Oracle for SAP Technology Update, Volume 24 (2015)

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No. 24a Oracle for SAP, December 2015www.oracle.com/sap

Oracle SAPfor® ®

T E C H N O L O G Y U P D A T E

DATABASE IN-MEMORY

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D E A R S A P C U S T O M E R ,

Oracle provides the world’s most complete, open, and integrated technology stack including database, business software, operating systems, servers, and storage. Oracle technologies make SAP applications run better.

The relationship of Oracle Corporation and SAP SE has been based on our long history, a rich heritage of joint developments and a bright future – for the benefit of mutual customers.

Oracle will support SAP Business Suite and SAP BW as long as SAP will be supporting them. As per SAP Note 1951491, with SAP NetWeaver 7.4 SP08, SAP is introducing innovation to take advantage of new technical capabilities of the

Oracle Database platform (i.e. Core Data Services); and as per SAP Note 2133079 Oracle Database 12c In-Memory.

Both companies have had an ongoing commitment to our tens of thousands of joint customers for over 27 years. Our recently renewed and longstanding reseller and support agreements provide enhanced access to Oracle Database technology and world class customer support.*The Oracle product strategy provides flexibility and choice across the IT infrastructure. A growing majority of mid-size to the largest enterprise SAP customers, in every industry, entrust their application deployments to the Oracle Database.

By choosing the Oracle Database and Database options, SAP customers significantly benefit through the on-going innovations without disruption. By taking a closer look, at least eight differentiators have been identified which will explain in detail why Oracle Database is the first choice for running SAP applications. They bring best performance and scalability, deployment flexibility, availability, reliability, disaster recovery, security, managea-bility, self management, support for very large databases, support for database consolidation and the integration of hardware and software. All SAP customers can enjoy the benefits of the features and functions of the Oracle Database to optimize their SAP applications.

Oracle Database In-Memory for SAP NetWeaver-based Products, is available to SAP customers (see SAP Note 2178980). The new Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features included in Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression, as well as Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) with row-level locking on Oracle Exadata and Oracle SuperCluster is planned to be certified in Q4. Oracle Multitenant option will be available for SAP customers in 2016. Please see more on page 5.

* www.oracle.com/sap

Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together

3Oracle provides a complete IT database and infrastructure stack to run SAP applications

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is engineered to consolidate all of your SAP – and non-SAP Databases into a private Database Cloud environment. It delivers the highest performance and most available platform for running the private Oracle Database Cloud for all types of database workloads including Online Transacti-on Processing (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0), and Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW 7.0 and higher). The Exadata Database Machine is ready to tackle your largest and most important database workload – and often run them 10 times faster or even more – deployed by a fast growing number of SAP customers today.

Oracle SuperCluster is the first general-purpose engineered system that combines the computing power of the new SPARC processor, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database per-formance of Oracle Exadata storage, and the accelerated middleware processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud on SAP kernel 6.40 and higher. Oracle redefines the economics of enterprise computing with a complete refresh and expansion of its SPARC M6 and T5 server portfolio providing customers the industry’s best value with leading price/performance.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is an engineered system that radically simplifies the way customers install, deploy, and manage converged infrastructures, which can be used as virtualization platform for database and application. The Oracle Database Appliance is a new way to take advantage of the world’s most popular Oracle Database, in a single, easy-to-deploy and -manage system. It’s a complete package of software, server, storage, HA and networking that’s engineered for simplicity; saving time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of database workloads. Oracle Linux 7 is the latest Linux version of Oracle for your SAP infrastructure computing needs. It is fast – delivers best performance for SAP – is up to date – brings the latest innovations to customers; is reliable – provides data integrity, better security, and improved application uptime; and is optimized for Oracle Databases underneath SAP. Oracle VM Server for x86 is a free server virtualization solution that makes SAP and other enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.

The Oracle development teams on site at SAP SE in Walldorf, Germany continue to work together with SAP developers to ensure that SAP customers will always have access to the latest optimized Oracle technologies ensuring performance, reliability and innovation. The Oracle for SAP Service & Support team offers Advanced Customer Services (ACS) that include health checks, workshops, database migrations, performance, tuning and ACS Oracle Solaris Services for SAP environments, including Assisted Services Engagements (Analysis/- Enhancement and SAP Readiness Service for IT Infrastructure).

For more information or to see current and previous editions go to: www.oracle.com/sap We welcome your comments and questions. Please contact us at: [email protected]

Sincerely,

Gerhard Kuppler

Vice President SAP AlliancesOracle Corporation

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C O N T E N T S

Please download the complete version of the Oracle for SAP Technology Update No. 24a

www.oracle.com/sap

Hardware and Software

Engineered to Work Together

Special Infrastructure Edition

Editorial

Oracle Database 12c for SAP: Roadmap, Base Certification Features and Options

Implementing a Data Management Infrastructure for SAP with Oracle Database Options and Packs

Benchmark Results Reveal the Benefits of Oracle Database In-Memory for SAP Applications

Why Oracle Database and Engineered Systems for SAP

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at AmerisourceBergen, USA

Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Jet Infosystems, Russia

Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Daiwa House, Japan

Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Acquedotto Pugliese, Italy

SAP Customers benefiting from Oracle Exadata Technology

SAP on Oracle Database at Petrolub Fuchs

Oracle Mission-Critical Support Services for SAP Customers

Joint Marketing Statement Relating to the Reseller Agreement

Oracle DB and ES related Notes for SAP

Oracle and SAP: a partnership based on sustainability and innovation

Simplify IT and reduce TCO: Oracle‘s End-to-End, Integrated Infrastructure for SAP Data Centers

Why more and more SAP customers are migrating to Solaris

Building simplified SAP Data Centers with Oracle’s complete Infrastructure Stack

SAP LVM and the Oracle Stack: simplify and automate management of your SAP Infrastructure

Oracle Security Solutions for SAP environments

SPAR Austria Group increases employee efficiency with background Single Sign-On

End-to-End services and support for SAP customers

Highest Availability for your SAP landscape with Oracle HA and DRSAP

Why Oracle Database runs best on Oracle servers and storage

Engineered for innovation, efficiency and simplicity: Oracle engineered systems for SAP

Customer Example: Atos and SAP on Oracle SuperCluster

iQor runs SAP on Oracle SuperCluster

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O R A C L E D A T A B A S E 1 2 c F O R S A P : R O A D M A P, B A S E C E R T I F I C A T I O N F E A T U R E S A N D O P T I O N S

Phase 4, planned for 2016, will complete the certification process by allowing SAP customers to use Oracle Multi-tenant. Oracle Multitenant allows for the consolidation of many databases into a single container database. This is a completely new database architecture and requires a considerable Oracle/SAP integration effort.

For more information about new features included in phase 1 see the section “Base Certification Features” in this article. For details about the features and options included in phases 2, 3, and 4 see the article “Imple-menting a Data Management Infrastructure for SAP with Oracle Database Options and Packs” on page 9 (especially the Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression, Oracle Database In-Memory, and Oracle Multitenant sections).

Base Certification Goals

Standard maintenance for Oracle Database 11g (11.2.0.4) ended on January 31, 2015. The Extended Support phase, which is restricted to three years, has started as of February 2015. For Oracle Database version 11.2.0.4 Oracle offers Extended Support until May 31, 2017 at no additional cost. For more information see SAP Note 2098258.

For the joint benefit of our customer base, Oracle and SAP agreed to split the certification process into several phases. Segmenting the rollout in stages, allows for the Oracle 12c Database to be made generally available as early as possible and ensures sufficient overlap with Oracle Data-base 11g. Oracle and SAP have broken the “terminal release” custom (certification of release x.2 only; no certi-fication of release x.1) valid for more than 10 years.


The Future of the Database Has Begun

In June of 2014, Larry Ellison announced the coming of the new Oracle 12c Database. His presentation was titled “The Future of the Database Begins Soon”. Several months later we can announce that his vision of the predicted future is now. Oracle Database 12c (12.1.0.2) has been released, and is certified for use with SAP applications as of March 2015. Features and options which are not included in the initial certification are scheduled for a staged rollout.

Oracle Database 12c for SAP Certification Roadmap*

Certification Phases

Oracle and SAP have agreed to certify Oracle Database 12c for SAP applications in four phases (see figure 1).

Phase 1, called Base Certification, has already been completed in March 2015. Included are all features and options that have been previously available in Oracle Database 11g plus several Oracle Database 12c features which are either completely transparent or require only minimal integration efforts.

Phase 2, completed in June 2015 is the first to offer major new Oracle Database 12c options. The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory option is now available for SAP customers.

Phase 3, completed in Q4 2015, add the new Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features included in Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression, as well as Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) with row-level locking on Oracle Exadata and Oracle SuperCluster.

*For the updated Oracle for SAP roll-out plan please see

Figure 1: Oracle Database 12c for SAP Certification Roadmap*

Base Certification(Q1 2015)

Oracle DatabaseIn-Memory(Q2 2015)

ADO/ILM FeaturesHybrid Columnar Compression

(Q4 2015)

Oracle Multitenant(CY 2016)

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/oradb12c-sap-certification-roadmap-2506113.pdf

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Base Certification Features

Advanced Compression

Customers running SAP applications on Oracle Database 11g can already choose from a variety of compression features: Index Key Compression and Compressed Index-Organized Tables (IOTs) are standard database features. OLTP Compression for structured data and SecureFiles Compression for unstructured data are provided by Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression.

Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression comes with many new features. Some of them are related to information lifecycle management support, which will be available for SAP customers as of certification phase 2. However, there are several Advanced Compression Option features in-cluded in phase 1 that can be utilized today within SAP environments:

Advanced Index Compression is a new form of index compression. Creating or rebuilding an index using Ad-vanced Index Compression reduces the size of unique and non-unique indexes, while still providing efficient access to the indexes. Benefits include:

Table 1: SAP Notes related to Oracle Database 12c (as of June 30, 2015)

• Advanced Index Compression works well on all sup-ported indexes, including those indexes that are not good candidates with the existing Index Key Com-pression.

• Advanced Index Compression works at the block level to provide the best compression for each block. This means that users don’t need knowledge of data character-istics – Advanced Index Compression automatically chooses the right compression per block.

Advanced Network Compression can be used to com-press the data to be transmitted at the sending side and then uncompress it at the receiving side to reduce the network traffic. Advanced Network Compression reduces the size of the data to be transmitted over a network connection. Benefits include:

• Increased effective network throughput: Compression allows transmission of large data in less time. SQL query response becomes faster due to the reduced transmission time.

• Reduced bandwidth utilization: Compression saves bandwidth by reducing the data to be transmitted, allowing other applications to use the freed-up band-width. This also helps in reducing the cost of providing network bandwidth.

Advanced Network Compression can only be used if both the Database/Instant Client and the Database Server are upgraded to 12.1.0.2.

In Oracle Database 11g, structured table data compression(OLTP compression) is not supported for tables with more than 255 columns. In Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression, the 255-columns limit is removed. On the surface this seems to be a minor improvement, how-ever tables having more than 255 columns are commonly found in almost all SAP systems.

A particularly interesting example is discussed in SAP Notes 1835008 and 1892354: Several application opti-mizations implemented by SAP can only be used, if some tables traditionally implemented as cluster tables are declustered. As the data in these cluster tables is normally stored in a compressed manner by SAP, customers find that the tables can grow considerably when they are con-verted to transparent tables. Unfortunately some of the declustered tables have more than 255 columns. The

Note No. Note Title

DB: General Information

DB: Patches

DB: Instance Configuration

Engineered Systems

1914631

2133079

2138262

2178980

19152991915301191530219153151915317

2064206

19153131915316

2145572

1888485

2145628

2087004

DB: Features and Options

DB: Installation and Upgrade

DB: Administration: BR*Tools

Central Technical Note for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

Oracle Database 12c : Integration in SAP Environment

Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression for SAP Systems

Using Oracle Database In-Memory with SAP NetWeaver-based Products

Troubleshooting Software Installation for 12.1.0.2Database Software 12.1.0.2 Installation on UnixDatabase Software 12.1.0.2 Installation on WindowsDatabase Upgrade Scripts for 12.1.0.2Migrating to Software Owner ‘oracle‘

Database Upgrade to 12.1.0.2 with Grid Infrastructure

Current Patch Set for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)Database: Patches for 12.1.0.2

Grid Infrastructure: Patches for 12.1.0.2

Database Parameters 12.1.0.2

Exadata/Supercluster: Patches for 12.1.0.2

BR*Tools Support for Oracle Database 12c

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Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression could not help to reduce their size. With the Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression Option, it is now possible to compress and manage the data residing in these very wide tables.

For more information about Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression for SAP Systems see SAP Note 2138262.

Active Data Guard

Data Guard – the functionality needed to set up standby databases – is included in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Active Data Guard is an extra option. In Oracle Database 11g it offers additional features such as Auto-matic Block Repair and Fast Incremental Backup. Active Data Guard Far Sync, the main new feature with Oracle Database 12c, allows customers to combine high performance (a characteristic of asynchronous data shipping) and zero data loss (a characteristic of synchro-nous data shipping) across large distance WANs.

For details see the article „Implementing a Data Manage-ment Infrastructure for SAP with Oracle Database Op-tions and Packs“ (Data Guard and Active Data Guard section) on page 17.

Backup and Recovery

Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) provides a com-prehensive foundation for efficiently backing up and recovering the Oracle Database. It is designed to work intimately with the server, providing block-level cor-ruption detection during backup and restore operations. RMAN optimizes performance and space consumption during backup through the use of file multiplexing and backup set compression. RMAN also integrates with Oracle Secure Backup, as well as third party media ma-nagement products, for tape backup. Cross Platform Backup and Restore enables you to transport data across platforms by using full and incremental backup sets.

The Oracle Database 12c, allows you to transport data across platforms using either full or incremental backups, using image copies or backup. To perform cross-platform backups using backup sets, the destination database must be Oracle 12c or later. This newly added feature simplifies platform migration and minimizes read-only downtime on the source database.

While RMAN remains the most popular tool to perform Oracle Database backups, another commonly used method for taking database backups is to create a storage snapshot of all files in the database. Mount the snapshot on a dif-ferent server (other than the one that runs the production database) and copy the data to a tertiary storage such as tape. Thus offloading the backup processing from the production server. Storage Snapshot Optimization en-ables you to use third-party technologies to take a storage snapshot of your database without the need for putting the database in BACKUP mode.

Snapshots taken this way are “crash-consistent”, provided the storage product adheres to specific guidelines outlined in Oracle documentation. Crash-consistent backups can be opened and used after undergoing a full crash recovery. However, they cannot be reliably used for point-in-time recovery, as the redo logs do not contain sufficient infor-mation to remove the data files‘ inconsistencies.

Alternatively, snapshots taken in backup mode, i.e. ALTER DATABASE [BEGIN|END] BACKUP, remove the point-in-time recovery restriction. However, each database needs to be placed in this mode before the snapshot is taken, and taken out of this mode when the snapshot completes. This complexity is magnified when the procedure must be done for tens, hundreds, or thousands of databases. In addition, during this mode, whole block images are written to redo logs as they are changed, inducing additional I/O activity.

With Oracle Database 12c, the RECOVER .. SNAP-SHOT TIME command, storage snapshots taken without the database in backup mode can be recovered in one step, whether to the current time or a specific point-in-time after the snapshot was taken, without any additional procedures. By supporting all types of recovery opera-tions using these snapshots, this optimization effectively eliminates the need for backup mode and its associated complexity and overhead, freeing the DBA‘s time to focus on more critical production tasks.


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ACFS Support

If you work with Exadata, you are probably aware that ACFS has not been supported until now. ACFS is now supported on Exadata, if you are running Grid Infra-structure version 12.1.0.2 or later. In SAP environments this can be used for SAP shared file systems (/sapmnt, etc.).

However, it is not meant as an alternative for running databases on ASM. Oracle Databases have to stay on ASM using the Exadata Storage nodes. This is the only suppor-ted configuration.

High Availability Network File Storage (HANFS) for Oracle Grid Infrastructure provides uninterrupted service of NFS V2/V3 exported paths by exposing NFS exports on Highly Available Virtual IPs (HAVIP) and using Oracle Clusterware agents to ensure that the HAVIPs and NFS exports are always online. If a cluster node fails, the HAVIP and NFS exports are automatically migrated to a surviving node.

The HANFS feature enables highly available NFS ser-vers to be configured using Oracle ACFS clusters. The HANFS cluster configurations may be built from your existing infrastructure or commodity servers and storage. This provides network services similar to ‚network filer‘ at the fraction of the cost.

Performance

The UNION and UNION ALL operators in SQL state-ments connect two or more branches (e.g. subqueries): <branch1> UNION <branch2>. Traditionally, in queries of this type, the branches execute one after another, mea-ning that only one branch is executed at a certain point intime, followed by the next branch, and so on in a serial manner. Oracle Database 12c introduces Concurrent Execution of Union and Union All Branches, meaning that one set of parallel servers will be executing one branch, a second set of parallel servers will be executing a different branch, and so on, all at the same time.

The ability to parallelize these branches will lead to much faster statement execution. In particular, it will improve SAP BW performance.

Manageability and Availability

Database administrators can now perform a variety of additional reorganization operations online using BR*Tools:

Online Move Partition: Starting with Oracle Database 12c, the ALTER TABLE ... MOVE PARTITION operation functions as a non-blocking online DDL command, while DML operations continue to execute uninterrupted on the partition that is being moved. Ad-ditionally, global indexes are maintained when a partition is moved, so that a manual index rebuild is no longer required.

Move Datafile Online: Prior to Oracle Database 12c, moving datafiles has always been an offline task. There were certain techniques you could employ to minimize that downtime, but you couldn‘t remove it completely. Oracle Database 12c includes an enhancement to the ALTER DATABASE command to allow datafiles to be moved online.

Rebuild Index-Organized Tables: Because index-organized tables are stored as B-tree indexes, you can encounter fragmentation as a consequence of inserts, updates and deletes. However, you can use the ALTER TABLE...MOVE ONLINE statement to rebuild an index-organized table and reduce this fragmentation.

For more information see SAP Notes 1856270 and 2087004.

Microsoft Windows

Oracle Database 12c supports the use of an Oracle Home User, which can be specified at installation time. The Oracle Home User is introduced to host Oracle Services for greater security using a low privileged non-admini-strator account. Oracle Home User can be a Windows Built-in Account or a standard Windows User Account (not an Administrator account). This account is used for running Windows services for Oracle Home. For enhanced security, Oracle recommends using a standard Windows User Account (instead of a Windows Built-in Account).

For more information see SAP Note 1915302.

9Oracle Database Options and Packs for SAP Customers

I M P L E M E N T I N G A D A T A M A N A G E M E N T I N F R A S T R U C T U R E F O R S A P W I T H O R A C L E D A T A B A S E O P T I O N S A N D P A C K S

Introduction

Database Editions

Oracle Database is available in five editions, each suitable for different development and deployment scenarios. However, only Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is certified and supported in SAP environments, as SAP applications are very demanding and cannot be run efficiently without the enterprise computing features provided by Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.

Database Options and Managements

In addition, Oracle offers several database options, management packs, and other products that enhance the capabilities of Oracle Database for specific purposes. They extend the power of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition to meet customer- or application-specific requirements in the areas of efficient use of disk space, performance and scalability, high availability, security and compliance, data warehousing and big data, and manageability.

Options and Packs in SAP Environments

This article is about database options and management packs for SAP customers. There are some differences

between a pure Oracle Database and an Oracle Database for SAP perspective:

• An option or pack offered by Oracle may not be certified for / supported by SAP. This article discusses only options and packs that are certified or planned to be certified in the near future. If in doubt, check the latest version of SAP Note 105047.

• Even if an option is certified, the use of some of its features may not be permitted. As this is an overview article, not all details can be discussed. If in doubt, again, check SAP Note 105047.

• Due to peculiarities of the SAP data model or application design, an Oracle Database option or management pack may not be optional, but required. E.g. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on Oracle Database requires Oracle Partitioning.

• From a pure Oracle perspective, an option or pack is licensed separately. However, an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition license bought from SAP (ASFU) already includes some (but not all supported) options and packs without additional payment. For details see SAP Note 740897.

Figure 1: Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Database Options (certified and required, or certified and optional) and Enterprise Manager Packs (certified and required, or certified and optional).

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Challenge: In more and more situations today the distribution of the data on disk turns out to be a problem:

(a) Single queries or complex batch jobs accessing a certain subset of the table data need too much time to complete.

(b) Data load (SAP BW) is either slow, because it must update many indexes; or indexes are dropped and rebuilt, in order to reduce load time, but this slows down user queries.

(c) Data archiving results in heavily fragmented databases.

(d) Customer wants to implement information lifecycle management (see Oracle DB 12c section of this presentation).

Value Proposition: Oracle Partitioning divides tables and indexes into smaller units (called partitions) and forces all data to be stored in the appropriate unit. Partitions can be accessed and managed individually and independently from each other. Therefore:

(a) Ideally a query now finds all relevant data in one

single partition and can ignore all other partitions („partition pruning“). This can reduce the runtime considerably.

(b) If the indexes defined on a partitioned table are partitioned as well, individual index partitions can be dropped and rebuilt while all other partitions remain untouched.

(c) The data archiving strategy can be based on the partition structure, and this can avoid disk space fragmentation.

(d) Partitioning is one of the basis technologies for information lifecycle management.

Certification/Support: Oracle Partitioning is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications.

Versions: Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Database 12c

Implementation: Partitioning (range partitioning) is configured and used by default in SAP BW on Oracle. In SAP OLTP systems, it can either be implemented using the SAP Partitioning Engine (which covers the data archiving issue) or by Oracle ACS for SAP.

