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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.

An All-in-One Solution

It can be very easy to start an SAP implementation on IBM i. An exclusive offering called the IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One, nicknamed Kobi, can be used to cut weeks from the normal installation and configuration phase of an SAP implementation by predefining a significant number of settings that SAP application consultants must handle. The Kobi process was the fruit of another cooperative development effort between SAP and IBM that even garnered a patent for the idea.

Bangkok’s Barbeque Plaza restaurateur Neerada Choopojcharoen says, "Our users aren’t particularly technically skilled, and we have a small management team that’s focused on running restaurants. Our objective was to implement the right solution for the company quickly, easily and at low cost." She adds, "IBM System i* architecture was clearly the best option for Barbecue Plaza, giving us a secure platform that’s easy to manage. It was also very fast to deploy, thanks to IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One." The full story of Barbecue Plaza’s SAP ERP installation appears online (www.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/STRD-7CNMJM?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us).

Changing the Landscape

Simple SAP landscapes usually have five to 10 SAP systems, with complex landscapes easily using dozens. This quickly translates to dozens of servers in a typical Windows* environment, where organizations not only use one server per SAP system, but often use multiple servers for larger SAP systems to accomplish the required scaling. However, the unique capability of IBM i subsystems to separate workloads within a partition lets IBM i customers contain a complete SAP landscape in far fewer footprints (and/or partitions) than are typical of Windows or UNIX* operating-system platforms (Figure 1). IBM i subsystems even allow SAP systems to be installed alongside your current i applications within an existing partition. “The whole infrastructure costs much less to run—and not just in terms of staff time, but electricity and air-conditioning requirements, too,Ó Teppo says. "Moreover, the SAP software environment averages better than 99.9 percent uptime. The reliability of the IBM hardware is a huge factor in keeping our systems up and running, keeping fire fighting to a minimum and helping the IT team focus on improving the service we provide."

By leveraging the IBM i subsystem and taking advantage of LPAR and PowerVM* CPU virtualization technologies, users can maximize resource utilization by placing multiple SAP systems in just one or a small number of IBM Power* footprints. This saves space, energy and, most of all, the cost of administrating all of those servers.

Less Administration

Azard Riaz Jhan, senior IT projects manager at Hemas Holdings PLC in Sri Lanka, explains the savings at the industrial conglomerate. "We already had experience with the IBM System i platform and knew it to be highly reliable. The integration of the IBM DB2 database in the IBM i5/OS* operating system gave us a stable, low-cost platform that’s essentially ready-made for SAP ERP. In particular, SAP software on the System i platform offered rapid deployment with easy management. This provided a very close fit with our requirements as a mid-sized enterprise—we don’t have a large IT department, and it’s important to select solutions that can be deployed and supported by a relatively small internal team," he says. Hemas Holdings’ story is also online (www.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/strd-7cmfs6?opendocument&site=default&cty=en_us).

Fewer footprints and LPARs on i have an advantage that probably sounds familiar to the traditional IBM i customer. "In our experience, the System i platform requires far less administration than other enterprise-class servers," Jhan says. "In particular, there’s no need to employ a dedicated database administrator as you would for an Oracle-based solution, so the cost is lower."

SAP consultants are usually only needed to work at the SAP application layer to merge the existing business processes with the applications. On other platforms, this can be a complex task because they may need extensive database administration and many servers to implement an SAP landscape. However, the simplicity and integration of the IBM i platform as an SAP infrastructure creates industry-leading SAP total cost of ownership, as supported by an ITG study (www.ibm.com/solutions/sap/us/detail/resource/A698262E25130J35.html). The ease of use of the IBM i infrastructure allows most SAP on i customers to deploy and maintain their SAP infrastructures with existing in-house IT staff. IBM offers an SAP Basis Administration class for IBM i, which provides detailed education. Other customers hire SAP on i consultants for education and/or special projects. Even the IBM Rochester Lab Services organization has started a consultancy practice for SAP on i (www.ibm.com/systems/services/labservices).

A commonly used resource for SAP on i information is the SAP Community Network (www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/db4). This broad Web site includes a forum dedicated to the SAP on i community that’s moderated by the SAP on i development team in Germany. Through the Basis course and the Internet forums—not to mention SAP, IBM and independent consultants—you’ll find ample opportunities for your staff to learn the few SAP on i skills they need.

"IBM System i is a very reliable and highly available platform for our business-critical SAP software environment," Jhan says. "What’s more, it actually offers lower total cost of ownership than any comparable platform that we considered—thanks largely to the fact that it requires so little administration."

The Perfect Combination

You can run SAP NetWeaver applications while still taking advantage of the integration and simplicity that comes with the IBM i platform. Your IBM i already includes everything you need to run SAP out of the box. Only SAP NetWeaver has one—and only one—fully optimized and tested stack from the hardware to the operating system to the database. Any other infrastructure would have variations, such as which database you’re using for a given operating system, which operating systems you’re using for a given vendor database or which combination SAP tests on. Every test and benchmark run at IBM and SAP for IBM i uses the same infrastructure combination. There’s no need to piece an infrastructure together for SAP when you choose IBM i, and only IBM i can offer that level of hardware/operating system/database integration from one source. When you combine that strength with the level of development partnership between the IBM and SAP labs, you can see that the IBM i is truly optimized for SAP.

You can find more information at the SAP on IBM i Web site (www.ibm.com/systems/i/support/erp/index.html) or by e-mailing the IBM/SAP competence center at isicc@de.ibm.com.