SAP environment, including SAP Central Services as well as SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) and Java applications, by invoking failover policies to take specific actions if a node becomes unavailable. The Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) option to Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition ensures continued database availability to support business-critical SAP operations. » Virtualization: Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC enable applications certified on Oracle Solaris 8, 9, 10, and 11 to run simultaneously on the system without modification. With these virtualization technologies built into Oracle Solaris, the SAP workload can be allocated to isolate I/O- or CPU-intense applications to their own virtual machines with dedicated resources that can easily be managed and reassigned as needed. With virtual clustering, dedicated Oracle Solaris Zones clusters can be configured to run specific SAP applications according to predefined cluster-management policies.

1 Results as of March 26,2013, World Record on 8-Chip Two-Tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark. Source: SAP, http://www.sap.com/benchmark. The SAP Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 2005/EP5 application benchmarks on March 26, 2013, by Oracle, has been certified with the following data: 40,000 SAP Two-Tier SD Users, 220,950 SAPs for SAP Two-Tier SD. Server configuration: SPARC T5-8 (8 processors, 128 cores, 1024 threads, T5, 3.6 GHz), 2 TB main memory, Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0. Certification Number: Certification Number: 2013008.

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ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER T5-8: THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR RUNNING SAP

Maximize SAP Efficiency, Resource Consolidation, and Availability Over time, large-scale enterprise SAP deployments typically evolve into complex infrastructures that host SAP landscapes employing many database and information management servers all connected to large numbers of interactive users over a network. At the data center, SAP landscapes might have separate development, test, quality assurance, and production systems for each SAP Business Suite application. These components can be deployed in application and database layers on production and nonproduction systems that, over time, grow in complexity and fragmentation, making the addition of new SAP services difficult and expensive. Sizing servers for peak demand typically results in low overall utilization with servers running at only 20 percent of capacity most of the time, driving low efficiency over a large data center footprint and higher operational costs. Figure 1 gives an example of how a SAP landscape architecture might be configured on an Oracle SuperCluster system that has been designed to reduce SAP infrastructure complexity while delivering high throughput for dataintensive workloads, enhanced security to protect SAP applications from intrusion and breaches, and high availability to ensure continuous operation in the event of equipment failure.

Figure 1. Example of SAP landscape configured on Oracle SuperCluster.

This example shows Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle RAC 11g running in database domains. Oracle RAC provides database scalability and high availability with data stored on high-performance Oracle Exadata

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ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER T5-8: THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR RUNNING SAP

Storage Servers. This database configuration has already demonstrated as much as 2 to7 times or greater acceleration for data-intensive SAP workloads including batch, reporting, and data loads. As shown in Figure 1, SAP components and applications are run in isolated Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris Zones clusters, ensuring high security, efficiency, and availability. Oracle Solaris Cluster automatically detects, isolates, and contains failing nodes or components, invoking failover policies to take specific actions if a node becomes unavailable. In this example, Oracle Solaris Zones clusters are used for SAP Central Services (SCS)/ Enqueue Replication Server (ERS), the primary application server (PAS), additional application server instances (AAS), and the spool. Oracle Solaris Cluster can be used to provide high availability for Java and ABAP application servers if desired. Oracle SuperCluster and Oracle Solaris are both engineered for high reliability, availability, security, and serviceability. Greater integration with fewer components drives higher mean time before failures (MTBF). Redundant components, mirrored file systems, and clustering reduce the risk of data loss and downtime. Hotpluggable compute and storage components that can be serviced while the system is running ensure continuous operation. The Oracle Solaris Fault Manager, included in Oracle Solaris, prevents service interruptions by automatically diagnosing faults and initiating self-healing measures without operator intervention. Oracle Solaris ZFS ensures data integrity and fast recovery in the event of system failure, with near-perfect error detection and correction.

The Best Deployment Choice for SAP The massive scalability and extreme performance capabilities of Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 are well suited for consolidating an entire SAP development, test, and production environment into a single, secure system that provides full resource sharing and management, fault and security isolation, and fine-grained workload tuning. To achieve the high degree of consolidation needed, SAP production, development, and test applications all run in Oracle Solaris Zones, which provide isolation and resource management configured for maximum security and efficiency with no added system overhead. This capability allows multiple business units within an enterprise to be consolidated securely onto a single system, even though they might have separate administrative domains and service agreements. Oracle Solaris resource management tools enable administrators to allocate as needed the resource pools of CPUs, storage, and specialized services to specific applications or zones in response to dynamic workload changes. Running SAP Central Services and primary application servers within dedicated zones configured around Oracle Solaris Zones clusters eliminates any single point of failure and ensures availability of critical SAP components. Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 is designed for data center consolidation in expanding environments with multiple dynamic workloads requiring high levels of availability, security, and reliability for hardware and software layers. With hardware redundancy and automated failover recovery for mission-critical applications and resources, it strikes a perfect balance between performance, cost efficiency, and data service availability.

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ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER T5-8: THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR RUNNING SAP

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