Options, Packs and Database Versions

This article discusses Oracle Database options and manage-ment packs for SAP as of April 2015. At this point in time, the overwhelming majority of all SAP on Oracle installations are based on Oracle Database 11g. The certi-fication of Oracle Database 12c has already started with a base certification in March 2015. (for details see the article “Oracle Database 12c for SAP – Roadmap and Base Certification Features” on page 5.) The major Oracle Database 12c-specific options (Database In-Memory, Multitenant) and features (in particular those related to Information Lifecycle Management) will be certified in the near future and are therefore included in this overview.

Structure and Infrastructure

As we said before, database options extend the power of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition in the areas of efficient use of disk space, performance and scalability, high availa-bility, security and compliance, data warehousing and big data, and manageability. In this article, however, we will focus on one single aspect: Database options help implement structure. When the amount of data in one single database grows, when data coming from different sources or even multiple, previously independent databases are consoli-dated in one single data management infrastructure (as in Oracle Multitenant), the unstructured mass of data will become unmanageable at a certain point. Therefore consolidation requires differentiation. Or: Infrastructure requires structure.

Table and Index Partitioning

The common denominator of all issues mentioned above is the fact that by default (and by definition) a table in the database is an unordered set of records with no guaranteed physical sequence whatsoever, whereas from a user, application, or DBA perspective this set of data

may consist of certain subsets which should ideally be separated from other subsets. Oracle Partitioning allows users to implement such subsets by physically storing related data as closely together as possible.

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Under these circumstances, the situation shown on the left hand side is the worst that can be imagined: Each database block contains one record of each color. Or, to put it differently, all subsets of records having the same color are distributed over all blocks. This is the worst possible situation from an I/O perspective (a query looking for all records of a certain color needs to read 8 blocks), from a

Oracle Database Options and Packs for SAP Customers

Figure 2 explains why storing related data as closely to-gether as possible makes such a difference. It shows database blocks filled with records. The different colors represent criteria such as different months or different locations. And we assume that the applications accessing those data in most cases want to retrieve all records having the same color.

Figure 2: Table Partitioning – Physically store subsets of related data as closely together as possible

Advanced Compression (Oracle Database 11g)

Challenge: In more and more cases today the size and the expected future growth of the database becomes a problem. Aspects of this problem include: Storage cost, performance guarantees (SLAs), cloning and backup of database files within a reasonable time.

Value Proposition: Oracle Advanced Compression uses a different format for storing table data. Together with other compression technologies, which come with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (e.g. Index Key Compression), it helps reduce the database size by 50% or more. This is the essential benefit in the sense that this is the effect Advanced Compression is designed for. And if the source database is smaller, the creation of backup and other copies needs less time.

As an additional benefit customers using Advanced Compression may see a performance improvement. Additional (as opposed to essential) here means: It may, but it is not guaranteed to happen.

Certification/Support: Oracle Advanced Compression is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. Imple-mentations are supported by SAP.

Implementation: Oracle Advanced Compression can be implemented easily in SAP environments, as SAP provides the tool BRSPACE, which is aware of all SAP-specific requirements. For details check SAP Note 1431296.

memory perspective (even if all users work with records of the same color, all 8 blocks need to be cached completely in database memory), therefore from a performance perspective (too much I/O means unsatisfactory performance), from a database administration perspective (subsets of records having the same color cannot be managed independently), and from an ILM perspective (“hot” and “cold” data cannot be separated).

The situation shown on the right hand side, in contrast, is optimal (again: under the circumstances described above):

All records having the same color are now stored together in one and the same database block. This is optimal from an I/O perspective (a query looking for all records of a certain color needs to read only 1 block), from a memory perspective (if all users work with records of the same color, only 1 block needs to be cached in database memory),therefore from a performance perspective (significantly less I/O means significantly better performance), from a database administration perspective (subsets of records having the same color can be managed independently), and from an ILM perspective (“hot” and “cold” data can be separated).

Now, multiply the number of records and blocks shown on this slide. Then a partition is the subset of all blocks containing records of the same color.

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Advanced Compression (Oracle Database 12c)

Challenge: (a) Data compression in Oracle Database 11g has several limitations. In particular, tables having more than 255 columns cannot be compressed. (b) Data load is slowed down, if target tables are compressed.

(c) No support for automated Information Lifecycle Management.

Value Proposition: Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression lifts the 255-columns limitation and allows more tables to be compressed. Completely new features (Heat Map, Automatic Data Optimiz-ation) enable customers to implement deferred data compression and sophisticated Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies.

Certification/Support: Some new features included in Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression have already been certified in March 2015. Certification of the ILM features is planned for end of Q4 2015.

Implementation: Details will be provided at the time of certification.

Related Feature: Oracle Database 12c Hybrid Columnar Compression (which is not included in Advanced Compression, but is a feature available on Oracle‘s Engineered Systems) provides stronger compression algorithms particularly suited for “cold” (i.e. historical) data. Certification of HCC on Oracle Engineered Systems is also planned for end of Q4 2015.

The maximum disk space savings which can be achieved depend on the characteristics of the data and the data characteristics depend on the SAP applications used. Usually SAP BW (BI) data can be compressed more efficiently than SAP ERP (ECC) data, and SAP CRM data permit even higher disk space savings.

Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression offers more than OLTP and SecureFiles compression. Backup files created by RMAN and export files created by Data Pump can be compressed substantially, even if tables and inde-xes in the production database are already compressed. Additionally, redo log data can be compressed as well before being shipped from the production to a standby database (see the Data Guard section in this article).

On the left-hand side, figure 3 shows a typical Oracle Database which forms an integral part of an SAP (in this case: SAP ERP) system. Approximately one third of the allocated disk space is used for indexes (red), and two thirds contain table data (blue). Table data in turn can be divided into structured data (organized in columns) and unstructured data (e.g. PDF or image files).

Oracle Database 11g can compress all three types of data:

• Index Key Compression is available for indexes. Index- Organized Tables (IOTs) can be compressed as well. Both features are included in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and do not require Advanced Compression.

• OLTP Compression, a major feature of Advanced Com-pression, can be used to compress structured table data. It is not restricted to OLTP systems, but can be implemented in SAP BW systems as well.

• SecureFiles Compression (an Advanced Compression feature, too) can be used to compress unstructured table data.

If all features are implemented and all appropriate data-base objects are compressed, customers have seen 55% disk space savings on average. (This assumes a completely reorganized database. If a fragmented database has not been reorganized, the effects of reorganization and compression are combined, in which case customers have seen up to 80% disk space savings).

Figure 3: Oracle Database 11g Index Key Compression and Advanced Compression (OLTP Compression, SecureFiles Compression)


Information Lifecycle Management

Even more parameters can be introduced thanks to the new features in Oracle Database 12c Advanced Com-pression. One of them is location. When you have “hot” (current) and “cold” (historical) data in your database, and you have two different types of storage, too, then you can ask the question: Where? Where would like which data to be stored?

Using Partitioning in addition to Advanced Compression, you can – or rather: you can have the system – move data from one tablespace (= storage tier) to another, when they “cool down”, thus freeing up space on a more expensive storage tier for more important (“hot”) data. This is called (automatic) storage tiering.

Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC)

Finally, if you run Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Exadata or Oracle SuperCluster, you can introduce the question: How? How, i.e. using which algorithm, do you want data to be compressed?

In addition to OLTP and SecureFiles Compression, this Engineered Systems support Hybrid Columnar Com-pression. As the name implies, this technology utilizes a combination of both row and columnar methods for storing data. This hybrid approach achieves the com-pression benefits of columnar storage, while avoiding the performance shortfalls of a pure columnar format. The compression rations that can be achieved by using HCC are much higher than those seen with “normal” compres-sion. Therefore HCC is particularly suited for “cold” data.

Due to the missing row-level locking feature, it had not been possible to certify Oracle Database 11g Hybrid Columnar Compression for use in SAP environments. In Oracle Database 12c, however, this feature is available on Oracle Exadata and Oracle SuperCluster. On these machines it is now possible to implement (automatic) compression tiering. This means that, while “hot” data remain uncompressed, “warm” data may be compressed using the standard compression algorithms (Advanced Compression) and “cold” data using Hybrid Columnar Compression.

Base Certification Features

In Oracle Database 11g, the index and table compression features have several limitations. That is why Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression offers a new, more efficient index compression algorithm (Advanced Index Compression) and increases the maximum number of columns for tables to be compressed. For details see the article “Oracle Database 12c for SAP – Roadmap and Base Certification Features” on page 5.

Heat Map and Automatic Data Optimization

In addition to those improvements, Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression comes with two completely new features. Heat Map automatically tracks modification and query timestamps at the row and segment levels, providing detailed insights into how data is being accessed. Auto-matic Data Optimization (ADO) automatically moves and compresses data according to user-defined policies based on the information collected by Heat Map.

Deferred Compression

Based on the information provided in the Advanced Compression (Oracle Database 11g) section, it might seem that compression simply reduces the disk space needed, and has nothing to do with database structure. However, this is an illusion. Even in Oracle Database 11g, we need to distinguish between tables that benefit and tables that do not benefit from compression (if this were not the case, compression could be made the default), i.e. between tables that should and tables that should not be compressed.

Nevertheless, this is still a very basic and inflexible distinction. Take, e.g., an SAP BW table that is used for data load. On the one hand, such a table could be compressed, because for most of the time it is accessed in read-only mode. On the other hand, it should not be compressed, because this would slow down the load operations considerably. In Oracle Database 11g the recommendation is: Do not compress such a table.

Heat Map and Automatic Data Optimization allow you to introduce a new differentiating parameter: If a table or partition should be compressed, when would you like it to be compressed? In Oracle Database 11g compression happens immediately or not at all. In Oracle Database 12c you can specify that data should be loaded today and (automatically) compressed tomorrow.

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Figure 4: Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression – Support for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

Oracle Database In-Memory

Memory: The New Dual-Format Architecture

Oracle Database has traditionally stored data in a row format. This format is ideal for online transaction (OLTP) systems, as it allows quick access to all columns in a record. A column format database stores each of the attributes about a transaction or record in a separate column structure. This format is ideal for analytics, as it allows for faster data retrieval when only a few columns are selected but the query accesses a large portion of the data set.

But what happens, when your system is characterized by a mixed workload? Up until now you have been forced to pick just one format and suffer the tradeoff of either sub-optimal OLTP or sub-optimal analytics performance. The only way to optimize for both OLTP and analytics had been to copy data from OLTP systems to analytic systems using complex ETL processes that add a great deal of expense and latency.

Challenge: In more and more systems, meeting analytics performance requirements turns out to be a challenge. This is true for long-running queries in BW. However, it can also happen in OLTP systems, e.g. if a very flexible implementation of operational planning/reporting allows users to create many, slightly different query variants.

Value Proposition: Oracle Database 12c In-Memory allows administrators to dedicate a certain amount of database server memory to the Column Store – a

memory structure that stores data in column format instead of in row format. Setup of the Column Store is fast and easy. Having available in column format can improve query performance substantially.

Certification/Support: Oracle Database In-Memory is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications.

Versions: Oracle Database 12c

Implementation: For an overview and pointers to more detailed documents see SAP Note 2178980.

Oracle Database 12c In-Memory optimizes both analytics and mixed workload OLTP, delivering outstanding per-formance for transactions while simultaneously supporting real-time analytics, business intelligence, and reports. This breakthrough capability is enabled by the dual-format architecture of Oracle Database In-Memory. This archi-tecture eliminates the tradeoff by representing tables simultaneously using traditional row format and a new in-memory column format. The Oracle SQL Optimizer automatically routes analytic queries to the column format and OLTP queries to the row format, transparently deli-vering best-of-both-worlds performance. Oracle Database 12c automatically maintains full transactional consistency between the row and the column formats, just as it main-tains consistency between tables and indexes today.


Figure 5: Oracle Database 12c In-Memory – Dual memory format, single disk format

• One or several table column(s) may contain data thatare not relevant for DSS queries. Again the database administrator may wish to restrict the data to be kept in the in-memory column store, but in this case the goal is to define a vertical subset of the table data, i.e. to exclude one or more columns from the population process. And again it is possible to make this happen, because Oracle Database In-Memory allows administ-rators to specify different in-memory characteristics for different table columns.

• The Oracle Database has been optimized and tuned for decades to scale-up on SMP servers. Large SMP servers are well suited for in-memory workloads, too, because all memory is accessible to all processors over an extremely high speed Backplane. In addition to being able to scale up, however, Oracle Database In-Memory can also scale out to very high memory and CPU capacities by using all of the memory and processors in a cluster of servers (RAC). In such environments, all objects populated into memory will by default be distributed across all in-memory column stores in the cluster. On Oracle Engineered Systems, objects can also be duplicated. This means that an object (or part of an object, e.g. a partition) populated into the in-memory column store will have a mirrored copy placed on one of the other nodes in the RAC cluster. Duplicating data provides in-memory fault tolerance as it ensures data is still accessible via the in-memory column store even if a node goes down or is taken down for maintenance.

Disk: Nothing Has Changed

The new column format is a pure in-memory format. Tables are stored on disk using Oracle’s existing row-based (or – on Engineered Systems – hybrid columnar) formats. Since there is no persistent columnar storage format, there are no additional storage costs or storage synchronization issues. Nor is there a need to modify the database. Oracle Database 12c In-Memory can be implemented without a database migration or a table reorganization.

As a result, the new Oracle Database 12c In-Memory fea-ture is fully compatible with existing standard or optional database features such as table and index compression, table encryption, and table partitioning. It is also compatible with the scale-out architecture provided by Real Application Clusters (RAC) and with all existing high availability technologies (such as Data Guard). These features work exactly the same way with and without Oracle Database In-Memory.

Easy to Implement and Manage

In addition to being compatible at the database feature and application level, Oracle Database In-Memory is easy to implement and manage. Enabling Oracle Database In-Memory is as easy as setting the size of the in-memory column store and identifying tables or partitions to bring into memory. Background processes populate data from storage into in-memory columns while the database remains fully active and accessible.

Fine-Grained Control

An easy start based on intelligent defaults for typical situations – this is what Oracle customers expect. In addition, however, Oracle customers expect mechanisms, which allow for fine-grained control and tuning. Oracle Database 12c In-Memory provides such mechanisms. Examples are:

• Tables can contain “cold” data, which are neither up-dated anymore nor accessed by queries. If those tables are very large, it would be a waste of memory to keep them completely in the in-memory column store. Therefore administrators may want to restrict the population process to the data really needed by DSS queries. Table partitioning allows them to make this happen. If the table is partitioned in a useful way (e.g. by month), this internal structure can be used to define a horizontal subset of the table data to be kept in the in-memory column store.

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Challenge: When the workload on a database server increases (due to new application versions, additional applications, or more users), the traditional solution is to replace the existing server with a bigger one (scale-up). Big servers, however, are very expensive.

In order to guarantee high availability of the database server, traditionally a failover cluster is implemented. Such a solution, however, has at least two disadvan-tages:

(a) A failover cluster relies on the concept that, at any given moment, only one database instance running on one machine can be active. The other machine (most probably an expensive server, too) is always idle.

(b) When a problem on the primary machine is detec-ted, an Oracle Database Server instance needs to be started on the secondary machine. In this particular situation, startup can take up to 30 minutes – which means: up to 30 minutes unplanned downtime.

Value Proposition: Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows multiple instances to be up and running and to access the same database at the same time. As these instances can and in most cases do run on different machines, customers have the option to implement a

scale-out approach: 4, 6, or 8 small servers can handle the same workload as one big server. However, they are much cheaper. And they can be added as needed.

In this architecture, all Oracle instances are up and running at the same time. Therefore no restart is required. If one of the RAC servers fails, the other instances can take over. A reconnect of the affected users is a matter of seconds, not of minutes.To summarize all this in a few words: The value proposition of Oracle Real Application Clusters combines workload distribution, scalability, high availability, better manageability, and cost savings.

Certification/Support: Oracle Real Application Clusters is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications.


Implementation: Customers can use any general-pur-pose machine (Unix, Linux, or Windows) certified by SAP to build a RAC system. In addition, Oracle offers Engineered Systems (Exadata, SuperCluster), which make the implementation considerably easier. Oracle Grid Infrastructure provides a set of base technologies that simplify implementation and help save money.

Real Application Clusters (RAC)

Figure 6 illustrates the RAC benefits which have been mentioned before:Scalability: Using RAC, the scale-out approach, which is always supported on the SAP Application Server level,

can be implemented on the database level, too. In this example, 5 SAP Application Server instances, running on 5 different machines, are connected to 4 Oracle Database Server instances, running on 4 different machines.

Figure 6: Real Application Clusters (RAC) for scale-out and immediate (instance) failover


High Availability: If one of the Oracle instances goes down, the affected SAP instance(s) is/are automaticallyreconnected to one of the available Oracle instances. After this operation users can continue their work. The failover occurs within seconds.

Oracle Grid Infrastructure provides the base technologies that are required to enable RAC. It can be divided into two main components:

• In order to let multiple Oracle instances access the database files at the same time, a cluster file system is needed. Therefore Oracle provides Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Unlike other, third-party cluster file systems, it is optimized for Oracle Database files, and it comes for free.

• Oracle Clusterware is the cross-platform cluster softwarerequired to run the RAC option for Oracle Database. It enables the nodes to communicate with each other, allowing them to form a cluster of nodes which beha-ves as a single logical server. Similar to Oracle ASM, which eliminates the need for a third-party cluster file system, Oracle Clusterware eliminates the need for third-party cluster management software.

Oracle Clusterware can provide high availability and resource management for SAP resources just as it does for Oracle resources. Therefore Oracle/SAP Development has created an Oracle Clusterware tool, SAP Control (SAPCTL), to enable customers to easily manage SAP high availability resources.

Data Guard and Active Data Guard

Challenge: RAC provides high availability by multi-plying the number of Oracle instances. Such high availability, however, is restricted to the instance level. Even in a RAC-based system, the database re-mains a single point of failure. This means that DBA errors, data corruption, server or data center failures can make the whole system unavailable.

Value Proposition: Data Guard removes this single point of failure. The technology allows customers to set up a standby (shadow) database as a copy of the primary (production) database and then keep the two databases synchronized. Please note that Data Guard is included in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It is not an option.

However, Active Data Guard is an option. In Oracle Database 11g it offers additional features such as Auto-matic Block Repair and Fast Incremental Backup.

Active Data Guard Far Sync, the main new feature with Oracle Database 12c, allows customers to combine high performance (a characteristic of asynchronous data shipping) and zero data loss (a characteristic of synchronous data shipping).

Certification/Support: Oracle Data Guard is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. However, only physical standby databases are supported, logical standby databases are not.

Oracle Active Data Guard is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. However, Real-Time Query is not possible in SAP environments, because even report generation is not a read-only operation.


Implementation: Standard Oracle setup procedures apply. In the white paper “Oracle Standby Database” SAP describes BR*Tools support.

performance, however, often makes it impractical to implement zero data loss protection when large distances separate the primary and replica database(s). Rather than impact database performance, many enterprises will com-promise on data protection by implementing asynchro-nous replication and accept that an unrecoverable outage will result in varying degrees of data loss.

Data Guard can provide both zero data loss protection and near-immediate restoration of service should a production database become unrecoverable for any reason. This is accomplished using the combination of Data Guard synchronous redo transport and a replication-aware apply process at the standby database. The impact that any synchronous replication method can have on database

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Active Data Guard Far Sync, a new capability with Oracle Database 12c, eliminates the need to compromise by extending zero data loss protection to a replica database located at any distance from the primary database. Far Sync provides zero data loss protection for a production database by maintaining a synchronized standby database located at any distance from the primary location, and can do so without performance impact and with minimal cost or complexity. A new type of Data Guard destination called a far sync instance receives changes synchronously from a primary database and forwards them asynchronous-ly to a remote standby. Production can be quickly failed over, manually or automatically, to the remote standby database with zero data loss.

A far sync instance is a light-weight entity that manages only a control file and log files. It requires a fraction of the CPU, memory, and I/O of a standby database. It does not have user data files, nor does it run recovery. Its only purpose is to transparently offload a primary database of serving remote destinations. A far sync instance can save network bandwidth by performing transport compression using Oracle Advanced Compression.

Take for example an existing asynchronous Data Guard configuration with a primary in Boston and a standby in San Francisco. Upgrade to zero data loss simply by using Active Data Guard to deploy a far sync instance within synchronous replication distance of Boston (less than 150 miles). There is no disruption to the existing environment nor is there any requirement for proprietary storage, specialized networking, more database licenses, or complex management.

Figure 7: Active Data Guard Far Sync – High performance, zero data loss across large distance WAN

Oracle Multitenant

Challenge: Many SAP landscapes consist of a few large and a considerable number of small or very small systems. However, the existence of many small SAP systems based on as many independent database servers has several disadvantages:

• Many small systems (even virtualized ones) use too many hardware resources (memory, CPU)

• Too much time is spent for the administration of so many small database systems

Value Proposition: Oracle Multitenant reduces resource consumption by separating “container” and “plug-gable” databases. It simplifies administration by moving standard operations to the “container data-base” level.

Certification/Support: Oracle Multitenant is planned to be certified in 2016.

Version: Oracle Database 12c

Implementation: Details will be provided at the time of certification.

Oracle Database 12c Multitenant introduces a new architecture that enables customers to easily consolidate multiple databases, without changing their applications. This new architecture delivers all the benefits of managing many databases as one, yet retains the isolation and resource prioritization of separate databases.

Consolidation Approaches

Large enterprises may use hundreds or thousands of da-tabases. Often these databases run on different platforms on multiple physical servers. A database may use only a fraction of the server hardware capacity. This is an expen-sive approach which fails to maximize the usage of both the hardware and human resources.


