In order to take advantage of the opportunities available in today’s economy, organizations are experiencing increasingly fast growth of their SAP solution landscapes. This often leads to required changes for operating systems and/or databases. Migrating SAP landscapes to new technologies (such as SAP HANA and more efficient platforms like Linux) needs to be handled carefully, as many SAP applications are mission-critical and require 24×7 availability. Traditional upgrades and platform migrations can cause prolonged downtime, costing companies hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars.
Not all industries and companies need minimized downtime to migrate, but if you consider industries such as healthcare and life sciences that need always-available applications to run their business, there is an important business need to ensure high availability for mission-critical systems during migrations. The same is the case for manufacturing companies with 24×7 production plants.
Sivantos, a German medical device producer, had a need to build up independent organizational structures, processes and IT architecture after a spin-off from Siemens Audiology. The existing IT landscape wasn’t ready for migration. That’s why Sivantos planned a heterogeneous platform migration from IBM AIX to Windows Server 2008—across Sivantos companies and continents (U.S. to Germany). Sivantos wanted to build their own IT landscape to run the SAP environment on its own premises in Erlangen, Germany. But the downtime had to accommodate workload during cutoff to go-live. To handle this challenge, Sivantos employed Dell ZeroIMPACT migration, using the Dell software tool SharePlex.
Dell ZeroIMPACT migration, when used in conjunction with SharePlex:
- Eliminates planned outages during migration to ensure continued end-user productivity
- Offers multiple configurations for highly customized implementations
- Provides on-time, on-budget, error-free migration to maximize the investment of new platforms
- Is backed by business-critical support, which provides expertise and practical experience
- Validates performance in new environment before migration using our test harness option
Using SharePlex, Dell can help organizations minimize downtime and maintain high availability without impact on the source system. SharePlex uses a streaming process outside the database, minimizing the impact on database performance. It also employs a unique, log-based replication technology to ensure data accuracy—providing data integrity in-flight without affecting or changing the live source application.
Using this method, Sivantos was able to perform data migration, independent of productive system downtime, by building a staging system to install and test the new environment with a copy of their database. After this step, a full database import was made to the new production system, then database changes were synchronized and reconciled on the new production system. Finally, the users were switched to the target system after database migration was complete and tested.
In the end the SAP productive downtime was less than three hours.
This replication method supports all current SAP data types. Whether upgrading a legacy platform, migrating to a new platform or moving to the Cloud, SharePlex enables large organizations to affordably evolve and modernize their SAP infrastructure.
Dell Services recently hosted a webinar with experts discussing the platform migration project at Sivantos, including a live demo of Dell ZeroIMPACT and SharePlex. Watch the video replay of the webinar to learn more:
For further details you can contact a Dell representative.
We hope you’ll join us this October at Dell World 2015, where you can hear more about Dell solutions for SAP both in the Main Track “On the way to a Smart Factory” including Dell Services for SAP – Session (Code MT65) and in the Enterprise User Forum Track (Code Sn4) “Business, applications, infrastructure, SAP. Simplify the Complexity with Dell Engineered Solutions for SAP.”