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Want a Winner?

Look no further than IBM i for your SAP NetWeaver infrastructure

Since 1996, IBM and SAP have partnered to bring the successful SAP NetWeaver suite of applications to the IBM i market. This hasn’t been just a partnership on paper. Over the years, IBM has sent scores of developers from Rochester, Minn., to the SAP lab in Germany on trips of a few days to international assignments of several years. SAP has also sent its own developers to Rochester to work closely with the IBM i team. Because of that strong partnership through the years, thousands of SAP installations are used by companies across the globe that run their businesses on IBM i.

You use IBM i to run your business today because it simply works and is easy to manage. These two attributes can save your company a lot of money in the long run. The IBM i value proposition still holds true when running SAP NetWeaver applications. As Margie Teppo, Basis systems analyst at pharmaceutical company Perrigo, puts it, "Our System i5* server is the perfect support platform for SAP applications—a highly reliable, available environment that’s easy to manage, keeping operational costs low." You can read all about Perrigo’s SAP solution online (www.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/strd-6x3gqr?opendocument&site=default&cty=en_us).

Over the past 14 years, IBM i has been optimized to run SAP applications. Each release since OS/400* V3R6 has included features the SAP development team in Germany specifically requested. One example that’s easily visible and applicable outside the SAP environment is the decimal floating-point data type support in i 6.1. This support lets SAP develop applications with more precise calculations of financial data. Other examples are deep inside the implementation of IBM i and are exclusively used by SAP. DB2* for IBM i has made by far the most enhancements to support SAP, but the IFS, TCP/IP, storage management, Integrated Language Environment runtime and Java* areas within IBM i have all provided significant features or changes in recent operating-system releases to benefit SAP NetWeaver users.

Ahead of the Competition

DB2 for IBM i enhancements have led to a series of industry-leading performance benchmarks with the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and SAP Business Intelligence (BI) applications. First, between January and September 2006, IBM i set records in the two-tier SAP BW Release 3.5 Standard Application Benchmark running on the SAP NetWeaver 04 platform in the query-analysis phase, beating results posted by other hardware and database vendors1. When SAP decided to release an updated BI benchmark, BI-Data Mart, IBM i was the vendor it chose to work with while developing the new SAP Standard Application Benchmark kit. The latest BI-Data Mart benchmark i 6.1 with DB2 for i 6.1 on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s) was published in October 20082. Since IBM i was the pilot partner, it’s no surprise it was the first to publish this new benchmark. However, it is surprising that after two years and multiple publishes with various IBM i hardware and software combinations, no other vendor has tried to compete with IBM i in this benchmark (as of Nov. 3, 2008).

How can IBM i be so far ahead of the competition? In V5R2, IBM unveiled a re-engineered SQL engine within DB2 for i and continued to extend its use in V5R3 and 5.4. This new state-of-the-art optimizer is now used for all database queries from all SAP applications, including the flagship ERP product. Cooperative development efforts between SAP Germany and the IBM i lab in Rochester have enabled SAP to take advantage of patented functional and performance features unique to DB2 on IBM i, such as encoded vector indexes and materialized query tables.

While SAP can take advantage of IBM i technologies, it’s important to note that the same SAP NetWeaver applications run across all hardware, operating system and database platforms supported by SAP. SAP application end users experience the same SAP look and feel regardless of their infrastructure platforms. SAP accomplishes this by abstracting the main SAP application code from the various underlying database and supported operating systems. The core SAP applications are architected around two virtual-machine engines. SAP application code is written to run on these engines, making the applications completely transportable. One engine is called SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) and the other is a JVM*. Even the ABAP engine is built from a single set of C and C++ source code for all operating systems and database platforms. The same IBM compiler is used to produce the ABAP engine executable for the IBM POWER* technology-based hardware for both IBM i and AIX*. Because of the abstraction layer between the SAP application code and the common code used for the SAP engines, running SAP on IBM i is just as mainstream as it is on any other SAP platform. And since there’s only one set of source code, it allows delivery of common SAP fixes and new SAP releases on IBM i simultaneously with all other platforms. Only a thin layer at the lowest level of the SAP applications is tailored to suit any given platform, and this is where SAP can leverage certain IBM i advantages when applicable.

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