Sharing of background processes, memory structures, system-wide metadata, and database files results in consi-derably decreased resource consumption. In addition, Oracle Database 12c Resource Manager is extended with specific functionality to control the competition for resources between PDBs within a CDB.

Manage Many Databases as One

By consolidating existing databases as pluggable data-bases, administrators can manage many databases as one. Benefits include:

• The investment of time and effort to patch one CDB results in patching all of its many PDBs. To upgrade all PDBs hosted in a CDB, simply upgrade the CDB and all hosted PDBs are upgraded “in-place”.

• Instead of executing separate database backups, admini-strators only require to back up their database at the CDB level. In other words, all PDBs consolidated into a container will be backed up as one, and administra-tors retain the flexibility to perform recovery operations at individual PDB level, if required.

• Administrators maintaining standby systems in another data center (using Data Guard or Active Data Guard) will only need to set up a standby configuration at the CDB level, to replicate all PDBs consolidated in that container.

A typical response to the management problem is to place multiple databases on each server (either as direct installs or using virtual machines). The problem is that the multiple database instances do not share background processes, system and process memory, or Oracle metadata. Another response is to logically separate the data into schemas (schema consolidation). The problem is that these virtual entities are difficult to manage, secure, and transport.

Oracle Multitenant Architecture

Oracle Database 12c Multitenant is based on an approach called database consolidation. It delivers a new architecture that allows one single Container Database (CDB) to hold many Pluggable Databases (PDBs). See figure 8.

An existing database can simply be “plugged into” a CDB. At any time, then, it can be unplugged and plugged into another CDB. Unplug/plug is even supported across Oracle Database software versions.

From the point of view of the client application connecting to the database server via Oracle Net, the PDB is the data-base. A PDB is fully compatible with a non-CDB – a rule also known as the PDB/non-CDB compatibility guarantee.

Resource Utilization and Resource Management

The many PDBs in a single CDB share its memory and background processes. This enables consolidation of many more databases compared to the old architecture, offering similar benefits to schema-based consolidation but with none of the major application changes required by that approach.

Horizontal partitioning of the Oracle data dictionary (a con-ceptual partitioning, not a physical table partitioning) removes the need to store and manage system-wide meta-data in every single database. The “lower” half (implemented in the CDB) holds the system-wide metadata – and nothing else, while the “upper” halves (implemented in the PDBs) hold application-specific metadata – and nothing else.

Creating pluggable databases, moving pluggable databases between containers, and cloning pluggable databases are done with new SQL commands and take just seconds. When the underlying file system supports thin provisioning, many terabytes can be cloned almost instantaneously.

Figure 8: Oracle Multitenant – New architecture for consolidating databases and simplifying operations

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Protecting Data in Transit: Oracle Network Encryption

In SAP environments, users do not directly connect to the Oracle Database server. They connect to an SAP application server instance, and the SAP application server instance in turn connects to the Oracle Database server. So, in this case, the application server instance is the Oracle client, and Oracle’s network encryption encrypts all data traveling between application server and database server.

Oracle’s network encryption requires Oracle software, which is not installed on end-user devices. Therefore other technologies or products must be used to protect the communication between SAP users and SAP appli-cation servers.

However, people do not only attempt to read data in transit, they can also try to intercept and modify them. Therefore, in addition to network encryption, Oracle also supports crypto-checksumming to ensure data integrity. Both encryption and crypto-checksumming are completely transparent to the application, and in both areas the system administrator can chose between several algorithms.1

1Please note: As of June 2013, network encryption and crypto-checksumming are no longer part of Oracle Advanced Security. They are included without additional cost in all licensed editions of all supported releases of the Oracle database.

Oracle Advanced Security

Protecting Data at Rest: Oracle Transparent Data Encryption

Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is applied to data in the files which make up the production databa-se (as opposed to backup files, which will be discussed in the next paragraph). As the name indicates, TDE is transparent to the application; no application changes arerequired. Starting with SAP NetWeaver version 7.20, you can use BRSPACE to set the encryption attribute on a tablespace level. BRSPACE can also be used to manage the wallet, which stores the encryption keys.

Transparent Data Encryption comes in two flavors. The first one (available since Oracle Database 10g) is called Column Encryption, because you select just a few of the many SAP tables, or even individual columns of these tables that contain sensitive data and encrypt them. Everything else remains unencrypted. The second one (available sinceOracle Database 11g) is called Tablespace Encryption. It allows you to encrypt complete tablespaces, which may contain hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of tables.

Protecting Data at Rest: Oracle Backup Encryption

If you decide to use column encryption in your database backups then it is generally much easier to steal backups of the database files than can the production database itself. Therefore, the third set of features in Oracle Advanced Security is related to backup encryption.

Challenge: In order to read or update data in an Oracle Database that is the data store of an SAP application, the obvious and only choice for legitimate users is this particular application. Attackers, however, who want to bypass SAP‘s user management and access control, could use either a network sniffing tool to capture data in transit or some kind of file editor to read data at rest, i.e. in a database file copy.

Value Proposition: Oracle Advanced Security is a bundle of features that allow administrators to encrypt data and make it harder for attackers to understand what they see. Oracle Network Encryption can be used to protect data in transit, while Oracle Transparent

Data Encryption and Backup Set Encryption protect data in the production database files as well as their backup copies.

Certification/Support: Oracle Advanced Security is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. Implementations are supported by SAP.


Implementation: Advanced Security features are activated either via the Oracle Net configuration or using SAP‘s BR*Tools. Details can be found in SAP Notes 973450, 974876, and 1324684.


Privileged database users – like database administrators – can use DBA tools and directly connect to the databa-se, thus bypassing SAP’s security checks (see figure 10). Against this kind of threat, encryption does not help. If someone is able to connect successfully using a sufficient-ly privileged account, and if he or she then sends a query, the Oracle Database will generously deliver the result set to this user. If the requested data is encrypted, Oracle will decrypt it. From an Oracle Database perspective the request sent by this user seems to be a perfectly valid request.

This can happen, because traditionally, if you were ex-plicitly granted a sufficient number of system privileges, you implicitly received object privileges for all tables as well. For decades people found this acceptable. Recently, however, companies began to ask: Is it really necessary and is it really desirable that a database administrator,

Figure 9: Oracle Advanced Security – Encrypt data in transit or at rest

If you simply backup your database files, only those co-lumns that are encrypted in the production database files are encrypted in the backup copies. However, combining Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN) and Oracle Advanced Security, whole backup sets (that is, all data) can be encrypted.

Database Vault

who is supposed to manage the database structure, is by default able to read (and even change) all data in the database?

Oracle Database Vault

A solution to this problem requires a new privilege management strategy in the database. This strategy should continue to provide system privileges and object privileges, but it should get rid of implicitly granted object privileges.

This is exactly what Oracle Database Vault does. It repla-ces the traditional, somewhat clumsy privilege manage-ment strategy with a new, more flexible one. It elimina-tes all implicit grants and instead provides a means to explicitly define access rights as well as the circumstances under which they are effective. This goes far beyond traditional user – privilege or user – role correlations.

Challenge: Data encryption does not help, if attackers do not use third-party tools, but Oracle tools to bypass the SAP applications. This is particularly dangerous in the case of privileged database users (database administrators). And it is particularly rele-vant, if database administration is outsourced or data are stored in the cloud.

Value Proposition: Oracle Database Vault replaces the traditional database privilege management strategy with a new, more flexible and more powerful one. It goes far beyond traditional user–privilege or user–

role correlations. Oracle Database Vault allows com-panies to implement and enforce concepts such as the segregation of duties or the four eyes principle.

Certification/Support: Oracle Database Vault is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. Implementations are supported by SAP.


Implementation: Database Vault is managed using the Oracle Database Vault Administrator (DVA).

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Figure 10: Oracle Database Vault – Privileged user access control and analysis

Oracle Database Vault allows companies to implement and enforce concepts such as the segregation of duties or the four eyes principle.

Oracle Database Vault for SAP

Oracle Database Vault, as sold by Oracle, is just a tool box. It is true that it comes with predefined realms and roles, but those are realms for system tables and very general (if fundamental) roles. These predefined components allow Oracle Database Vault to be functional and allow you to use it, but they do not protect your application-specific data. That is because Oracle does not know anything about your applications and your data. Oracle can only give you a toolbox, and it is up to you to determine your security requirements and translate these requirements into an access control policy.

But there is an important difference. As long as customers use home grown applications, it is simply not plausible for Oracle to do more. However, if thousands or tens of thousands of companies use a certain standard application and the security requirements of all these companies are (at least to a certain point) identical, because they are results of the application design, then it makes much more sense for Oracle to analyze the requirements and implement a basic security policy.

Oracle has actually done this, saving customers the time that is needed to implement the boring basics of an application-specific security policy, and protecting these companies from forgetting to implement some of the basics. As of today, Oracle provides a whole family of predefined application-specific Oracle Database Vault policies, and Oracle Database Vault for SAP is a member of this family.

Real Application Testing (RAT)

Challenge: Database software patches or upgrades, modified database server configurations, and the im-plementation of new database features/options can improve performance, availability and security of the database server and the whole system. In particular if the implementation must take into account custo-mer- or application-specific characteristics, adminis-trators will want to know in advance how the new feature or configuration works in the production system.

Value Proposition: The main problem with many test systems is that the workload applied to them is smaller than or different from the workload of the production system, and that a new feature or configuration works well in the test system, but not in the production

system. Therefore Oracle Real Application Testing allows customers to capture production database workload and replay it on a test system. Combining these two steps, allows for the true effects of the changes to be understood using a real-life workload before they are implemented in production systems.

Certification/Support: Oracle Real Application Testing is certified for all SAP NetWeaver applications. Implementations are supported by SAP.


Implementation: As this is a database-only feature, no SAP tool support is required. For details see SAP Note 1426980.


Oracle Real Application Testing enables you to perform real-world testing. By capturing production database workloads and assessing the impact of system changes before production deployment, it minimizes the risk of instabilities associated with changes. Oracle Real Appli-cation Testing comprises two components: Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer.

Database Replay

Load testing today is generally done using tools that allow testing teams to generate synthetic workloads based on what they expect users to do on a system. These workloads can then be replayed by application virtual users, which simulate the end users by submitting requests to the application. Although widely used, this approach has a number of shortcomings when it comes to testing database level changes:

• Creating the synthetic workload can take a considerable time and requires programming expertise.

• User behavior is not well understood, so many possible workflows are often missed in the synthetic tests.

• Production scale database concurrency is near impos-sible to simulate with these tools.

• A full application stack is required for testing as these tools simulate end users.

The Database Replay feature included in Oracle Real Appli-cation Testing provides DBAs and system administrators with the ability to faithfully, accurately and realistically rerun actual production workloads, including online user and batch workloads, in test environments. By capturing the full database workload from production systems, including all concurrency, dependencies and timing, Database Replay enables you to realistically test system changes by essentially recreating production workloads on the test system, something that a set of scripts can ne-ver duplicate. With Database Replay, DBAs and system administrators can test:

• Database upgrades, patches, parameter, schema changes, etc.

• Configuration changes such as conversion from a single instance to RAC, ASM, etc.

• Storage, network, interconnect changes.

• Operating system, hardware migrations, patches, upgrades, parameter changes.

SQL Performance Analyzer

Database Replay delivers half of what Oracle calls Real Application Testing; the other half is provided by another tool, SQL Performance Analyzer. The main difference between these two tools is the scope involved: Whereas Database Replay applies to the capture and replay of all activities in a database, SQL Performance Analyzer allows you to capture specific SQL statements and replay them. The latter offers a significant advantage for SQL tuning, because you can tweak the SQL statement issued by an application and assess its impact.

SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) can predict and prevent SQL execution performance problems caused by environ-ment changes. It provides a granular view of the impact of environment changes on SQL execution plans and statistics by running the SQL statements serially before and after the changes.

Figure 11: Real Application Testing (RAT) – Capture and replay real database workload

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Enterprise Manager Packs

Challenge: Monitoring and manage a complete IT infrastructure often can be challenging. Adminis-trators may end up with a considerable number of management tools designed for this or that particular purpose.

Value Proposition: Oracle, being a vendor of the whole IT stack from hardware via databases to applications, realized that there is a need for an integrated enter-prise management tool. However, in order to avoid unnecessary complexity, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid/Cloud Control is divided into a base product and several packs dedicated to special features. With or without packs – Oracle Enterprise Manager always provides a complete view of the IT landscape.

Certification/Support: Generally speaking, SAP on Oracle customers have a choice. On the one hand there is the BR*Tools family of management tools

provided by SAP. These tools include SAP-specific knowledge and are therefore easy to use. On the other hand there are the powerful Oracle Enterprise Ma-nager and its packs. However, in some cases Oracle Enterprise Manager or one of its packs are required – either because there is no BR*Tools support for an Oracle Database feature (example: Database Vault) or because SAP and Oracle functionality are integrated so completely that the former is not possible without the latter (example: SAP DBA Cockpit and Enterprise Manager Diagnostics Pack).


Implementation: For general information about using Oracle Enterprise Manager in SAP environments see SAP Notes 355770 and 1028068. Special use cases are discussed in additional notes and white papers.

• Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM): ADDM builds upon the data captured in AWR. ADDM makes it possible for the Oracle Database to diagnose its own performance and determine how any identified problems could be resolved. ADDM runs automati-cally after each AWR statistics capture and makes the performance diagnostic data available immediately. ADDM examines data captured in AWR and performs analysis to determine the major issues on a proactive basis, recommends solutions and quantifies expected benefits.

• Active Session History (ASH): All active database sessions are automatically sampled once every second and stored in the ASH. The data is captured in a rolling buffer in database memory. The ASH data shows where the database is currently spending its time and high-lights any performance bottlenecks. As ASH captures the session state with many performance attributes, the in-memory ASH data can be very effectively used to understand the database workload profile and pro-actively diagnose any transient performance issue, such as a CPU spike or an I/O storm, that occurs for a very short duration.

SAP DBA Cockpit and Enterprise Manager Diagnostics Pack

The Oracle Diagnostic Pack provides automatic per-formance diagnostic and advanced system monitoring functionality. The Diagnostic Pack includes the follo-wing features:

• Automatic Workload Repository (AWR): AWR is a built-in repository within every Oracle Database that contains operational statistics about that particular database and other configuration and usage information. At regular intervals, the Oracle Database takes a snapshot of all its performance statistics and workload informa-tion and stores it in AWR. AWR forms the foundation for most of the self-management functionality of Oracle Database. It is the source of information that gives the Oracle Database a historical perspective on how it is being used and enables it to make decisions, which are accurate and specifically tailored for the system‘s environ-ment. Most of the self-managing features of the Oracle Database rely heavily on the information captured in AWR. The data in AWR is also useful for diagnosing all types of performance issues ranging from persistent or comparative performance diagnosis.


Oracle Diagnostics Pack diagnostics and analysis features such as ADDR, ASH, and AWR are tightly integrated with SAP‘s DBA Cockpit. Therefore DBA Cockpit has a mandatory requirement for Oracle Diagnostics Pack.

Database Lifecycle Management Pack

The Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack automates the deployment of software, applications, and patches. It makes critical data center operations easy, efficient and scalable, resulting in lower operational risk and cost of ownership. The ability to provision the entire software stack that includes the operating system, middleware and database, supplemented by comprehensive reporting tools, make the Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack an extremely significant entity in overall system management space.

The Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack includes an end-to-end patching solution that works seamlessly across a wide range of products and customer environments. The patching application automates the deployment of Oracle patches for the database and the underlying opera-

ting system. The application takes care of pre- and post -patching steps such as shutdown and startup of services, and dictionary changes, if required. It also leverages the flexible Deployment Procedure framework, that lets users add custom steps for specific actions within the patching process.

The Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack also comes with out-of-box Deployment Procedures to provision the Oracle Database (both single instance database and RAC), Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Automatic Storage Management from “gold images” following the best practices for maximum availability. The gold images are tested and approved software images and can be patched to any level before deployment.

For SAP environments, the MOPatch utility is integrated with the deployment procedures of Oracle Enterprise Manager to automate the orchestration of patching for Oracle Databases. See white paper “Patching of Oracle Databases in SAP Environments using Oracle Enterprise Manager”.

Figure 12: Oracle Enterprise Manager Diagnostics Pack and SAP DBA Cockpit

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Summary

In a certain sense, the Oracle Database has always been a data management infrastructure, and therefore there has always been a need to provide support for two opposite goals: consolidation, and separation or differentiation. Oracle has always been a multi-user, multi-schema, and possibly multi-application database. Therefore – apart from the very basic split of the available data into different tables – there was a need to separate application-specific schemas. For performance reasons, there was a need to separate the files used for user/application data from those used for redo log or undo information. Being a complete data management system, the Oracle Database has nevertheless always provided adapters, gateways, and other means that allow interactive users and batch jobs to join data stored in the Oracle Database with data coming from other, external data sources.

However, as a result of the growing amount of data, in-creasing workload, and shrinking maintenance windows that many customers experience, Oracle needed to provide additional, more sophisticated solutions. This has happe-ned in Oracle Database 10g, in Oracle Database 11g, and again in Oracle Database 12c.

Defining Subsets of Data

Released for the first time several versions and many years ago, Table and Index Partitioning is still a good example of data differentiation and a powerful technology. Therefore it has been discussed at the very beginning of this article. It is used to define subsets of table data which can be accessed and managed independently.

Subsets and Access Patterns

When determining a specific partitioning strategy it is important to not only look at the data but to consider the access patterns as well. Partitioning a table by month may turn out to be useless or even negatively impact performance, if most queries access the data by location.

However, distinguishing subsets of data by access pattern in new, previously impossible ways is the main goal of many Oracle Database 12c features and options.

Heat Map, a feature included in Advanced Compression, automatically tracks modification and query timestamps, thus providing detailed insights into how data is being accessed. Automatic Data Optimization automatically moves and compresses data according to user-definedpolicies based on the information collected by Heat Map. This means that storage and compression tiering can be implemented, i.e. the selection of different storage media and different compression algorithms for different subsets of data which are defined by different access characteristics.

Oracle Database In-Memory allows administrators to dis-tinguish between different types of transactions as well as different data representations in memory and to avoid the trade-off which results from the requirement to pick one single data format for all types of transactions and applications. Based on the new In-Memory option, Oracle Database 12c can provide data used by OLTP transactions in row format, and at the same time data used by analytics in column format.

Workload Distribution

Other options focus on workload distribution. A prominent example is Real Application Clusters (RAC), which allows customers to split the system workload and let many servers, running at least as many Oracle instances, handle the workload. It is up to the customer to decide whether all instances should handle the same type (or mixture) of workload(s) or different instance should be responsible for different types of workload (e.g. interactive transactions vs. batch jobs).


Figure 13: Oracle’s multi-tiered data management infrastructure

To put it simply, Multitenant is about the distinction between those administration tasks that should be execu-ted for every single database individually (because there are differences) and those that can be executed once for all or at least for a certain group of databases (because there are no differences). E.g. to apply a certain patch to 25database systems means to repeat the very same process 25 times. Therefore Oracle Multitenant moves this operation to the Container Database layer, where it can be done once for all Pluggable Databases. On the other hand, a point-in-time recovery is an operation to be per-formed on the PDB level, as it should not affect other PDBs.

In addition, the Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack allows administrators to automate those operations which are similar in all cases. Examples are the deployment of Oracle patches or the provisioning of new systems based on “gold images”.

Monitoring and Testing

Will your systems benefit from these features? How can you be sure? And how should the features be implemented

in order to have a positive impact on your systems? Real

Application Testing will help you to answer these and similar questions.

In addition to enabling workload distribution, RAC increases the system availability. This is even more true for Data Guard. Nevertheless, Data Guard does not require the standby database to be idle. It can be used for operation such as backup or – under certain conditions – reporting. In other words: Data Guard helps implement workload distribution as well.

Data Access Policies

In a somewhat different sense, Oracle‘s security options are related to access patterns as well. In particular Database Vault lets security administrators define and enforce access policies which prevent privileged users from reading or manipulating data they are not supposed to access. Phrases such as “segregation of duties” make it very clear that even here we are talking about the balance between separation and combination.

Database Administration

Oracle Database 12c Multitenant moves the data manage-ment infrastructure principle to a completely new level: We do not simply talk about an infrastructure for many tables or many users. We talk about an infrastructure for many databases. And here consolidation clearly requires separation.

28

1#

oracle.com/databaseor call 1.800.ORACLE.1

Source: IDC, “Worldwide Database Management Systems 2014–2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares,” IDC #248952, June 2014; Table 4, (Relational Database Management Systems). Vendor share based on software licenseand maintenance revenue. Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners

DatabaseWorldwide Vendor Share

Oracle 44,3%

IBM16,8%

Microsoft21,5%

Oracle DatabaseTrusted by 310,000 Customers Worldwide

29

B E N C H M A R K R E S U L T S R E V E A L T H E B E N E F I T S O F O R A C L E D A T A B A S E I N - M E M O R Y F O R S A P A P P L I C A T I O N S

Disclaimer

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functional-ity, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Preface

For many years, SAP has published a series of standard benchmarks that allow database vendors to demon-strate the performance of their products for running SAP Business Applications. These benchmarks mea-sure the performance of databases running SAP Busi-ness Applications like Sales and Distribution (SD), Assemble to Order (ATO), etc. By certifying results from different hardware and database vendors, SAP provides their customers with the ability to compare the performance and scalability of different platforms or databases. The benchmarks also provide guidance on how to configure and size SAP Business Suite.

