SAP hardware sizing/requirements and cost saving.

byRAJIB IMRAN -2:42 PM

SAP Hardware

SAP Hardware Sizing by Rajib Imran

*Next Upcoming Post: SAP S4HANA Hardware Sizing- How to build worlds most cost effective hardware for S4HANA on premise editions.

SAP hardware requirements Calculation for right size SAP hardware.

• What is the right hardware or how to choose hardware for SAP

• SAP hardware requirements

• what is SAP hardware sizing

• SAP hardware upgrade

• SAP saps to cpu converter

• Cost of SAP hardware

• SAPs vs CPU core or socket

• SAP saps calculation or SAP saps cpu

• SAP saps

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SAP Sizing and Choosing a Hardware to save you cost.

A lot of the companies invest huge in buying right hardware for their SAP to run. I know lots of companies having SAP license but not going for implementation because of the implementation cost is huge. And one of the main expense is hardware expenses. Most interestingly most of the companies are not aware of the right hardware. If you analyze you will find most of the small and medium size companies having SAP installed hardware are less than 25% resource use. That is it’s a west of your invest. SAP has certified about 100 Three-Tier systems and 724 Two-Tier systems worldwide benchmark. For any new hardware for any SAP implementation or migration is a huge invest and sounds like a lot. So choose right hardware is a challenging part definitely. I will try to describe based on my experience and SAP’s guideline. click here for sample benchmark

The first we need to know our scope in details, lets summaries as on the bellow questions which will help you to make your scope well defined and fixed.

1. What are the SAP components you are going to use?

2. How many users for each server (Development, Quality, Production, Solman etc

3. Which hardware platform you like to use, UNIX or x86?

I think if you have the answer on those 3 questions than you can start for SAP QUICK SIZER to know sap SAPS benchmark after that you can go for hardware vendor. Let’s analyze how we can get those questions answers:

01. Most common component now a days is SAP ECC 6.0 and may have some other add-ons for example AFS. You may use SAP Solution manager, BI, BOBJ, PI etc. here I will discuss about the main component SAP ECC 6.0 so that you can get the bigger picture.

02. Hmm. This is a tricky question. I have seen lots of companies misunderstood this count. They count as many as employees they have all will be SAP named users. But the truth is you have to consider only the users who will be directly needs to use SAP. Suppose in your organization you have 1000 employees among them only 600 will need to enter data in SAP and use SAP to have reports. And moreover it depends on what are the module you are taking, suppose among the 1000 employees 200 are HR and 300 for production department but you are not taking HR and PP module so those users will not come under SAP users. A easy count I understand is that the number of Employees you have count 40% to 50% for next 3 or 4 years.

03. Here is another chance of banging your head. In market there is a perception is that UNIX system performs better that x86 systems. You have only 3 companies produce UNIX based hardware IBM, HP, SUN for their UNIX OS.

04. But do you know at what point you should consider UNIX? Or should you consider UNIX at all?

05. SAP Products or components can be scale out by Application server, so why you will go for UNIX socket scale up?

SAP Benchmark ? SAP has tested most of them are UNIX and those are about 3 to 4 years in age, so now a days you cant get those system In the market. And for core per processor count both UNIX and x86 is having up to 16 core/processors. So you can consider less socket now with most cores.

Lets analyze the core with SAPs count. I believe you will get interest here. A general term is the performance is depending on core. So more core more performance. Do you know how many SAPs can deliver per core? If we analyze the SAP’s benchmark data we will get the bellow picture which shows x86 processors delivers more than 1400 SAPs per core and UNIX processors delivers about 1400 SAPs per core.

So that’s the point to calculate or choose your right hardware. So if you need 4000 SAPs you can choose 1 CPU with 4 core or 2 processors with 2 core. Got shocked? Yes it’s the secret which your hardware vendor will not tell you, they will force to buy the latest costly hardware. Now it your call to choose the right hardware and cut the SAP hardware cost for implementation and migration.

For more information on SAP Benchmark on Hardware: www.sap.com/benchmark