Oracle and other database vendors have been running these benchmarks for many years. We are very proud of the performance of the Oracle Database running SAP business Applications, and you can see our bench-mark results published on SAP.com.

Interestingly, SAP has chosen not to publish any benchmark results showing the performance of their HANA database running the standard SAP bench-marks run by other database vendors; instead, SAP has created a new benchmark called SAP Business Ware-house Enhanced Mixed Workload (BW-EML). This benchmark measures the performance of a database running the SAP BW analytical application. SAP only publishes BW-EML benchmark results for HANA.

Apparently, SAP does not want to disclose the per-formance of HANA on any of the other SAP Business Applications except for the BW application, making

it impossible to tell how HANA compares to other data-bases running the SAP Business Applications benchmarks unless those databases run the SAP BW-EML benchmark.

This paper compares Oracle’s results on the SAP BW-EML benchmark to those achieved by HANA.

Introduction

The BW Enhanced Mixed Load Benchmark (BW-EML Benchmark) was designed to measure the current de-mands of typical business warehouse customers, using a combination of real-time report data loads and ad-hoc queries.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the SAP BW-EML benchmark, details on the benchmark results achieved by Oracle Database 12c, and a description of the unique database technology used to achieve these results.

SAP BW-EML Benchmark

The BW Enhanced Mixed Load Benchmark1 (BW-EML Benchmark) was designed to measure the current demands on a data warehouse and has two main requirements:

Demonstrate near real-time reporting – Getting instant results from analytical applications on up to the minute data is crucial for timely decision making.

Ad-hoc reporting capabilities – Provide the ability to ask any question on any data without having predefined aggregated results.

The benchmark simulates a large number of online users running reports for a 60-minute interval. During this 60-minute window new data is “trickle loaded” into the database every 5 minutes, resulting in an additional 0.1% of the total data volume over 60 min-utes. The benchmark result is the total number of que-ry navigations or decision steps that can be completed over 60 minutes.

Oracle Database 12c with the Oracle Database In-Memory option outperforms SAP HANA by a factor of 2X

1#




Oracle 44,3%

IBM16,8%

Microsoft21,5%


30

Benchmark Schema

The database schema used in the benchmark is based on three InfoCubes and seven DataStore objects (DSO). Each DataStore contains one year’s worth of data (total of 7 years of DSO) and the three InfoCubes hold the same data as the corresponding DataStore objects for the last three years. It is effectively an “Extended Star Schema”, that is to say, each query joins one fact table to one or more dimension tables, and those dimension tables will join to Surrogate ID tables (SID tables).

Benchmark Scale Factors

As with all standard benchmarks, the SAP BW-EML benchmark can be run at different scale factors. A scale factor represents the total number of records or rows stored in the schema, and in the case of the BW-EML benchmark the scale factors range from 500 million re-cords to 10 billion records. To give you some idea of how much raw data that actually is, the 1 billion records

scale-factor generates approximately 600GB of flat files. In this white paper we will focus on the 1 billion record scale factor and examine that workload both on a single database server and in a scaled out solution.

Benchmark Workload

The queries are based on 8 web reports (4 on the DSO MultiProvider and 4 on the InfoCube MultiProvider). Each query is randomized both by characteristic and filter value and drill-down.

Throughout the course of the benchmark new data is loaded into the database every 5 minutes, resulting in an additional 0.1% of the total data volume over 60 minu-tes. That is 1 million additional records at the1 billion records scale-factor, or 100,000 new rows added to each of the ten objects.

Figure 1: SAP BW-EML benchmark schema2

Multi-dimensional Data model in BI

1 More details on the BW-EML Benchmark can be found on sap.com2 More information on SAP Data Modeling can be found in their whitepaper

Multi-Dimensional Modeling with BI

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Oracle Database 12c SAP BW-EML Benchmark

Motivation

In July 2014, Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.2) was released and it included a new option called Orac-le Database In-Memory (Database In-Memory), which accelerates analytics by orders of magnitude while simultaneously speeding up mixed-workload OLTP. This Oracle database release including Oracle Databa-se In-Memory has been certified by SAP for use with SAP® solutions based on the SAP NetWeaver® 7.x technology platform.

Database In-Memory leverages a unique “dual-format” architecture that enables tables to be in memory simulta-neously in a traditional row format and a new in-memory column format. The Oracle SQL Optimizer automati-cally routes analytic queries to the column format and OLTP queries to the row format, transparently delivering best-of-both-worlds performance. Oracle Database 12c automatically maintains full transactional consistency between the row and the column formats, just as it main-tains consistency between tables and indexes today.

There are four main reasons why accessing data in the In-Memory column format is more efficient for analytical queries: the last three years. It is effectively an “Extended Star Schema”, that is to say, each query joins one fact table

1. Access only the columns that are needed

Analytic queries typically reference only a small num-ber of the columns in a table. Database In-Memory minimizes work and maximizes performance by access-ing only those columns needed by a query.

2. Scan and filter data in a compressed format

When data is populated into memory in the new column format it is automatically compressed using a new set of compression algorithms that allow WHERE clause predicates to be applied against the compressed formats. This means the volume of data scanned in the In-Memory column format for a query will be far less.

3. Prune out any unnecessary data within each column

When tables are populated into memory in the column format they are logically split into sections, and the min-imum and maximum value of every column is main-

tained for every section of the table. This allows queries to quickly skip table sections that only contain data out-side of the range of data needed by the query.

For table sections where the value we are looking for does fall within the minimum and maximum range, an addi-tional level of data pruning is possible via the metadata dictionary created when dictionary-based compression is used. The dictionary contains a list of the unique column values within the table section. By comparing the valuein the where clause predicate to the dictionary we can easily determine if the value we are looking for is one of the distinct column values or not.

4. Use SIMD to apply filter predicates

Modern microprocessors support SIMD (Single Instruc-tion for Multiple Data values) vector processing instruc-tions to accelerate graphics and scientific computing. Oracle Database In-Memory can use these SIMD vector instructions to process sets of column values in a single CPU instruction. SIMD vector processing enables the Oracle Database In-Memory to scan billion of rows per second per core versus the millions of rows per second per core scan rate that can be achieved if the data is in row format.

In order to demonstrate the performance benefits of Database In-Memory and to enable SAP customers to size their systems when using Database In-Memory, Oracle decided to run the SAP BW-EML benchmark at the 1 billion records scale factor both on a single database ser-ver and in a scaled out configuration (multiple database servers).

Hardware Configuration

The hardware configuration used for the SAP BW-EML benchmark consisted of three-tiers; a driver (which simu-lates the users), an application tier and a database tier.

An Oracle Exalogic X4-2 server was used as the appli-cation tier. Each application server had 2 twelve-core Intel E5-2697 v2 processors (2.70GHz) and 256GB of memory.

The Database tier was an Oracle Exadata X5-2, which contains 8 database servers. Each database server consists of 2 eighteen-core Intel Xeon® E5-2699 v3 processors (2.3 GHz) and 512GB of memory.


32

Database Configuration

An In-Memory column store was allocated on each of the database servers, and the necessary data for the benchmark was populated into memory in the new In-Memory column format. Remember the data populated into memory is compressed, so the In-Memory column store doesn’t need to be as large as the on the disk footprint of the data.

Results

1 Billion Records on a Single Database Server

The initial benchmark test was run using just one of the database servers in the Exadata X5-2 with 36 cores. Oracle Database 12c was able to complete over 300 thousand navigation steps in one hour. That’s 84 analytic queries per second over the course of the benchmark run.

1 Billion Records on Multiple Database Servers

The same benchmark was then repeated using 2 database servers, then 4 and finally all 8-database servers on the Exadata X5-2. Oracle Database 12c was able to show close to perfect scalability as the number of database ser-vers was increased, achieving over 2.3 million navigation steps per hour with 8 database servers. That’s an incre-dible 650 analytic queries/second.

Comparison With Existing SAP BW-EML Benchmark

Results

One of the goals of SAP Application Benchmarks is to provide SAP customers with the ability to compare the performance and scalability of different platforms or da-tabases. Currently SAP HANA is the only database with published results for the SAP BW-EML benchmark at the 1 billion records scale factor3. Below is a comparison of the Oracle Database 12c results versus the best SAP HANA results, both for a single database server and for scale-out solutions.

1 Billion Records on a Single Database Server

The Oracle single server benchmark was conducted on one of the Exadata X5-2 database servers, which has 2 Intel processors (Intel Xeon Processor E5-2699), 36 co-res, and 512GB of main memory. In October 2014, SAP HANA results were released on a 2-socket Dell server using the same Intel processor, with the same number of cores and the same amount of memory.

Figure 2: Oracle Database 12c SAP BW-EML benchmark configuration

Figure 3. Oracle Database 12c achieves over 300 thousand navigation steps per hour on a single database server

Figure 4. Oracle Database 12c shows linear scalability & achieves over 2.3 million navigation steps per hour on a 8 database servers

33

As you can see from the graph below, on this much larger hardware platform SAP HANA narrowly beat the Oracle result achieving 320,940 navigation steps, but they nee-ded twice the number of cores and 3 times the amount of memory to do it.

In May 2015, a new SAP HANA benchmark result was released at the 1 billion records scale factor for a single database server. This result was again achieved using a Dell server but this time it had 4 Intel processors (Intel Xeon Processor E7-8890) with 72 cores and 1536 GB main memory.

As you can see from the graph below, on this much larger hardware platform SAP HANA narrowly beat the Oracle result achieving 320,940 navigation steps, but they need-ed twice the number of cores and 3 times the amount of memory to do it.

1 Billion Records Scale Out

Again SAP HANA is the only database vendor with published results for the SAP BW-EML benchmark at the 1 billion records scale factor with a scale out confi-guration but unlike Oracle they have not demonstrated linear scalability by releasing results for 2, 4, and 8 server configurations. SAP HANA has only released scale out results for a 7 server configuration.

SAP HANA’s best 7-server scale out result was published in May 2015 using 7 Lenovo 3850 X6 servers, each with 4 processors, 60 cores (Intel Xeon Processor E7-8890 v3) and 1024GB of main memory.

With almost twice the number of cores (504 cores versus 288 cores) and double the amount of memory, SAP HANA still couldn’t achieve the same number of navigation steps per hour that Oracle delivered on the 8-server configuration.

Conclusion

The two key benefits of a standard application benchmark is the ability to compare different platforms and data-bases in terms of performance and scale and to provide guidance on how to configure and size an SAP system.

Using the SAP BW-EML benchmark we have proved Oracle Database 12c with the Oracle Database In-Me-mory option outperforms SAP HANA by a factor of 2X on the same Intel processor for SAP workloads. Oracle Database 12c also shows near linear scalability as the number of database servers is increased and achieved more navigation steps per hour than SAP HANA on half the CPUs.

Figure 7. SAP HANA requires 4-socket servers with 2X the cores compared to Oracle’s 8 2-socket servers and it still doesn’t achieve the same result.

Figure 5. Oracle Beats SAP HANA by 2X at the 1 billion records scale factor on the same Intel processor & chipset.

Figure 6. SAP HANA requires 2X the CPU cores and 3X the memory to narrowly beat the Oracle on a single Database server.

3 The results of all SAP BW-EML benchmarks are available on SAP.com


34

Appendix A - Detailed Benchmark Results

Oracle Database 12c

35Oracle Database 12c with the Oracle Database In-Memory option outperforms SAP HANA by a factor of 2X

36

SAP HANA


http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/in-memory/overview/benefits-of-dbim-for-sap-apps-2672504.html

37

38

From SMEs to the largest companies around the world, tens of thousands customers benefit from using the Oracle Database for SAP. There are many good reasons for this. Have a closer look to the outstanding differentiators which make Oracle Database for SAP the primary choicefor the majority of SAP customers.

For more than 27 years Oracle and SAP have collaborated to optimize the Oracle Database for SAP customers. Renewing commitments and agreements underline the long-established relationship and partnership. Above all: SAP customers benefit from Oracle innovation. Oracle innovation provides flexible solutions which allow you to meet your business needs and requirements. On the other side SAP customers values the great sustainability and protecting investments using Oracle Database for SAP applications. As we look more in detail, it will be clear why Oracle Database for SAP is the leading and best RDBMS running SAP applications. In this context, let‘s have a closer look at the key differentiators between the Oracle Database for SAP as compared against other databases witch can be used in combination with SAP applications. There are not less than 8 differentiators, regarding Oracle Database for SAP 11g, 12c* and Oracle Exadata Machine respectively Oracle Engineered Systems (with important features/options):

1.) Best Performance & Scalability

Oracle has world record SAP SD and BI-D (BI-Data Mart) benchmark results, with exceptional scaling and perfor-mance across SMP and Cluster environments on Unix and Linux.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) provide a flexible way to achieve near linear scalability of SAP applications. With RAC, customers have a choice to either scale up or scale out the database server layer. Since all RAC nodes are active, it helps SAP customers to meet the demands of production workload requirements. Widely adopted by customers, Oracle RAC is the only generally available clustered database solution certified for all SAP products and makes SAP resources highly available based on Oracle Clusterware and avoids the need for 3rd party software.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a volume manager and a file system for Oracle Database files that supports single-instance Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) configurations. ASM is Oracle‘s recommended storage management solution that provides an alternative to conventional volume managers, file systems, and raw devices.

The Oracle Database In-Memory Option accelerates Analyt-ics, Data Warehousing, Reporting and OLTP performance. The In-Memory Option to Oracle Database 12c* is 100 percent compatible with existing applications and leverages all existing Oracle Database functionality. Every Application that runs on Oracle Database 12c* can auto-matically and transparently take advantage of Oracle Database In-Memory Option. Existing applications will retain full functionality while experiencing effortless speedups. New applications can be developed that were previously impractical due to performance limitations.

From best Performance over best Availability to best Support for DB Consolidation – a lot of good Reasons/Differentiators using Oracle Database for SAP applications

W H Y O R A C L E D A T A B A S E A N D E N G I N E E R E D S Y S T E M S F O R S A P ?

39Why Oracle Database for SAP?

With Oracle Exadata Database Machine customers can scale up/out incrementally and on demand. Start with the appropriate Exadata size – eights, quarter, half, or full rack. Exadata is upgraded to the next larger size before you need additional speed or capacity. No need for a forklift upgrade, simply scale up/out the existing system.

Exadata includes a unique technology to offload data intensive SQL operations into the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers and only the rows and columns that are directly relevant to a query are sent to the database servers.

As a result, it provides outstanding performance for trans-action processing and data warehousing. SAP transactions requesting data will likely be serviced from flash memory for ultra-fast retrieval. Reporting and Batch users will not interfere with SAP transactional users. SAP BW/BI data warehouses will return queries to users orders of magni-tude faster.

2.) Best Deployment Flexibility

Widest range of supported platforms; Unix – Linux – Windows – “Oracle is Oracle is Oracle”. The same code base across all operating systems means, Oracle has the same features, tools and functionality on all hardware platforms and operating systems, so customers can choose the most cost effective platform for their implementations.

Should customers require a change in operating systems, Oracle offers fast and efficient Oracle-to-Oracle (O2O) migration services. Many customers cannot afford the downtime associated with an offline migration. For these situations, Oracle offers its Triple-O service. The service is a near zero downtime online Oracle to Oracle migra-tion.The outage requirements are then cut from hours to minutes independent of the database size.

A new option for Oracle Database 12c*, Oracle Multi-tenant helps customers reduce IT costs by simplifying consolidation, provisioning, upgrades, and more. It is supported by a new architecture that allows a multitenant container database to hold many pluggable databases. An existing database can be simply adopted, with no change, as a pluggable database. No changes are needed in the other tiers of the application.

Traditionally, Oracle has provided Oracle Database Server software to be installed on systems made up of third-party hardware and a third-party operating system. This approach is still possible. However, in addition Oracle provides “Engineered Systems”, where Oracle manufactures the machine, the operating system and the database. All the embedded components to run an Oracle database are pre-configured, pre-tuned and pre-tested by Oracle experts, eliminating weeks or months of effort typically required to deploy a high performance system.

3.) Best Availability and Reliability

Real Application Clusters (RAC) for SAP removes the database server as a single point of failure. The database remains online as long as one or more database instance is still up and running. Oracle Data Guard complements Oracle RAC, providing a disaster recovery solution that requires no SAP downtime in case of failure. Data Guard is often used in combination with Flashback (technology to rewind database changes without any restore to dra-matically minimize downtime). Online Patching allows customers to install single or bundle patches completely online, without requiring the database instance to be shut down.

SAP customers are able to use Oracle Cloud File System (ACFS), which is part of Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.2) (and can be used as well on X2, X3, X4 and X5) to complement Oracle Automatic Storage Manage-ment (ASM) in order to store non-Database files on ACFS which will be even available on Exadata X5 to store SAP related files like /sapmnt and /usr/sap/trans and skip using external NFS file systems.

40

Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP customers is a highly engineered and pre-validated configuration. It provides built in High Availability, ‘out of the box’. With Exadata’s redundant architecture, all single points of failure are eliminated. Familiar features such as mirroring, fault isolation, and protection against drive and cell failure have been incorporated into Exadata to ensure continual availability and protection of data.

Exadata is prebuilt, reducing time and costs for deploy-ment, installation, and configuration (HW, OS, DB, RAC, Clusterware etc.).

4.) Best Support for Very Large Databases

The Oracle database is well known for providing the most efficient use of disk space. This is extremely important to SAP customers as the size of their databases continue to grow dramatically.

Compression of B*Tree indexes, which make up to one-third of disk space allocated to databases in SAP environ-ments, reduces I/O and improves overall performance by allowing more index information to be stored in the same amount of memory (cache).

Table compression, implemented in Oracle’s Advanced Compression, uses a unique algorithm that eliminates duplicate values within a database block, even across multiple columns. This approach combines disk space reduction, performance benefits and ease of management.

Out-of-line LOBS (SecureFiles) compression, Data Guard Compression, Expdp Compression, RMAN back up com-pression are a further enhancements to the compression features SAP customers can benefit from.

The complete unload and load of data during a Unicode migration (required by all new SAP releases) was opti-mized by Oracle to achieve the fastest SAP Unicode Migrations, with up to 1 terabyte/hour data transfer rates and it’s fully integrated with SAP products. Even the largest multi terabyte databases have been migrated in one weekend.

SAP customers using Oracle Databases also take advantage of a rich collection of table partitioning types to reduce I/O and improve performance. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 enriches this list with sub-partitioning and interval partitioning meant to enhance design flexibility and application performance.

In Oracle Database 12c*, several new features have been added to the Advanced Compression Option (ACO) which enhance the storage management capabilities of Oracle Database. Heat Map automatically tracks modification and query timestamps, providing detailed insights into how data is being addressed.

Hybrid Columnar Compression – available on Oracle Engineered Systems (Exadata platform) – enables the highest levels of data compression and provides enterprises with tremendous cost-savings and performance improve-ments due to reduced I/O. Average storage savings can range from 10x to 15x depending on which Hybrid Columnar Compression level is implemented.

Many environments are reaching the end of their useful life and are costly to maintain. Exadata and Exalogic provide a simple and easy way to manage an environment – a viable option for a private cloud.

SAP Business Warehouse: - Huge and complex infocubes, queries or transactions

with large database time - Large daily extracts with a limited time window - Large extracts can flood the network

41Why Oracle Database for SAP?

5.) Best Database Security

Compliance and security are more important now than ever before.

Oracle’s Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) makes encryption of sensitive data simple by trans-parently encrypting data when it is written to disk. Oracle Database provides; Tablespace Encryption (encrypts all data within one tablespace), RMAN Backup encryption, Data Guard Secure Network, Expdp, and SecureFile Encryption.

With Oracle Database Vault, protective realms around SAP application database objects can be established to prevent privileged database users from accessing sensitive data and to enforce separation of duties among privileged database users.

Oracle Database Vault helps customers meet regulatory compliance requirements by enforcing separation of duties. Database Vault 12c* privilege analysis with minimizing number of granted roles.

All Oracle Security features are available for all database configurations (single instance, RAC) and all Hardware/OS platforms – including the Exadata Database Machine.

Exadata for SAP satisfies even the most stringent security and high-availability requirements. It is a complete, pre-built, balanced and secure cloud-based machine for mission critical databases with all available high security features of Oracle, like Database Vault.

6.) Best Manageability and Self-Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control (EM), SAP DBA Cockpit, and SAP BR*Tools rely on Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) that automatically stores workload and performance statistics so administrators and support engineers can analyze and quickly resolve performance issues, whether the root cause happened hours or days before.

Real Application Testing (RAT) to evaluate and imple-ment changes in the customer data center infrastructure e.g. Operating system, hardware migrations, patches, upgrades changes. Database Replay (part of RAT) enables customers to realistically test system changes essentially recreating production workloads on the test system.

A very exciting new functionality for SAP customers in Oracle 12c* is Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) /Automatic Data Optimization (ADO).These features combined along with the Heat Map can be utilized to build a robust ILM strategy. This strategy incorporates automatic tiering and compression of your data to meet the policies you define.

Bundle Patches are created and certified in conjunction with SAP and bundled for simplicity. Applying the Exadata Bundle Patches and the SAP Database Bundle Patches is all that’s required. BR*TOOLS have been expanded to support ASM and Exadata.

Exadata for SAP:- Makes complex integration work and manual tuning

(database, storage, network, and server) superfluous

- Optimally supports implementations, migrations, and consolidations for quick, inexpensive project runtimes

- Enables users to implement a highly efficient centralized data pool featuring a multitude of system databases.

7.) Best Support for DB Consolidation

Oracle supported traditional DB consolidation methods like virtual machines or schema consolidation for a long time. And SAP customers benefitting from saving costs and effective infrastructure optimization. Oracle Engineered Systems like Exadata Database Machine gave customers new opportunities for DB consolidation and infrastructure cost savings with reduced complexity. More-and-more SAP customers are using Exadata for this stated purpose: the consolidation of their numerous “SAP databases”. SAP can be included in enterprise-wide database consoli-dation plans on Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Con-solidate all databases on a modernized database platform and lower overall database costs due to consolidation; there are great advantage of the opportunity to consolidate multiple dispersed Oracle Databases into one Exadata environment. Administrators can focus on managing Exadata, not on maintaining own unique configurations.

42 Why Oracle Database for SAP?

Oracle 12c* Multitenant gives DB consolidation projects above the said before massive additional advantages. The Multitenant Option provides higher productivity and resource/cost savings for customers who realize DB con-solidation projects by significant simplification.Oracle Multitenant stands for logically segmenting a single database by dividing the database instance into separate pluggable databases, but allowing the management as one grouped resource with minimized memory resources.SAP customers can manage many databases as one (patching, backup, etc.). More efficient utilization of system resources/resource management can be realizing in an easy and very efficient way.

8.) Best Integration of Hardware and Software

For years Oracle Database Server Software has leveraged the ability of relevant hardware components. E.g. for using flash, encryption etc. With Oracle 12c* In-Memory Option scans use super-fast “Single Instruction Multiple Data Values” (SIMD) vector instructions, if supported by CPU. So, the co-engineering of hardware and software continues with Oracle 12c* to deliver even better overall quality and effectiveness.

Exadata is an Oracle Engineered System and is prebuilt, reducing time and costs for deployment, installation, and configuration (HW, OS, DB, RAC, Clusterware etc.). Exadata for SAP customers consolidates platforms, data

bases, provides best integration of hardware and software in the first place and reduces power and cooling of your SAP environment.

Oracle Database 12c certification:*

Phase 1, called Base Certification, has already been completed in March 2015. Included are all features and options that have been previously available in Oracle Database 11g plus several Oracle Database 12c features which are either completely transparent or require only minimal integration efforts.

Phase 2, completed in June 2015 is the first to offer majornew Oracle Database 12c options. The Oracle Database 12c In-Memory option is now available for SAP customers.

Phase 3, planned for Q4 2015, will add the new Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features included in Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression, as well as Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) with row-level locking on Oracle Exadata and Oracle SuperCluster.

Phase 4, planned for 2016, will complete the certification process by allowing SAP customers to use OracleMultitenant. Oracle Multitenant allows for the consolidation of many databases into a single container database. This is a completely new database architecture and requires a considerable.

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1#




Oracle 44,3%

IBM16,8%

Microsoft21,5%


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Solutions

• Deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine as the foundation for the company’s SAP applications and saw a significant improvement in SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) response time from day one – from just over a second to 800 milliseconds – while managing 30% more

• Eliminated unplanned down time for its business- critical SAP ECC environment

• Gained ability to run the company’s 100,000 daily batch jobs 25% to 75% faster, depending on the job, to ensure service level agreement (SLA) compliance and improve customer service

• Ensured that the SAP data infrastructure can scale for an increase of more than 2x the throughput to support a new business opportunity with a national retail pharmacy

• Ensured system availability, improving business continuity and avoiding lost revenue potentially associated with enterprise-resource-planning system down time

• Used Oracle Advanced Compression to reduce the storage footprint for the company’s SAP ECC application and SAP business warehouse environment by up to 60% with no negative impact on performance while significantly lowering storage-management costs to achieve a return on investment in six to nine months

A M E R I S O U R C E B E R G E N O P E N S N E W B U S I N E S S O P P O R T U N I T I E S B Y D O U B L I N G T H R O U G H P U T O F O N E O F W O R L D ’ S L A R G E S T S A P E N V I R O N M E N T S

AmerisourceBergen Corporation is one of the largest global pharmaceutical sourcing and distribution-service com-panies, helping healthcare providers and pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers improve patient access to products and enhance patient care. With services ranging from drug distribution and niche premium logistics, to reimbursement and pharmaceutical consulting services, AmerisourceBergen delivers innovative programs and solutions across the pharmaceutical-supply channel. It is ranked 28 on the Fortune 500 list.

Challenges

• Improve stability of the company’s SAP data infrastructure – one of the largest in the world, which processes over 1 million line items daily and adds 1 TB of data each month • Gain scalability needed to support a new contract with a national drug store chain that will more than double throughput requirements for the company’s SAP environment and reduce peak processing from eight to four hours, daily

• Implement the new environment rapidly to support new business opportunities

• Reduce footprint across two data centers, 60 miles apart, and cut associated costs

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine is helping to transform our business. Our SAP environment, one of the world’s largest, can now support twice as much throughput with improved stability, which opens new business opportunities. We’ve also simplified our environment and cut the total cost of ownership. We can put more databases in a smaller footprint and enjoy a streamlined support model, thanks to a single and optimized Oracle technology stack.”

– M I L T S I M O N D S , ‎

Director, Enterprise Platform Delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

45Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP at AmerisourceBergen

• Simplified the company’s data infrastructure with Oracle Engineered Systems built on an optimized Oracle technology stack

• Streamlined IT management, ensured high performance, and accelerated issue identification and resolution for the operating system and storage layers with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services and its Advanced Monitoring and Resolution services

• Accelerated database back-up time with existing backup infrastructure, completing full Oracle Recovery Manager backups of 27 TB in 7 hours instead of 24 hours

• Gained the capability to continue consolidating more than 95 database hosts and 230 TB of storage in 2014 and beyond

Why Oracle

AmerisourceBergen chose Oracle Exadata as an SAP con-solidation platform. The company viewed Oracle Exadata as the most comprehensive technology solution – from end-to-end data lineage, to simplified architecture – with the ability to scale up to meet future needs. It also considered Oracle as the best provider of a comprehensive support model with combined SAP Center of Excellence and Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services offerings.

Implementation Process

AmerisourceBergen had a short implementation window. It tested Oracle Exadata in a staging environment for two months and took the system into production three months later for its SAP ECC environment. Amerisource-Bergen completed the cut over in four hours.

The second phase will involve migrating the rest of the company’s Oracle Databases – supporting its enterprise portal and customer-relationship-management and process-integration applications. This phase will go live in 2014. Eventually, all systems that run on an Oracle Database will be running on Oracle Exadata – in pre-production and production environments.

“Oracle Advanced Customer Support services has pro-vided critical value and support throughout our Oracle Exadata initiative. It is a big positive to have support from all levels at Oracle. When you take on a big project, you will run into bumps along the way, and having Oracle’s undivided attention has been very important,” said Milt Simonds, director, enterprise platform delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

www.amerisourcebergen.com

Location: Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, United States

Industry: Life Sciences/ Pharmaceutical

Employees: 13,000

Annual Revenue: Over $5 Billion

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine • Oracle Advanced Compression • Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services • Oracle Active Data Guard

“Oracle Advanced Customer Support services has pro-vided critical value and support throughout our Oracle Exadata initiative. It is a big positive to have support from all levels at Oracle. When you take on a big project, you will run into bumps along the way, and having Oracle’s undivided attention has been very important,” said Milt Simonds, director, enterprise platform delivery, AmerisourceBergen Corporation.

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J E T I N F O S Y S T E M S D E M O N S T R A T E S O R A C L E D A T A B A S E P E R F O R M S H U N D R E D S O F T I M E S F A S T E R O N E X A D A T A

Jet Infosystems has been active in the Russian information technology (IT) market since 1991. Initially specializing in building corporate-level IT infrastructures, Jet Info-systems expanded to become a full-profile systems integrator with a wide portfolio of solutions and services, including customized packages that meet industry-specific require-ments. Jet Infosystems has seven regional offices across Russia; regional representations in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine; and has ongoing projects in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, and Georgia.

“We have tested many databases for our partners and customers in a variety of industries, including communications, banking, retail, insurance, and the public sector. The performance increase was outstanding every time. For example, we demonstrated to one of our telecom customers that reports can be generated hundreds of times faster on Exadata.” – A L E X E Y S T R U C H E N K O , Head of Database Optimization Department, Jet Infosystems

Challenges

• Enable Jet Infosystems’ enterprise clients to conduct performance testing of various Oracle Database-based systems

• Demonstrate that online transaction processing and data warehousing applications run much faster on Oracle’s engineered systems than on any other machine in the world – with the largest performance increases obtained in data-heavy industries, such as telecom-munications

• Prove the cost-saving potential and query performance gains enabled by Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s Hybrid Columnar Compression

Solution

• Demonstrated to customers in telecommunications, banking, insurance, retail, and utilities that SQL queries generate much faster, for some queries up to 800x faster, on Oracle Exadata Database Machine than on commodity servers

• Compressed call-data records for five Russian and Ukrainian telecommunication companies by a factor of 11 with Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression query algorithm

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• Processed up to 1.6 TB per hour with the Oracle Recovery Manager copy command, at 0.8 TB per hour with transportable tablespaces, and 0.3 TB per hour using Oracle Data Pump technology via a database link

• Assisted customers with database migrations using methods, such as those provided by Oracle Recovery Manager’s copy command files, Oracle Transportable Tablespaces, and the Oracle Data Pump via a database link, enabling customers to test their own environ-ments, experience their applications running at peak performance, and maximize the demo experience

• Enabled Jet Infosystems’ partners and customers to participate in live demonstrations of Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s processing capabilities, including proof of concept with customer data to measure runtime and performance improvements

Why Oracle

“Oracle Engineered Systems exemplifies the slogan Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together. In our view, the specially designed Exadata software enables users to demonstrate extreme performance with the use of relatively inexpensive, x86 architecture,” said Alexey Struchenko, head of database optimization department, Jet Infosystems.

Resources

• Jet Infosystems Proves SAP Reports Can Run 800x

Faster for Data Heavy Industries. Such as Telecommuni-cations, Banking, Insurance, Retail, and Utilities

• More Reference Assets About Professional Services

Oracle Customer: Jet Infosystems

Location: Moscow, Russia

Industry: Professional Services

Employees: 1,400

Oracle Products & Services:

• Oracle Exadata Database Machine• Exadata Storage Server Software

Oracle Exadata at Jet Infosystems, Russia

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D A I W A H O U S E I N D U S T R Y I M P R O V E S D A I L Y O P E R A T I O N S A N D C U S T O M E R S E R V I C E W I T H 2 4 1 X F A S T E R B A T C H P R O C E S S I N G

Founded in 1955 in Osaka, Japan, Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd. is one of Japan’s largest diversified housing and facility construction companies. Its businesses include building, leasing, selling, and managing single-family houses, condominiums, commercial buildings, and faci-lities. The company also manages and operates resort ho-tels, golf courses, fitness clubs, and health care facilities, and it provides a range of related services.

In recent years, Daiwa House Industry has directed its fo-cus on the development of next-generation smart houses in Japan and real estate development projects abroad. Daiwa House Industry emphasizes comfort and safety in all its construction work. The company has more than 100 branches, factories, and offices throughout Japan and in 10 countries around the world.

Challenges

• Ensure seamless migration of existing cloud-based, integrated business applications to an engineered system to reduce costs and eliminate bottlenecks and frequent delays in processing time-sensitive accoun-ting tasks

• Provide a high-performing, reliable, and scalable database platform to improve batch-processing speeds for daily, business-critical tasks, such as for contract and customer management and property-lease billing for improved customer service

• Simplify and automate system management to reduce IT staff time spent on troubleshooting and to increase productivity

Solution

• Improved operating efficiency for daily critical tasks, such as month-end closes and real estate lease and sales billing by processing daily batches up to 241x faster – from 80 minutes down to just 20 seconds, thanks to Oracle Exadata’s InfiniBand network technology

• Improved customer service by providing 3x faster response times, and enabled smooth operation for tasks such as real estate contract management, daily repor-ting, scheduling, invoicing, and travel and business expense calculations, thanks to Oracle Exadata’s Smart Scan technology

• Provided a highly reliable, high-performing database platform for the group’s cloud-based business applica-tions environment and eliminated frequent delays in billing, accounting, and customer-related tasks, which improved customer satisfaction

• Boosted productivity by enabling IT staff to focus on valuable tasks, such as developing applications for new services, rather than spending time dealing with system issues during peak periods

• Reduced costs and enabled rapid deployment by seamlessly migrating the existing Oracle Database to Oracle Exadata without changes to existing cloud-based, integrated business applications

“Oracle Exadata enabled seamless and rapid migration of our cloud-based, integrated business applications, required no major modifications, and helped us reduce costs. With Oracle, we dramatically improved our batch processing speed by 241x and overall system performance by 3x, enabling us to improve operating efficiency for our daily, critical tasks and to enhance customer service.”

– K Y O J I K AT O , Executive Officer and General Manager, Information System Division, Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd.

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Why Oracle

Daiwa House Industry chose Oracle Exadata because testing results confirmed that the new database platform would work with its existing cloud-based, integrat-ed business applications running on Oracle Database without major modifications. Daiwa House Industry could also leverage the expertise and experience of Oracle Database provided by Oracle Platinum Partner, ITO-CHU Techno-Solutions (CTC), a private cloud-services provider, and by its own in-house IT team, to enable seamless migration.

“With Oracle Exadata, we were confident that we would greatly improve overall system performance with mini-mal changes to the applications, resulting in lower costs and shorter switchover times,” said Nobuo Watanabe, head of the business solutions group, information system division, Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd.


Daiwa House Industry engaged CTC to migrate its cloud-based integrated business applications to Oracle Exadata, which was also hosted by CTC. The group started verification testing by using the same data that is used in the live production environment and completed the migration to the new platform in under six months. Daiwa House Industry is now considering leveraging its new processing capacity to support big-data analysis and to provide customers with more tailored proposals in the future.

Partner

CTC, Daiwa House’s long-standing system and services provider and the original developer of its in-house business applications, provided meticulous and detailed system integration services for the database migration project.

“CTC’s intimate knowledge of our IT infrastructure and its proven success with our Oracle Exadata implemen-tation enabled us to harness fully the capabilities of the Oracle Exadata-based cloud environment at lower cost,” Watanabe said.

Oracle Exadata at Daiwa House

Oracle Customer: Daiwa House Industry

Location: Osaka, Japan

Industry: Engineering and Construction

Employees: 14,380

Annual Revenue: Over $5Billion


• Oracle Exadata Database Machine

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O R A C L E E X A D A T A D A T A B A S E M A C H I N E R E P L A C E S T R A D I T I O N A L I B M A I X D A T A B A S E S E R V E R S A T A C Q U E D O T T O P U G L I E S E – W I T H N U M E R O U S B E N E F I T S

Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A. is the largest water supplier in Italy, servicing over 8 million households. It manages a network comprising twenty-two thousand kilometers of pipelines, mainly in the region of Apulia in southeast Italy. Acquedotto Pugliese, which has its headquarters in the famous coastal town of Bari, has revenues of almost 0.5 billion and employs around 2,000 people. In addition to its water supply activities, the company is increasingly moving into the field of renewable energy.

For the past 10 years Acquedotto Pugliese has been usingthe proven combination of SAP applications and Oracle Database. As with other SAP customers, both the appli-cation environment, including the necessary IT infra-structure, and the applications usage have changed in many ways over the years. In response to ever-increasing application usage and a fast-growing data volume, Acquedotto Pugliese had to carry out occasional hardware optimizations in the form of database server upgrades. This happened in 2006 and again three years later, when (IS-U) ECC 6.0 landscape was extended by SAP BW.

Profitable change thanks to Oracle Engineered Systems

for SAP

Late in 2012, it was time for another major database server upgrade for the IBM AIX hardware hosting Oracle Database version 11.2 databases, which Acquedotto Pugliese had been using since first starting to work with SAP. As Pasquale Sciacovelli, System and Database Ad-ministrator at Acquedotto Pugliese, explains, „Perfor-mance problems were increasing, and this was impacting

business processes. The response times for accounting and important reports were not acceptable in the long term, and this was having a negative impact on business process efficiency.“

Acquedotto Pugliese was able to resolve this performance issue with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The Oracle Engineered System proved to be a versatile opti-mization tool that delivered profitable change, including beneficial side-effects.

Oracle’s Database Machine combines hardware, networking and software in one optimized system to deliver maxi-mum performance for little cost, and is an ideal platform for customized company-wide database use. Oracle Exadata Database Machine significantly improves system performance where SAP applications are used. Exadata is also ideal for the cost-saving consolidation of both SAP and non-SAP database landscapes.

Oracle comes out on top in evaluation

Before opting for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Acquedotto Pugliese carried out an in-depth evaluation, appraising various possible solutions. „We concluded that the Oracle Exadata Database Machine offered the greatest benefits quickly and without an unrea-sonably expensive upgrade project. That‘s why we chose the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.“ Working with the SAP Oracle Solution Center in Walldorf, Acquedotto Pugliese then carried out an “Exadata SAP Acceleration Pre-Check” to confirm its own results and

“Through the IT infrastructure reorientation with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine we achieved all our optimization objectives relating to SAP, and there were several of them. The overall benefits were significant –

from accelerated business processes and substantially increased performance to cost savings and the fact that Exadata delivers a completely new usage experience.”

– PA S Q U A L E S C I A C O V E L L I , System and Database Administrator, Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A.

Multiple benefits: Enhanced performance, faster SAP processes, cost savings, new consolidation tool, and a completely new usage experience

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provide a rough plan for the planned migration of the AIX database servers to Exadata. „The work was completed in a very short time, so we were quickly able to start the migration to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine,“ says Sciacovelli.

An Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 for SAP has been running smoothly at Acquedotto Pugliese since mid-February 2014, replacing several IBM AIX p770 database servers. The data migration was handled with the RMAN. From the company’s point of view, “The conversion was easier than we expected. Whenever any-thing was unclear Oracle always offered their help right away.”

All SAP Oracle Databases now run on Exadata

All SAP Oracle Databases (a total of eight including productive, development and QA databases in Version 11.2 for SAP) were transferred to Exadata. The database volume amounts to 10 TB (productive systems: 2.5 TB for ECC 6.0 and 1.7 TB for BW). Before the migration, a database reorganization was implemented with the Oracle Advanced Compression option, which Acquedotto Pugliese was using for the first time. According to Acquedotto Pugliese, the data volumes were reduced by an average of around 50%. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) was also used with Exadata for the first time, with two nodes, to further increase availability.

“Through the IT infrastructure reorientation with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine we achieved all our optimization objectives relating to SAP, and there were several of them. The overall benefits were significant – from accelerated business processes and substantially increased performance to cost savings and the fact that Exadata delivers a completely new usage experience,” concludes Sciacovelli.

New usage experience for SAP users

Thanks to the power of the Oracle Engineered System, Acquedotto Pugliese has achieved a massive performance increase in terms of both ECC 6.0 and BW usage. The performance problems previously experienced with SAP accounting and various reports (queries) have been resolved and business processes have been optimized.

Accounting processes (billing and invoices) are now 75% faster and performance in relation to queries has also

Oracle Exadata Database Machine at Acquedotto Pugliese, Italy

dramatically improved. Important reports are now available to users immediately or much more quickly. Performance for BW is now 4 to 10 times faster depending on the queries.

As for the users, they benefit from a new usage experi-ence: „The migration was completed over the course of a weekend in mid-February. When the team came back to work on Monday morning, they were amazed at the response times of the SAP applications. The IT team received nothing but positive feedback, which we were obviously very pleased about,“ says Sciacovelli. According to Acquedotto Pugliese, Exadata has enabled the company to achieve further performance optimiza-tions in the processes of Java applications that directly access the SAP database. A total of around 450 users work with SAP applications.

Database license costs halved

In addition to the benefits of dramatically improved per-formance, according to Acquedotto Pugliese, „The Oracle Exadata Database Machine makes it possible to minimize IT costs and TCO. Oracle Database licenses are calculated by the number of CPU cores used. With the Exadata Database Machine on an Engineered System, the number of cores is reduced by 50% compared with AIX systems. As a result the database license costs are cut in half.“

Acquedotto Pugliese achieved further cost savings by reducing its AIX servers by a factor of 3. The SAP-AIX application servers will continue to run in the long term. Thanks to the Engineered System, patch implementation is now faster and easier, saving both time and money.

The company will also use Exadata to consolidate its entire Oracle Database landscape. All 40 existing Oracle Databases, including both SAP and non-SAP, will be consolidated on the Exadata system in the long term, with the associated cost and efficiency benefits. All the Oracle Databases are managed with Oracle Enterprise Ma-nager 12c. Acquedotto Pugliese also is considering using Oracle Dataguard as part of its disaster recovery concept.

Should the company ever need to enlarge the quarter-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 to a half or full rack, this can be easily implemented without the need for a complex upgrade project.

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Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A.www.aqp.it

Industry: Utilities

Revenue: Approx. $ 0,5 Billion

Workforce: Approx. 2,000

Oracle Products and Services: • Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP• X3-2 Quarter Rack • Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c• Oracle Real Application Clusters• Oracle Advanced Compression • Oracle Data Guard (planned)

Key Benefits: • Modern scale-out infrastructure for SAP applications, faster business processes, high performance, high security, high availability, cost reduction, high scalability; future-oriented infrastructure with innovative technologies.

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S A P C U S T O M E R S B E N E F I T I N G O F E X A D A T A T E C H N O L O G Y

Performance Boosts and other important benefits right

out-of-the-box, no changes required

Oracle Exadata Database Machines deliver extreme performance boosts for all customer workloads like SAP Business Suite (i.e. SAP ECC 6.0, SAP CRM 7.x) and SAP BW 7.x. Oracle Exadata customers can also run Oracle Databases with multiple workloads, SAP and non-SAP, on a single Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The fact is: It is simple and fast to implement the Exadata Database Machine is ready to tackle the largest and most important database applications and often run them 10 times faster or more. The key is system engineering, using industry standard hardware from Sun and the intelligent database and storage software from Oracle.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine is certified by SAP since July 2011 and SAP customers can use Oracle Exadata Database Machine for their SAP applications. Exadata is an easy-to-deploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database and runs SAP unchanged providing better performance out-of-the-box, consolidates SAP NetWeaver applica-tions, and reduces the number of vendors to just two; SAP and Oracle. Oracle Exadata also allows better sup-port, fast online migration, DBaaS deployment platform, advantages of the Enterprise Database Cloud Solution with a rapid deployment of its infrastructure, and lower costs through consolidation.

Over time many more SAP customers worldwide have purchased and deployed Exadata Database Machines. The following shows some customers around the world that have implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine across different industries and highlights some challenges and solutions they faced in various environments.

Expansion requires a “Datacenter of the Future”

The challenges for a chemical and fertilizer company in India with approximately half a billion USD in revenue listed the following: implementing a new future oriented and scalable solution that helps to force planned expansi-on into the APAC region. Hardware reaching end of life and was not supporting growth. In addition, the need for increased storage requirements was also an issue.

So, the company realized a detailed comparison of tradi-tional systems versus engineered systems was required. A PoC which focuses on SAP ECC and BW running on Exadata Database Machine cleared up any last doubts and the benefits for the company are enormous. A company spokesman said, “Oracle Exadata Database Machine is central for us building up a datacenter of the future. As a high performance platform to support our user growth we are able to fulfill our plans ideally”. Other benefits in-clude an efficient database consolidation, storage savings and significant performance gains.

Next example, a core consumer finance company in Japan found advantages by deploying Exadata Database Machine. In this case the management expects cost reduction in IT through consolidation of databases and a migration from Unix to Linux for SAP ECC. A smooth migration process to Oracle Exadata (with R/3 Load) is in the plan and also the replacement of the Itanium HP UX system. It is clear that with the new platform the finance company is able to continue the growth and consolida-tion of SAP, increasing the performance of processes and enabling more complex data queries.

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Why more SAP Customers worldwide deploy Oracle

Exadata Database

Another customer example in Japan involves the import and export sales of Japanese chemicals, plastics, electronic materials, cosmetics and health foods. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine was first used successfully for the company’s non-SAP environment and now is also used for the SAP environments. “Due to very good results in non-SAP decision was made to go for SAP ECC with Exadata Database Machine with X3 Half Rack”, a spokesman said. The main goal was to consolidate all databases and to benefit from the return of investment through cost reduction and replacement of the Windows platform. In summary the ECC system was facing various demands to increase performance, minimize downtime and ensure business growth.

Customer requires Real-Time Business

Meanwhile, in North America, a US media and enter-tainment company has different challenges which Oracle Exadata Database Machine perfectly solved. First the customer requires a kind of real-time business. Second there are I/O problems or issues with the current infra-structure and especially demanding SLAs. The customer was looking for a suitable IT architecture with a future growth path, inclusive private cloud offering DBaaS with charge-back and rapid provisioning. “Before making our final decision we checked SAP HANA as an alternative. We clearly saw that Oracle Exadata Database Machine fulfills all important demands, which we built up”, a spokesman from the company said.

Another US customer from the health care sector chose the same solution. In this example a technology refresh for SAP BW was needed. The IT staff wanted to make sure they had a very dense database consolidation platform that would scale for a global roll-out. The company is extremely happy with their choice with implementing Oracle Exadata. Not only was the performance of the application exceptional, but it fit within the strategic corporate goals to provide the optimal platform for con-solidation and standardization.

Next example in the US, a global consumer packaged goods company selected Exadata for their SAP BW. There were significant performance problems running BW on x86 and Microsoft Windows. The IT team from the Fortune 500 Company evaluated Oracle AWR reports

SAP Customers benefiting of Exadata Technology

and recommended Exadata for SAP BW. The statementfrom the company spokesperson: “Now we are able tocontinue the growth and can consolidate SAP workloads,increase the performance of business processes and reducethe overall platform cost.”

In other parts of the Americas, SAP customers deploy theOracle Exadata Database Machine to solve other challengesand requirements. For example, a company from theenergy sector in Brazil is using Exadata to deliver betterperformance and provide a smoother integration of theirSAP environment. Query time improved by a factor of 25and the load time decreased by a factor of 10 as comparedto the same activities ran on the previous hardware.

Faster Time-to-Market

EMEA Region, a large insurance and financial servicescompany wants faster time-to-market with new prod-ucts. From an IT perspective they needed to reduce thecomplexity of dozens of databases running on multipleoperating systems (IBM AIX, Linux, MS Windows andSolaris). With Exadata Database Machine the customeris now able to realize database consolidation of their SAPand non-SAP systems, with less effort and a decreasednumber of licenses. Oracle Exadata helps the company toachieve greater success by requiring less time-to-marketand reducing IT complexity.

Another example from EMEA, a B2B retailer with10,000 employees has the task to reduce IT costs andto solve business problems. The company minimizedcosts by consolidating 46 databases into two ExadataMachines. User I/O is no longer a major wait event andbatch jobs now run in one-third the time. All of thiswith with no application changes required. The retailernow gets, as a spokesperson said, “much better perfor-mance of the out-of-the-box”.

The last example from our many SAP customers, whichbuy and deploy Exadata Database Machine, is a large French company from the electricity sector. The main point being that the company had performance issues while running ECC batch jobs. Trying to solve this problem Oracle Exadata and two other alternatives were evaluated. A PoC to validate Exadata convinced the customer. The SAP customer is clearly benefiting from the new Oracle IT infrastructure, “Thanks to Exadata for SAP the IT land-scape is now highly consolidated and optimized and also compatible with our future demands”, a spokesman stated.

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S A P O N O R A C L E D A T A B A S E A T F U C H S P E T R O L U B S E

Fuchs Petrolub SE is a globally operating chemical com-pany based in Germany. Fuchs Petrolub specializes in the development, production, and sale of lubricants. They are the largest independent supplier of lubricants worldwide. The company was founded in Mannheim in 1931 by Rudolf Fuchs. It provides several thousand lubricants covering a vast range of industries and fields of application. Their lubricants and related products are utilized in industries that range from coal mining, steel, agriculture, automobile to household supplies and motoroils. The regions with the highest sales for the company are Western Europe, Asia, and North America.

The strategic application for all Fuchs Petrolub divisions is SAP. Fuchs Petrolub has used the Oracle Database with SAP since 1998. In 2012, Fuchs reviewed their options for a technology refresh and potential redesign of its database environment. The Oracle Database was considered in this process as were competing solutions such as SAP HANA.

After an intensive auditing process Fuchs Petrolub deter-mined that it was in their best interest to remain on with the Oracle Database environment for SAP. The reasoning behind this was simple. The Oracle Database has always met and exceeded their requirements for performance, availability, scalability. Additionally, Fuchs Petrolub had never had any significant problems with theOracle Database.

Auditing as an important tool for risk avoidance

Since Fuchs Petrolub had been using its Oracle Database licenses exclusively for SAP ERP and SAP BW applications since 1998 without any interruption, Oracle decided in 2012 to contact Fuchs Petrolub for the purpose of a license review (audit). The auditing process, carried out by Oracle partner „inforsacom“, was based on an agreement with old

“Due to the high quality and complexity of our applications and despite numerous other attractive offers, we have decided to remain with the Oracle Database. It has always worked harmoniously with the SAP software.”

– D I R K S A I L E R , Head of EuroSAP, Fuchs Petrolub SE

metrics. Due to changes in Oracle‘s licensing terms, as well as the growing importance of the SAP applicationwithin the Fuchs Group, the number of users increased significantly. This resulted in substantial re-licensing requirements.

“inforsacom” responded to Fuchs Petrolub‘s concern about this result with a practical sales solution, a cus-tomer relationship which was renewed by the audit, and the resulting future-oriented license optimization. This solution, combined with the past reliability of the Oracle Database solution in the SAP environment at Fuchs Petrolub, was so solid that Fuchs Petrolub decided to continue employing Oracle products despite attractive rival offers.

Why Oracle?

For fourteen years Fuchs Petrolub has relied on the security, performance, and reliability of the Oracle Database. This combined with the fact that they had never experienced database issues in conjunction with the SAP applications led Fuchs Petrolub to the determination that extending their licenses would be in their best interest. One of the keys to this reasoning was to avoid taking unnecessary risks with the infrastructure.

Why „inforsacom“?

„inforsacom“ is proud to be an IT system integrator, buil-ding bridges between the requirements of the customer and the technologies of various manufacturers. Their main focus is on projects in its own data center. These include the technologies relating to database systems, servers, storage and backup/recovery.

Since its founding in 1997, inforsacom Informations-systeme GmbH has been implementing data center solutions for customers. Over 160 employees ensure that customers can count on security, sustainability and maximum utility.

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With fifteen years of experience, “inforsacom” bases everything it does on a common understanding with the customer. With a vast understanding of the opportunities offered by technologies as well as IT challenges, “inforsa-com” lays the foundation for better decisions.inforsacom guides its customers through the entire process, from understanding, evaluating, selecting, convincing employees and secure implementation all the way to operational support.

Since Oracle is also an integral part of inforsacom‘s core competence pool, it was no surprise that Oracle decided to consult with inforsacom after an informal audit offer in order to carry out the actual audit with Fuchs Petrolub.

Customer: Fuchs Petrolub SE, Mannheim

Customer URL: www.fuchs-oil.de

Industry sector: Chemistry

Employees: over 4,000

Partner: inforsacom, Informationssysteme GmbH

Customer URL: www.inforsacom.com

Oracle Products & Services: • Oracle Database Enterprise Edition• Oracle Partitioning• Oracle Diagnostic Pack• Oracle Support• Oracle License

Management Services

Benefits: • Oracle Database successful in „historical“ SAP environment• Audits as an opportunity for security and license optimization

“Fuchs Petrolub continuesto rely on Oracle Databaseafter 14 years”

SAP on Oracle Database at Petrolub Fuchs

58

For organizations using SAP for critical operations, seamless data availability, optimal performance, and reduced IT risk are essential for business success. Oracle ACS services deliver mission-critical support services to help you maintain and maximize the performance of your Oracle systems. With a unique service approach focu-sed on building a long-term relationship with your IT team and collaborative support within Oracle’s support and engineering teams, Oracle ACS delivers a highly integrated, end-to-end service offering. A single contact for all Oracle and SAP issues and access to Oracle and SAP experts allows problems to be resolved faster and more efficiently. Proactive, preventative support services use diagnostic tools to help you increase system availa-bility, optimize performance, reduce risk, and accelerate return-on-investment (ROI) across the Oracle and SAP stack. Planning, migration, configuration, and instal-lation services allow you to take advantage of advanced features and new technologies faster and more effectively. Customized workshops train you with best practices on how to operate and maintain your SAP environment for the maximum performance and availability. All of this adds up to services that allow you to focus on delivering business value, not on day-to-day IT support.

Oracle has the deep SAP expertise you need to get the most out of your SAP environment. With over 27 years of collaboration with SAP, Oracle is the top database provider for SAP deployments and has the longest experi-ence with SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver of any database provider. Dedicated engineering and support resources from both companies work together on end-to-end deve-lopment, integration, and optimization and ensure fast customer issue resolution, so you can operate your SAP and Oracle environment with confidence. Highest Avai-lability for your SAP landscape with Oracle HA and DR development, integration, and optimization ensure fast customer issue resolution.

Oracle ACS Lifecycle Support Services for Oracle

Databases

Whether you need to migrate your database to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, consolidate legacy systems onto modern hardware, or improve the perfor-mance of your SAP workloads, Oracle ACS Lifecycle Support Services help you optimize your Oracle Database for SAP.

Oracle ACS Lifecycle Migration Service for SAP Migration

Through automation, advanced support tools, and more than 10 years of Oracle Database migration experience, Oracle ACS Lifecycle Migration Service delivers migration planning, validation, and execution services that allow you to migrate your SAP database faster, with lower costs and less downtime. Oracle experts assess your SAP environment, guide you in choosing from multiple migration approaches, resolve potential migration issues, perform migration test runs to reduce risk, and migrate your database through a secure online gateway. Oracle’s efficient process, based on the latest industry best practices, allows you to migrate your SAP database in a matter of days, not the weeks or months typically required for SAP migrations.

Oracle Consolidation Planning Service

Consolidating legacy systems onto modern hardware can reduce costs, improve performance, and simplify opera-tions. The Oracle Consolidation Planning Service helps you quickly identify the most optimal consolidation and migration scenarios for consolidation onto Oracle’s hard-ware platforms and engineered systems. Oracle experts assess the current configuration, workloads, patch levels, and security requirements of your SAP environment to develop a comprehensive consolidation plan, including detailed projections and actionable recommendations to lower transition and operational risks.

Oracle Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Service

Through ongoing monitoring and quarterly assessments, the Oracle Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Service helps you maintain consistent, optimal performance for critical SAP databases. Key performance metrics are mo-nitored to proactively identify issues before they impact operations. Quarterly performance assessments include re-commendations based on industry standards, Oracle best practices, and ongoing experience with customers that have similar SAP database configurations and usage scenarios.

Adding the Oracle Load Testing and Analysis Service further increases uptime, lowers costs, and reduces risk through comprehensive database testing. Oracle Database load testing experts evaluate the performance impact of planned technology changes, recommend configurations to optimize performance, and identify and address issues before go-live.

M I S S I O N - C R I T I C A L S U P P O R T S E R V I C E S F O R S A P

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Oracle ACS Services for Oracle Servers, Storage,

and Engineering System

For SAP environments based on Oracle hardware, Oracle ACS provides planning, deployment, optimization, and support services based on deep expertise for servers, sto-rage, and engineered systems. These services improve the performance and availability and reduce new hardware implementation times for your SAP environment.

Oracle ACS Services for Servers

Oracle ACS offers several services to help you improve the performance and availability of your Oracle servers and reduce deployment time for new systems. Installati-on and configuration assistance includes pre-production readiness reviews to speed deployment of new Oracle systems and ensure your resulting SAP environment is stable and supportable. Tailored services for server per-formance tuning and availability configuration optimize your SAP environment. And, customized workshops address best practices and knowledge transfers so you can operate your servers with confidence.

Oracle ACS Services for Storage

As with servers, Oracle ACS offers installation and con-figuration assistance to speed deployment of new Oracle storage systems. Storage optimization services include configuration and performance reviews and advanced monitoring and resolution services to maximize the avai-lability and performance of storage systems in your SAP

environment.

To learn more about Oracle ACS services for servers and storage, visit: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/advan-

ced-customer-services/servers-storage/overview/index.html.

Oracle ACS Services for Engineered Systems

Through a complete lifecycle approach, Oracle ACS de-livers mission-critical support for Oracle engineered sys-tems, including Oracle Exadata, that help you maximize the return on your engineered systems investment.

Support Services for SAP

Oracle ACS Lifecycle Support Services enable faster database migrations, reduce migration and consolidation risk and costs, and help you optimize database performance and availability. For more information on Oracle ACS Lifecycle Support Services for SAP environments, visit:

http://www.oracle.com/us/support/advanced-customer-services/database/overview/index.html and http://www.oracle.com/us/support/advanced-customer-services/lifecycle-support-services/overview/index.html

Advisory and planning, design and build, and deploy-ment services ensure a smooth migration to Oracle engineered systems and operational readiness within your SAP environment. Ongoing production support reduces risk and gives you a single point of contact for both Oracle and SAP issue resolution. The Oracle Exadata Start-Up Pack for SAP provides an integrated service package for end-to-end support coverage, including the following services:

• Oracle Exadata Start-Up Advisory Service

• Oracle Exadata Installation and Configuration Service

• Oracle Exadata Production Support Readiness Service

• Data migration services

• Oracle Exadata Quarterly Patch Deployment Service (including Oracle and SAP patching)

For more information on Oracle ACS services for engineered systems, visit: http://www.oracle.com/us/

support/advanced-customer-services/engineered-systems/

overview/index.html

Oracle Business Critical Service for Systems

Oracle Business Critical Service delivers enhanced preventative support and accelerated response times for your mission-critical SAP systems. Priority response with service-level agreements (SLAs) for response time and time-to-replace and on-site assistance for high-severity incidents ensures faster problem resolution. Continuous system monitoring with automated service request generation detects faults and starts the resolution process before they impact operations. The preventative services with regular system reviews and proactive patching optimizes performance and availability of critical systems in your SAP environment. To learn more about Oracle Business Critical Services for systems, visit: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/premier/business-critical-

service/overview/index.html.

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Oracle Platinum Services for SAP Environments

Through a special entitlement under the standard Oracle Premier Support program, Oracle Platinum Services offers customers additional, enhanced support features for their SAP environments. Using the secure Oracle Advanced Support Gateway, continuous, remote fault monitoring of your entire Oracle and SAP environment – hardware, database, operating system, and networking – enables accelerated response times. Notification of faults is delivers within 5 minutes of occurrence, with restoration or escalation to development within 15 minutes. Joint debugging of escalated faults starts within 30 minutes of occurrence. The result it decreased downtime through the prevention of critical issues and faster issue resolution. In fact, Oracle Platinum Services customers experience 50% fewer high-severity issues and 31% faster response times, on average, and reduce support-related workloads within their organization. Additionally, quarterly patch deployment services, including both Oracle and SAP patches, ensure your SAP environment is always up-to-date.

Oracle Platinum Services are included with Platinum- certified configurations of Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and Oracle SuperCluster with Oracle Premier Support contracts. For more information about Oracle Platinum Services for SAP environments, visit: http://www.oracle.

com/us/support/premier/engineered-systems-solutions/

platinum-services/overview/index.html.

Oracle Workshops for SAP Customers

Oracle provides customized workshops for SAP customers to help you better maintain and operate your Oracle and SAP environment. These onsite workshops are tailored to your business needs and delivered by Oracle professionals with deep expertise in optimizing Oracle Database de-ployments for SAP. Live, hands-on demonstrations and practitioner-oriented documentation cover a variety of topics to help you get the most out of your Oracle and SAP environment.

Support Services for SAP

61Joint Marketing Statement Relating to the Reseller Agreement

62

1289494

2138262

1431296

1436352

For Oracle Solaris and latest DB Notes please see: service.sap.com

Note Number Note Title DB Version

DB : General : Licensing Information

DB : General : Oracle Support for HANA-Related SAP Application

DB : General : File System Support

DB : General : Tool Support

DB : Features : Data Storage & Compression

581312

740897

1028068

1174136

2098258

Oracle Database Licensing Restrictions

Oracle License Scope & Required Oracle Options

Required Oracle Options for DBA Cockpit

Oracle: End of Support Dates

Oracle 11.2 Extended Support Free of Charge until May 31, 2017

Support for Oracle Functions in the SAP Environment

Central Technical Note for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

Oracle Database 12c: Integration in SAP Environment

Oracle Database 11g Integration in SAP Environment

BR*Tools support for Oracle 11g

Oracle 11.2 Central Technical Note

Oracle Database 11.2 for older SAP versions

Activate Database Performance Optimizations for SAP ERP

Minimal DB Platform Requirements for SAP NetWeaver 7.4 SP08

Oracle Direct NFS

Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

BR*Tools Configuration for Oracle Installation under „oracle“ User

BR*Tools Support for Oracle ASM and Exadata

SAPinst for Oracle ASM Installation

Oracle ASM and SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM)

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) in the SAP Environment

Use of Index Key Compression for Oracle Databases

Support for Index Compression in BRSPACE 7.20

SecureFiles – The New Way to Store LOB Data

Deferred Segment Creation

Dataload Without Dropping Bitmap Indexes

Performance Improvements for Tables with Single Unique Index

FAQ Oracle Compression

Oracle Database 12c Advanced Compression for SAP Systems

LOB Conversion and Table Compression with BRSPACE 7.20

Advanced Compression for SAP Systems

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

DB : General : Version Support

DB : General : Feature Support

105047

1914631

2133079

1398634

1430669

1431800

1434131

1835008

1951491

1416773

1550133

1598594

1627541

1738053

1825328

355770

386413

1109743

1464156

1426979

1583303

1842044

1856270

DB : Options : Advanced Compression

63Oracle DB related Notes for SAP


DB Option: Advanced Security

742243

1859841

1333328

General Table Partitioning

Deinstallation of Oracle Partitioning Option (SAP BW)

Partitioning Engine for Oracle

Oracle RAC Support in the SAP Environment

RAC with TAF

Protecting SAP instances through Oracle Clusterware (SAPCTL)

Using Shared or Local Oracle Homes with RAC

Database Upgrade to Release 11.2.0.4 on Unix with RAC or ASM

The Real Application Testing Option

OPS$ Connect and Security Aspects

Secure Connection of AS ABAP to Oracle via SSFS

Connect to Oracle Database

Using Personalized Database Administrator Accounts

Database Administrators Segregation

Support for Secure Storage in BR*Tools

Overview: Oracle Security SAP Notes

Advanced Security – Network Encryption

Advanced Security – Transparent Data Encryption

Advanced Security – Backup Encryption

Using Oracle Database Vault in an SAP Environment

Installing Oracle Database Vault in an SAP Environment

Database Vault for SAP Policy Scripts

SAP System Copies with Database Vault

Troubleshooting Software Installation for 12.1.0.2

Database Software 12.1.0.2 Installation on Unix

Database Software 12.1.0.2 Installation on Windows

Database Upgrade Scripts for 12.1.0.2

Migrating to Software Owner ‚oracle‘

Database Upgrade to 12.1.0.2 with Grid Infrastructure

Upgrade Scripts

Instant Client

Database Upgrade to Release 11.2.0.4 on Unix (Quick Reference)

Troubleshooting the Software Installation

Troubleshooting the Database Upgrade

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

DB Option: Real Application Clusters (RAC)

DB Option: Real Application Testing (RAT)

527843

1431241

1496927

1977463

2059515

1426980

157499

1622837

1623922

1710997

1755636

1764043

1868094

1355140

1597194

1502374

1716939

DB Option: Database Vault

DB Features: Security

973450

974876

1324684

Deployment: Software: Installation & Upgrade 1915299

1915301

1915302

1915315

1915317

2064206

1431793

1431794

1949451

1431796

1431797

DB Option: Partitioning

64 Oracle DB related Notes for SAP



Deployment : Instance Configuration

MOPatch – Install Multiple Oracle Patches in One Run

SAP Bundle Patches – Structure Changes Starting June 2014

Current Patch Set for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

Database: Patches for 12.1.0.2

Grid Infrastructure: Patches for 12.1.0.2

Patching of Oracle Homes with Minimal Downtime

Oracle 11.2.0: Current Patch Set

Database Patches/Patch Collections (11.2.0.4)

Grid Infrastructure Patches/Patch Collections (11.2.0.4)

Database Parameters 12.1.0.2

Quick Reference for ADRCI and ADR

Database Parameter Settings 11.2.0.x

SAP Workload Management via Oracle Resource Manager

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Deployment: Software: Patches

1027012

2011199

1915313

1915316

2145572

1696869

1431799

1949250

1968502

1428529

1838850

1844380

2086966

1882182

Deployment : Software : BR*Tools

1888485

1431751

1431798

1589924

646681

937492

966117

Corrections in BR*Tools Version 7.20

Corrections in BR*Tools Version 7.40

Minor Functional Enhancements in BR*Tools (5)

Minor Functional Enhancements in BR*Tools (6)

Functional Enhancements in BRARCHIVE 7.40

Oracle Lifecycle Migration Service (formerly O2O/Triple-O)

Deployment : Data

Reorganizing Tables with BRSPACE

Oracle Flashback FAQ

Oracle Flashback Database Technology

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

Database: Services

1508271 All DB Versions

Oracle DB 12c

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

Oracle DB 11g

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

For Oracle Solaris and latest DB Notes please see: service.sap.com

65

Oracle SAPfor® ®

T E C H N O L O G Y U P D A T E


All DB Versions

All DB Versions

All DB Versions

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O R A C L E A N D S A P : A P A R T N E R S H I P B A S E D O N S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y A N D I N N O V A T I O N

Oracle’s and SAP’s relationship base on a long history, rich heritage of joint developments and a bright future* – for the benefit of mutual customers. All efforts are made to serve our joint customers: all our plans and actions are centering on our customers. This also means doing the right things and doing things right for the customer.

Oracle and SAP have a long history of joint collabora-tion and innovation starting in 1988. Whether this has been the first development of SAP R3 on Oracle DB, or the use of Java by SAP as building block for application developments; world record benchmarks on Solaris and SPARC architectures, support of latest DB technologies and IT features, such as virtualization, or just recently the support of Oracle Engineered Systems which in itself simplify the use and operation of complex SAP environ-ments. This collaboration has resulted in tight integration between SAP and Oracle products today. Oracle Databases

Databases are available for SAP applications on all major operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Unix. Oracle Sun and SAP provide mission-critical enterprise solutions for collaborative, adaptable, open services architecture. Oracle Sun servers, storage, Solaris OS, virtualization, infrastructure and services address custom-ers’ concerns for increasing demands to network access, bandwidth, and storage driven by explosive data growth. Oracle and SAP have long-term agreements to ensure continued development, optimization, and support of Oracle Database and Oracle Sun Systems technology for SAP software. Joint customers enjoy a steady stream of new features and technologies enabling the latest inno-vation. At the same time, both companies diligently worked together to guarantee backward compatibility of their products to ensure investments in business critical infrastructure are protected and solution life cycles sustained.

* just recently SAP confirmed their commitment for the SAP NetWeaver stack until 2025:

http://www.asugnews.com/article/sap-extends-maintenance-guarantees-fixed-rate-until-2025

Oracle and SAP – Continuous Innovation

(1) requires Option

67Oracle and SAP: A Partnership

Oracle Corporation and SAP EG support our joint customers with long-standing reseller and customer support agreements that provide enhanced access to Oracle hardware and software technologies as well as world-class customer service.

Oracle and SAP foster an ongoing commitment to our joint customers through several resources. The Oracle development teams manage and implement joint integra-tion projects for Oracle/SAP database, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Linux, while Oracle Global Technology Centers for SAP provide pre-sales support, including sizing and IT infrastructure optimization. Oracle Database and Or-acle support teams are also on site at SAP support centers in Tokyo, Palo Alto, CA, and St. Leon-Rot/Walldorf, Germany.

Oracle Database for SAP

For more than 27 years, Oracle has been the safe, reliable, and scalable database of choice for SAP and SAP customers. More than two-thirds of all midsize- to large-enterprise SAP customers in every industry entrust their applica-tion deployments to Oracle Databases, and companies run SAP applications with Oracle Databases on all major operating systems. Oracle Database and database options are constantly optimized for SAP applications.

Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP

Customers today must meet surging demands for data amid an economy marked by spending cuts. Efficiency is the watchword for many, making an Oracle platform the smart choice for SAP application deployment. With Sun server, storage, operating system, and virtualization technology, Oracle provides flexibility and choice across your IT infrastructure. Together, Oracle and SAP offer a world-class set of end-to-end IT infrastructure solu-tions that deliver a high level of system availability as well as a clear path to improved productivity, increased system utilization, lower total cost of ownership, and the transformation of your technology infrastructure into an eco-friendly data center.

Oracle IT Infrastructure for SAP

Optimized for Oracle Database and SAP applications, Oracle’s Engineered Systems reduce the time needed to get SAP landscapes up and running. The systems are factory integrated, configured, and tested, and arrive ready for on-premise SAP installation. Each system is tuned for a specific purpose, reducing the need for customization and infrastructure modifications.

Oracle Services for SAP

Oracle and SAP coordinate global support processes designed to mitigate risk and reduce support-related assistance requests when new products are introduced. A dedicated, long-term team of technical analysts provide direct, consistent service relationships to SAP customers using Oracle Databases and systems. In addition to deliver-ing unified support with SAP, technical experts in Oracle’s Solution Support Center for SAP also provide a variety of services, workshops, and engagements tailored to specific customer needs through Advanced Customer Services.

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S I M P L I F Y I T A N D R E D U C E T C O : O R A C L E ’ S E N D - T O - E N D , I N T E G R A T E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E F O R S A P D A T A C E N T E R S

Introduction

With increasing numbers of interdependent applications, servers, and databases, distributed IT environments, and more users than ever before, IT infrastructures have become extremely complex. Increased complexity leads to higher costs, impedes agility, and reduces the time and resources available for innovation.To increase business value, IT organizations must simplify their infrastructure and operations.

With end-to-end integration, Oracle IT solutions for SAP span the enterprise, from browser to data center to storage, allowing you to simplify your SAP environment. Oracle solutions help you save energy, increase flexibility, improve availability, and streamline management operations. The result is reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerated return on investment (ROI) for your SAP and Oracle environment. Through vertical integration, cloud-ready, best-in-class systems, and a tight partnership with SAP, Oracle delivers solutions that let you drive more business value.

Vertical Integration

Oracle adds value and simplifies your infrastructure through integration. No other vendor provides all the components of the stack, so their solutions must be pieced together, a time- and resource-consuming process. Oracle’s solutions are designed to work together at every level from the start and are built on open standards for easy integration with your existing IT infrastructure.

• Broad portfolio – Oracle’s portfolio is the broadest in the business. That gives us a unique ability to offer customers a complete hardware and software stack – from applications through middleware and databases, and all the way down into servers and storage. We offer all of this on premises or in the cloud

• End-to-end integration – Each of the layers – and all the products within the layers – have been designed and engineered to work together according to open standards

• Optimized performance – Because Oracle solutions are designed from the start to work together, we’re able to optimize performance across the entire stack

• Increased reliability and security – Oracle’s inte-grated design approach ensures all components work together reliably and boost security

• Streamlined management – Because Oracle’s management tools run through every layer, it’s also much easier to manage the stack and upgrade it over time

The net result is that Oracle customers spend a lot less time and money on routine tasks, and a lot more on strategic projects.

Figure 1.: Oracle’s integrated approach helps simplify your IT landscape.

Cloud-Ready Infrastructure

Oracle’s solutions are designed to work in the cloud and the same Oracle systems can be used to build a com-plete cloud infrastructure for your SAP environment. With Oracle, you get a complete, integrated cloud that minimizes IT integration efforts, increases flexibility and agility, boosts performance, and protects your existing Oracle investments. When your business is ready, you can move to the cloud easily – without expensive integration efforts – and be sure that your data is connected across all of your systems.

69

Best-In-Class Solutions

Oracle focuses on creating the best possible products and solutions on the market. Gartner recognizes Oracle as the #1 provider across dozens of product categories, segments, and industries. Oracle delivers functionality, scalability, reliability, and security – all with mobile and social features built in. That means you can spend less time on maintenance and customizations, and more time on innovation.

Lower TCO

By simplifying IT, Oracle allows you to reduce TCO of your SAP infrastructure. In fact, a recent market study showed that simplifying IT with Oracle systems drives a value of US $3610 per employee each year, totaling US $83 million average annual benefits. That money can be redirected to strategic business goals. Oracle systems reduce TCO through a number of methods.

uSee graphic 1 next page

• No integration costs – Oracle’s solutions are pre-inte-grated, saving you time and money

• Virtualization and consolidation – The Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP enables the consolidation of multiple, complex SAP landscapes. Built-in no-cost, low-overhead virtualization technologies isolate SAP workloads and offer the fine-grained resource control needed to safely consolidate the SAP landscape within a single platform. This saves money on hardware and software licenses and power and cooling

• Simplified maintenance and management –Built-in management tools streamline software up-dates and patch rollouts. To simplify software main-tenance, patches from Oracle and SAP are integration-tested for compatibility, verified, and bundled together for easier administration. This means the entire software stack – even patches and upgrades applied previously – goes through load and stress testing before being released to ensure patch combinations work as expected. This reduces risk, shortens downtime, and saves you time and resources which can then redirected to other projects. All of this adds up to more efficient opera-tions and better productivity.

• Energy efficiency – Oracle actively develops new processors with simpler cores that produce less heat and use half the power of competitive processors. In addition, Oracle works closely with Intel to design energy-efficient computers using Intel Xeon proces-sors. Oracle’s eco-efficient Open Storage products combine solid state disks (SSDs) and hard drives to improve storage performance, increase capacity, and lower power consumption. Beyond using green hard-ware, increasing system utilization with virtualization technologies is critical to reducing energy consumption. Virtualization technologies from Oracle dramatically reduce energy costs, simplify administration, and improve flexibility, from the edge of the network to back-end information management, to enable your business to adapt and grow quickly

• Performance – Oracle’s high-performance systems allow you to do more in less time with a smaller, simpler infrastructure. Reports and analysis run faster, giving you new insight into your business so you can respond faster to changing market conditions with new business models

• Unified support – Support is just a single call away for your entire SAP and Oracle environment. This minimizes system downtime by reducing risk and resolving issues faster, so you can be more productive

All of this adds up to lower TCO for your SAP environ-ment. The Oracle Insight Program can analyze your in-frastructure and business strategy to help you understand the cost effects of your current technologies and how you can improve the TCO of your SAP environment.

uSee graphic 2 next page

Conclusion

Based on market-tested, industry-leading technology, Oracle’s end-to-end infrastructure solutions for SAP provide a high-performance, robust, open, flexible SAP architecture that leverages virtualization to reduce TCO and increase business agility. Oracle’s solutions help you simplify IT so you can deliver more value to your business. Email [email protected] for more information about Oracle’s solutions for SAP customers.

Simplify IT and Reduce TCO

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Choose Oracle Engineered Systems for lower TCO for SAP environments

Oracle TCO Customer Case Studies

Overall, Customers Choosing Oracle Engineered Systems For SAP BenefitFrom TCO Reduction

Exadata Customer Successes Have Been Impressive

Simplify IT and Reduce TCO

Graphic-1

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Graphic-2

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W H Y M O R E A N D M O R E S A P C U S T O M E R S A R E M I G R A T I N G T O O R A C L E S O L A R I S

Introduction

Oracle’s tag-line, “Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together,” promises dramatic improvements in scalability, flexibility, reliability, and productivity of application and business systems, combined with reduced costs and risk. Oracle and SAP applications, along with industry-leading middleware and database software technologies, operate on a wide variety of Oracle and non-Oracle hardware platforms. But it is Oracle’s invest-ment in deep application-to-disk integration, end-to-end testing with fault injection, and documented best practices for running SAP software on Oracle hardware that helps customers most effectively manage the ever-increasing pressure to consistently deliver more value with less cost and risk.

As a key component in Oracle’s end-to-end integration, Oracle Solaris creates enormous value for customers. For organizations that are overdue for an upgrade of their UNIX, Linux, and other platforms running Oracle and non-Oracle Databases for SAP applications, migrating to Oracle Solaris delivers the opportunity for great improve-ments in performance, scalability, flexibility, and security.

Until recently, the risk of downtime for their always-on databases and business applications and already long IT project backlogs has kept many enterprise IT organiza-tions from migrating to newer and more advanced techno-logies and systems. In these organizations, aging UNIX and Linux systems – including IBM AIX and HP-UX systems – are failing to keep pace with growing service and application demands. With the future of these platforms uncertain, IT managers are now looking for alternative platforms that can deliver the functionality, performance, scalability, reliability, availability, and security needed to support business priorities. Oracle’s SPARC and x86 systems running the Oracle Solaris operating system provide an obvious alternative and safe platform for running critical business applications like SAP. And, for HP-UX customers, transitioning to Oracle Solaris is even easier, as HP-UX and Oracle Solaris share a common UNIX history – and are more alike than they are different.

Why Move to Oracle Solaris?

For organizations that need to modernize or expand their infrastructure, Oracle offers a leading alternative that delivers higher performance, scalability, and flexibility, reduces risk to IT operations, and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than similar HP and IBM UNIX solutions. Through Oracle’s new infrastructure offerings, customers can reduce capital expenses by up to 1.6x, lower their TCO by up to 2.6x, and benefit from world record OLTP and data warehouse performance that is up to 2.4x faster than IBM’s Power AIX systems. For published long-term system roadmaps, Oracle is the safest platform choice for mission-critical business applications.

These benefits are a result of Oracle’s focused long-term investments in end-to-end integration from applications to silicon. Oracle integrates and optimizes Oracle and SAP applications, Oracle Database, middleware, operating system, and infrastructure platforms to deliver the best results possible when deployed together. By deploying complete solutions that are engineered to work together, organizations that migrate to Oracle realize significant cost savings, achieve major performance improvements, and benefit from lower risk, all while reducing the need for significant, high-cost, custom consulting services.

Oracle is also investing heavily in research and development to extend the unique mission-critical cloud capabilities of Oracle’s Solaris operating system and server and storage technologies, and in the process is changing the economics of computing landscape for the better. Traditionally, large-scale, multiprocessor systems were only available at a significant premium per compute power compared to smaller systems. Simply put, traditionally, a 16-pro-cessor system was priced significantly higher than eight 2-processor systems. Now, Oracle can deliver higher performing, more efficient systems at a lower cost and is passing those savings on to its customers.

In the past, IBM has delivered most performance gains and enhancements in its Power servers and AIX systems. Meanwhile, Oracle has delivered radical improvements in

Why more and more customers are migrating to Oracle Solaris

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Oracle Solaris and SPARC performance, focusing on ease of lifecycle management, virtualization, and networking. Additionally, it has extended its lead with the best-per-forming and most reliable platform for running business applications and databases. While Intel is focused on general purpose computing, and IBM is making only modest gains in its system performance, Oracle increased and focused research and development on the enterprise infrastructure market – stepping out with the strongest technology portfolio for the enterprise IT customer. Oracle’s infrastructure portfolio reflects ideas and strate-gic designs that continuously provide new innovations for its customers. And, Oracle continues to invest in Solaris development to deliver groundbreaking new func-tionality, like OpenStack integration, ZFS enhancements, compliance tools, and zones, for enterprise use.

Availability

Your SAP systems are critical to business and must be up and running at all times. With numerous reliability and availability features in server, networking, and storage management, Oracle Solaris can improve the availability of your SAP landscape. The Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing framework helps diagnose, isolate, and recover from hardware and application faults. Oracle Solaris Clus-ter, fully integrated with Oracle Solaris and engineered for business-critical applications, extends reliability across multiple systems and sites to provide high availability and disaster recovery for your mission-critical SAP applica-tions. With multi-site, multi-cluster disaster recovery services, Oracle Solaris Cluster features automated application failover and coordination with application, storage, and host-based replication solutions. Oracle cluster agents for Oracle Databases and SAP applications deliver instant, solution-specific failure detection and recovery. Reducing service recovery time and minimizing outages due to component failure. With co-located sup-port and development means support for your entire SAP environment is just a single call away.

Scalability and Performance

Oracle Solaris is ideal for applications like SAP that require high-performance systems, batch processing, high I/O rates, and large memory-addressing capabilities. Scaling from entry-level to large enterprise systems, terabytes of main memory, and hundreds of Gbps, Oracle Solaris allows more consolidation of your SAP landscape, saving

you money and easing system maintenance and manage-ment. Oracle Solaris ZFS supports files and file systems as large as 16 exabytes (EB) and provides innovative data storage and management features to handle huge amounts of data efficiently and cost-effectively. Some of these features include data deduplication and data compression, optimized code paths from application to hardware, and data backup and migration technologies such as snapshots. And, Oracle Solaris benefits from ongoing improvements that enhance scalability and performance, so you can be sure your SAP environment is always performing to the max.

Efficiency and Management

Oracle Solaris contains many innovations that ease man-agement tasks for administrators. For example, Oracle Solaris ZFS provides snapshots, read-only copies of an Oracle Solaris ZFS file system or volume that can be used to almost instantly save the state of a file system at a given point in time. Snapshots can be used to recreate file systems at a later date. This is useful for performing backups in very tight windows, as well as moving large data volumes to other systems.

Oracle Solaris 11 also includes a number of different technologies related to configuration management. The Service Management Facility (SMF) provides administra-tors with the ability to configure services running on a system with seamless configuration management through system upgrades. Puppet has been included in Oracle Solaris 11 to allow administrators automated configuration enforcement across systems, with enhanced support for a number of new resource types to support Oracle Solaris technologies. The Remote Administration Daemon pro-vides secure, remote administrative access to an Oracle Solaris system, including the ability for developers to write programmatic administrative interfaces.

Overall, Oracle Solaris allows you to respond more quickly to change requests and lets you operate more efficiently.

Security and Compliance

As more employees, customers, suppliers, and partners access SAP NetWeaver’s collaborative environment, the need for security increases. Security is also being driven by regulations governing data integrity. Oracle continues its 20-plus year commitment to building security into the operating

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system with capabilities that include user and process rights management, role-based access control, secure execution, and an integrated firewall. Oracle Solaris is engineered for security and compliance to protect data, applications, users and the system itself from a variety of external and internal threats. Oracle Solaris combines the power of industry standard security features, unique security and anti-malware capabilities, and compliance management tools for low risk application deployments and cloud infrastructure. Oracle Solaris builds in many isolation and security features, such as support for on-chip encryption, a robust cryptographic framework, trusted extensions, and virtualization capabilities. Other Oracle Solaris security features include:

• Digital signatures. Provided for all files shipped in Oracle Solaris, digital signatures enable administrators to check the integrity of critical system files and meet requirements for security compliance

• Secure execution. Secure execution enables the system to run only valid, signed executables, preventing rogue applications, trojan horses, and viruses from executing.

• Role-based access controls. Role-based access controls grant users and applications only the minimum capabilities needed to perform specific tasks. When integrated with industry-leading Oracle IdentityManagement tools and SAP specific Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) components, the result is the most powerful security solution on the market. These combined software tools address the end-to-end life-cycle of user identities across all enterprise resources, within and beyond the firewall

• Secure by default. Starting with Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle platforms are secure out of the box. All data services must be enabled explicitly, with only the serial port enabled by default

An integrated compliance framework built on OpenSCAP ensures compliance requirements are easily assessed and monitored through the complete software lifecycle, from development to production.

Virtualization

Oracle works with SAP to integrate and validate its virtualization technologies with SAP Business Applications and the SAP NetWeaver platform. This allows SAP and

Oracle customers to improve productivity, flexibility,and system utilization rates through virtualization and consolidation. Oracle’s cross-platform virtualization management technology provisions and manages flexible pools of resources that users can share and allocate to many SAP instances. Built-in resource management features enable sharing of compute, memory, and I/O resources, improving server utilization to up to 85 percent of capacity. Upgrading SAP on Oracle technology can improve user productivity, consolidate workloads, and better utilize resources – resulting in dramatically re-duced data center costs.

Oracle Solaris 11 includes a built-in virtualization tech-nology called Oracle Solaris Zones that provides a highly efficient, near-zero overhead and scalable solution for mission critical workloads. Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones provide support for independent kernel and patch levels giving greater flexibility that is ideal for cloud deploy-ments. Fully supported for SAP applications, Zones for Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 offer easy implementation and minimal impact on performance, making these tools a popular choice with SAP customers. Oracle Solaris Zones easily support the consolidation of old and new projects on one server, such as a Solaris 10 zone on Solaris 11.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC is included with Oracle Solaris at no charge. OVM provides a highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization capabilities for supported Oracle SPARC servers. Oracle VM Server leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide a supported platform’s resources using partitions called logical (or virtu-al) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC flexibly deploys multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simulta-neously on a single platform. OVM Server also creates up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by Oracle SPARC servers.

OVM Server for x86 is a free server virtualization and management solution that makes enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support. Backed worldwide by affordable enterprise-quality support for both Oracle and non-Oracle environments, Oracle VM facilitates application deployment and management on a fully certi-fied platform reducing operations and support costs while simultaneously increasing IT efficiency and agility.

Why more and more customers are migrating to Oracle Solaris

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Each of these virtualization technologies can be used to-gether or separately for flexibility. With these virtualization technologies built into Oracle Solaris, SAP workloads 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 zone clusters can be configured to run specific SAP applications according to predefined cluster management policies.

Integration and Certification

SAP supports Oracle Solaris as the operating system platform for both database servers and SAP application server installations.

Oracle has the deep SAP expertise you need to get the most out of your SAP environment. With over 25 years of collaboration with SAP, Oracle is the top database provider for SAP deployments and has the longest experience with SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver of any database provider. Dedicated engineering and support resources from both companies work together on end-to-end development, integration, and optimization and ensure fast customer issue resolution so you can operate your SAP and Oracle environment with confidence.

Oracle hardware and software engineers work together to ensure that SAP applications, Oracle Database, and middleware are integrated and optimized with compute, storage, networking, and operating system resources. The result is extreme performance, unique features, built-in robustness, exceptional security, and seamless integration of operating system, hardware and application software. In the event of a problem, support is delivered from a single enterprise for faster resolution.

Simplify the Migration to Oracle Solaris

One of the largest single success factors for any IT project is quality planning. The same is true for migration projects like moving business systems to Oracle Solaris. Breaking down a migration project into the key steps can help customers realize that migration effort, risk, and duration are often more about where one is currently than where one is planning to go! Customers are in the best position to describe their business needs and determine where they are today with their IT infrastructure supporting

Oracle software technology. As such, a plan needs to start with a scoping assumption of which parts of an IT infrastructure need to be included in a plan: a system on which the migration process is to be tested, a key system that needs the benefits of migration now, or multiple systems in the IT landscape. Additionally, having some objectives for the migration duration time and migration recovery point requirements for each of the scoped sys-tems can help in making the right planning tradeoffs.

Oracle ACS Lifecycle Migration Services and Oracle

Migration Factory

Oracle ACS Lifecycle Migration Services and Oracle Mi-gration Factory help you migrate your operating system, system tools, and SAP database quickly and optimally so your business can benefit from the latest technologies. With more than 10 years of Oracle database migration experience and over 1,800 migrations performed, Oracle experts analyze your SAP environment and guide you in choosing from multiple migration approaches based on current industry best practices and standards. They also provide you with a direct connection to Oracle Support and product development throughout the migration process. Delivered online through the secure Oracle Ad-vanced Support Gateway, Oracle’s migration services give you access to the latest tools and automation to help you migrate your SAP database faster, more efficiently, and with less downtime. Real-time monitoring and reporting ensures that any issues are found and mitigated quickly. No sensitive or migrated data leaves your data center during the process so you can be sure that your informa-tion is protected. Oracle migration services include:

• Pre-migration analysis of key database, operatingsystem, and environment aspects critical to a suc-cessful migration

• Migration automation and dynamic tuning to in-crease migration performance and ensure accuracy

• Parallelized data migration to reduce downtime

• Migration testing and validation

• Real-time, comprehensive reporting throughout the migration process

• SAP certified migration

75Why more and more customers are migrating to Oracle Solaris

Migration guides and system mappings are available for RHEL, IBM AIX/Power, and HP HP-UX systems at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/so-

laris11/overview/evaluate-1530234.html.

Find out more about Oracle services for SAP and Oracle Migration Factory at: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/services/over-view/index.html and http://oracle.com/migrationfactory.

Conclusion

IT organizations can simply and easily improve produc-tivity, flexibility, scalability, and reliability of mission-critical applications and business systems – and reduce costs and risk – by migrating their SAP environment to Oracle Solaris running on Oracle hardware. If they’re overdue to upgrade legacy UNIX or Linux systems, the opportunity for improvement is even greater. With the proper planning and assessment, customers can migrate with ease and confidence. By taking advantage of training resources available from Oracle University and applying Oracle Optimized Solutions as end-state architecture, customers have all the tools to migrate to a better future. Moreover, customers have the Oracle Migration Factory experts to assist with their deep experience, tools and methods for migration.

To find out more about how to begin migration now and receive the benefits of Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together, customers can check out: http://www.oracle.com/aixtosolaris.

Solaris Migration Case Study

A large food distribution and retail company determined they had scalability and performance issues with their existing IBM AIX-based SAP system. These issues were impeding the rollout and implementation of SAP across the company’s numerous business units. Their infrastruc-ture had high development and runtime costs. Operational activities such as daily database backups were tedious and took most of a day to run. With significant database growth projected, the company needed a high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective new SAP infrastructure.

After a comprehensive and objective investigation into the options for meeting the stated goals, the company chose to migrate their SAP environment to Oracle Exadata and Oracle Solaris.

Due to the nature of the business, minimizing downtime was critical. A near-zero downtime migration was required.The Oracle ACS Migration Services team has the tools, experience, and personnel to perform this type of migration. Oracle and the customer worked together to leverage the correct and best resources at each phase of the project.

From concept to rollout, the migration process took less than 5 months, including capacity planning, delivery, initial build, testing, and production go-live. The process went smoothly, with minimal outage time and even better performance than expected. The new infrastructure is also greener and easier to maintain than the previous IBM systems.

With the new Oracle-based SAP infrastructure, significant runtime improvements between 200% and 1600% were realized immediately. The migration also lowered data center costs by 7x and significantly reduced the hardware footprint of the company’s SAP environment. The new Oracle infrastructure allows the company to operate more efficiently and prepares their SAP environment for future growth.

Customer example of achieved improvements with

Oracle-based SAP infrastructure

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Deploying SAP applications on Oracle platforms delivers end-to-end SAP infrastructure solutions that improve productivity and performance, increase system utilization, and create an eco-friendly data center.

Upgrading SAP on Oracle’s Systems technology can im-prove user productivity, consolidate workloads, and better utilize resources – resulting in dramatically reduced data center costs. Oracle’s eco-optimized IT infrastructure for SAP data center solutions provides a methodology for upgrading existing SAP Business Suite applications with eco-efficient Sun servers and storage; Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux operating systems; and industry-leading virtualization technologies.

Oracle’s Infrastructure Stack for SAP Data Centers

The Oracle Product Strategy: Co-Engineering

Oracle’s integrated infrastructure stack – consisting of servers and storage, operating systems, database software, middleware, networking, and built-in virtualization features – is optimized to deliver agility, scalability, reliability, and performance to SAP applications. While each layer of this technology stack is leading edge in its own right, all layers are optimized and tested to work together with ease.

The complete stack is validated to streamline solution deployment. From server and storage systems with intel-ligent automation to built-in virtualization technologies, database, and management software that are integrated throughout all levels, Oracle IT infrastructure helpsenterprises address the challenges of business process optimization.

B U I L D I N G S I M P L I F I E D S A P D A T A C E N T E R S W I T H O R A C L E ’ S C O M P L E T E I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S T A C K

Storage, ZFS, ZFSA, FS1, Backup

Oracle optimized storage enables enterprises to simplify IT environments so they can operate more efficiently, reduce costs, and respond quickly to dynamic business needs.

Our best-of-breed storage products and business-ready storage solutions are engineered to enable business-cri-tical software to run faster and more efficiently, offering unsurpassed capabilities for heterogeneous data centers. Oracle storage systems optimize performance, maximize data protection, and reduce the total cost of ownership for Oracle Databases, SAP applications, and heterogeneous data management. Choose from a wide range of storage systems, from individual tape drives and high-capacity tape library solutions, to fiber-channel disk arrays and SAN solutions. Oracle’s application-engineered storage reduces storage sprawl, complexity, and cost with industry-leading Oracle integration, management simplicity, and high performance, including an innovative storage architecture and unparalleled efficiency. Storing SAP data on NAS-filers like the latest Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 products is easy and safe. For the utmost in performance, Oracle offers integrated storage appliances such as Sun ZFS Storage Appli-ances and Flash storage systems to turbocharge SAP applications.

Oracle Optimized Storage Systems

Flash memory is clearly a key technology behind high performance. The new FS1 Series flash storage system can scale to petabytes of all-flash capacity. The product provides performance advantages over comparable com-petitive products according to Oracle benchmarking data

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while offering a much lower $/TB cost. It provides up to 80 GB/s throughput with up to 2 M 50/50 Read-Write IOPS performance with up to 16 high availability nodes and 2.4-173 TB of SSD storage. By utilizing 10% of the system CPU for HDD storage up to 2.8 PB of additional storage is possible without a significant impact of overall system performance.

The system provides quality of service (QoS) by using workload-driven heat maps to perform fine-grained auto-tiering on 2 flash and 2 HDD storage layers. Both SSD and HDD have a performance and capacity layer to give a wide choice of tiered performance that can be selected by the user.

Database and big data applications are critical elements in today’s cloud service offerings. Digital storage of all sorts plays an important role and these various storage solutions create a “Trail of Tiers” that provides the best trade off between cost and performance.

Servers and SPARC roadmap

Gain flexibility and reliability for your SAP landscape by matching Oracle platforms (such as engineered systems, SPARC or x86 servers, and Solaris or Linux operating systems) with SAP modules to create an optimal architecture for specific SAP workloads.

The New Wisdom

The Efficiency of Large Systems

Conventional Wisdom

• Build large scale IT infrastructure with a bunch of small networked servers

• Use large systems for specialized workloads that justify historical price/performance disparity

The New Wisdom

• Oracle’s M6-32 and T5-8 servers are simpler and have lower costs than a bunch of networked small systems – Better performance – Lower network latency – Easier to manage – Greater flexibility

Oracle – Complete Infrastructure

Oracle Sun servers provide the necessary performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness to meet your business needs using SAP solutions. Oracle’s complete family of servers lets you choose the architecture that best supports your specific requirements.

Extreme Performance, Simplified Management

Oracle‘s servers are engineered to deliver record-breaking performance, simplified management, high availability, and cost-saving efficiencies to SAP deployments. These industry-leading systems include built-in virtualization, cloud management, and systems management; they areoptimized to run Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. A wide variety of platforms are available, from blade and x86 systems to high-performance SPARC and enterprise-classservers.

Oracle SPARC Servers for SAP

• Oracle’s Sun Blade servers deliver performance, scalability, energy efficiency, longevity, and a choice of platform architectures in a single, common chassis to help make the most of SAP infrastructure. With this open architecture, businesses can respond to changing priorities and expand SAP infrastructure with ease.

• Oracle’s Sun x86 systems offer an economical, enter-

prise-class alternative. The combination of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux scalability and powerful, energy-efficient Intel processor-based systems creates a mission-critical platform that can deliver manageability, flexibility, security, and reliability to SAP applications at less cost.

• Oracle’s SPARC servers are ideal for small to large SAP deployments. Oracle SPARC Enterprise MSeriesand SPARC T-Series servers deliver affordable virtuali-zation and consolidation to Web tier, cloud computing,

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operations, and higher server utilization for large, complex workloads or for consolidating smaller servers. Histori-cally, large-scale servers have had a higher cost per unit of performance and therefore limited those servers to specialized workloads. Oracle has re-engineered server economics, enabling near-linear pricing from two-processor SPARC T5 servers to the terabyte-scale SPARC M6-32 server.Oracle customers can deploy any workload onto a larger scale server, obtaining better performance, better efficiency, and less complexity without a price premium over small servers.

Terabyte-Scale Computing Advantages

“Scaling up” with large servers – generally SMP servers hosting eight or more processors – provides significant advantages over “scaling out” with many small servers. Higher system performance is available from larger pools of compute resources due to higher bandwidth system interconnects and lower latencies, versus conventional networking across clusters of small servers.Large-scale servers can be configured with terabytes of system memory. Entire databases and applications can be cached in-memory for unprecedented performance levels. Oracle’s SPARC M6-32 server offers up to 32 terabytes of system memory – twice the memory per processor of any other large-scale enterprise-class server – and more than a terabyte/sec of memory or I/O system bandwidth.

The New Wisdom of Near-Linear Pricing – What Does This

Mean?

For a few decades now, conventional wisdom has said that vendors charge a significant premium for larger multiprocessor servers and deliver price/performance that is worse relative to smaller severs. These price premiums have limited big-scale servers to specific workloads for which large compute resources, memory footprint, high availability, or other large-scale server capabilities are required. This trend has led IT organizations to build larger-scale deployments with increasing quantities of smaller networked servers. Resulting in challenges to achieve performance, increased complexity, higher costs for high-speed networks, and lower server utilization.

database, and large-scale enterprise application en-vironments. M5/M6-Series servers with up to 32 TB of main memory, as well as the SPARC T-Series servers with chip multithreading technology (CMT) deliver exceptional throughput and performance for SAP applications.

The combination of Oracle servers and Oracle Solaris yields proven performance advances. In fact, Oracle plat-forms continue to set performance and price/performance world records on a wide range of industry-standard benchmarks.

You can also turn to the SAP Standard Application Bench-marks to help find the appropriate hardware configuration for your IT solutions. This standardized and well-defined benchmarking procedure is monitored by the SAP Bench-mark Council. The council consists of SAP representatives and other technology partners, including Oracle. Oracle actively engages in the benchmark process, viewing it as an opportunity to strengthen quality assurance, as well as test and verify scalability, concurrency, and multi-user behavior of system software components, RDBMS, and business applications.

The Oracle Systems Advantage

Better Value from the Complete Stack of Hardware and

Software

Strategy

• Optimize for Oracle Database and Java • Develop and test full hardware and software stack

Leadership

• #1 Fastest Processor • #1 Engineered Systems • #1 In-memory processing • #1 Fastest database server • #1 Fastest Java server • 1st Operating System for Cloud

Revolutionizing Server Economics

Terabyte - Scale Computing Without the Premium Price

Large-scale servers offer significant advantages in the areas of application performance, simplified data center

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Oracle has created new wisdom with the introduction of the SPARC T5 and M6 servers. Near-linear pricing means that the price/performance of the terabyte-scale SPARC M6-32 server is nearly the same as the price/performance of the SPARC T5-2 server. In fact, the price/performance for all SPARC T5 servers, which scale from two to eight processors, is nearly the same. Oracle customers can now deploy any workload onto larger-scale servers obtaining the advantages of teraby-te-scale computing including higher performance, higher system availability, and less complexity for nearly the same price/performance as smaller servers.

Oracle: Revolutionizing Systems Economics

This chart above illustrates how price/performance across Oracle’s SPARC T5 and SPARC M6 servers is nearly constant. The lines show the price/performance for servers configured with the same amount of memory per pro-cessor, but different maximum processor (socket) counts, while the numbers indicate list prices.Other vendors charge high premiums for large servers – regardless of the processor (x86, POWER, Itanium, etc.)on which they are based. As shown in the example above, IBM’s POWER servers still follow conventional wisdom, with a high price premium for larger servers. The revolu-tionary price/performance introduced by Oracle is made possible by breakthrough engineering, such as the creation of a highly efficient processor interconnect design and the utilization of non-proprietary memory components.

Increased Server Economics with Server Consolidation

Workloads and applications consolidated onto larger scale servers benefit from shared system compute resources. Consolidating smaller servers can lead to much higher server utilization as excess capacity can be pooled and

shared among applications to achieve the highest efficiency levels. Servers used for consolidation must provide high scalability, high availability, and advanced virtualization, so that partitioning into virtual machines can be used to securely isolate multiple application workloads.

Re-engineered Systems Economics

The comparison table above shows that, for about the same price, a single SPARC M6-32 server offers a dramatically simpler deployment, while providing much better performance, than a network of smaller servers. The architecture using SPARC T5-2 servers needs to factor in the cost of expensive, complex, high-performance networking that is necessary to make a cluster of small servers perform like a single high-end system. However, even the most sophisticated conventional technologies available today for networking cannot match the speed and efficiency of the SPARC M6-32 internal system in-terconnect. A similar argument can be made when com-paring an architecture with one SPARC T5-8 server with a cluster consisting of a few smaller servers. Oracle’s new large-scale servers – SPARC M6-32 and SPARC T5-8 – are ideal consolidation platforms, delivering the scalability, high availability, virtualization, and system management capabilities to support hundreds of diverse workloads of varying sizes.Oracle customers can benefit from the significant advan-tages of Oracle’s large servers in terms of higher perfor-mance, system availability, and reduced management complexity when compared to many smaller networked systems.

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Operating System Benefits

SAP supports Oracle Solaris, the most strategic platform available for today’s demanding enterprise, as well as Oracle Linux and Linux environments on Oracle servers, as operating system platforms for both database servers and SAP application server installations.

In the face of diminishing budgets, SAP customers require high-availability solutions to operate effectively in a 24/7 global economy characterized by continuous security demands. A strategic platform for SAP applications, SAP NetWeaver solutions running on Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux can help IT organizations to deliver dynamic busi-ness solutions much more effectively.

Oracle Solaris for SAP

Oracle Solaris is the #1 enterprise OS for datacenters, developers, and service providers. Oracle Solaris provides industry-leading performance and scalability. It optimizes the system CPU, memory, I/O, and network resources for a broad range of mission-critical workloads. The proven reliability of Oracle Solaris gives customers built-in fault tolerance through features such as ZFS, DTrace and Predictive Self Healing. Oracle Solaris enables customers to increase system and service availability while reducing infrastructure costs and risk. Oracle Solaris offers the most complete range of reliability features and delivers datacen-ter reliability on systems ranging from a single processor to hundreds of processors and cores.

Solaris is the ideal cross-platform choice for customers looking to cut costs and simplify system administration while maintaining high service levels. Innovative and built-in features deliver a number of advantages:

• Flexibility. Oracle Solaris is an enterprise-class operating system that runs on both commodity x86 hardware and Oracle’s SPARC processor-based servers. Oracle Solaris draws on built-in binary compatibility to in-crease system utilization through scalability, consolida-tion, and virtualization. In fact, Oracle’s virtualization technologies make it possible to virtualize SAP instances and draw from an underlying pool of dynamically managed, heterogeneous resources.

• Price/performance. Oracle Solaris is ideal for applica-tions such as SAP that require high-performance systems, massive threading and batch processing, high I/O rates, and large memory-addressing capabilities at an attractive price point.

• Reliability. Oracle servers feature hot-swappable, redundant components and can leverage powerful Oracle Solaris capabilities such as Predictive Self Hea-ling, Oracle Solaris Fault Manager, and Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) to maximize SAP uptime. In addition, you can minimize downtime for SAP upgrades using a combination of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris ZFS. High availability and disaster recovery are possible with Oracle Solaris Cluster and with Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition.

• Security. As more employees, customers, suppliers, and partners access SAP NetWeaver’s collaborative environment, the need for security increases, further driven by regulations governing data integrity. Oracle continues its 20-plus year commitment to building security into the operating system with capabilities that include user and process rights management, role-based access control, secure execution, and an integrated firewall.

• Complete stack. Oracle hardware and software engineers work together to ensure that Oracle applications, data-base, and middleware are integrated and optimized with compute, storage, networking, and operating system resources. The result is extreme performance, unique features, built-in robustness, exceptional security, and seamless integration of operating system, hardware and application software. In the event of a problem, support is delivered from a single enterprise for faster resolution.

SPARC M6-32 Consolidation Example


• Platform optimization. Oracle engineers continue to optimize the operating system for various hardware platforms, leveraging innovations for eco-efficiency found in both SPARC and x86 processor-based servers. These improvements enhance the performance of SAP solutions on Oracle Solaris. The latest generation of Oracle servers powered by intelligent processors adapt to application behavior by automatically adjusting processing power to deliver optimum performance, scalable energy use relative to the workload, and best-in-class virtualization. With a full line of SPARC and x86 systems – all running Oracle Solaris – Oracle platforms can help enterprises take advantage of the best technology to handle multitier enterprise SAP workloads.

SAP supports the following databases on Oracle Solaris platforms:• Oracle Database• IBM DB2• SAP MaxDB/Sybase

Oracle Linux for SAP

Oracle Linux is certified by SAP on x86 64 (Intel, AMD) hardware. Both the Red Hat-compatible kernel and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel are supported. Oracle Linux can be used as an operating system platform for database server as well as for SAP Application Server installations. Oracle Linux is a supported OS platform for Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Single-instance and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) imple-mentations are possible. Oracle Cloud File System can be used as storage platform.

If SAP runs on Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Oracle Linux is also a supported platform for SAP Application Server and SAP applications (Unicode versions only, NetWeaver 7.0x or higher).

Several Virtualization Options for Every Need

Only Oracle offers the industry‘s most comprehensive desktop-to-datacenter virtualization solutions portfolio that can virtualize and manage your full hardware and software stack, from applications to disk. Virtualization offers cost savings through consolidation and lower energy, facility, and labor costs. Oracle’s virtualization solutions provide these benefits and much more, including:

• Highly optimized and integrated hardware and software virtualization solutions• Integrated management from applications to disk• Easier and faster deployment of software• Greater IT efficiency, agility, and flexibility

Backed by Oracle’s world-class support organization, customers now have a comprehensive, enterprise-class portfolio of virtualization solutions across the stack.Oracle offers several virtualization options to make software and systems easier to deploy, easier to manage, and easier to support.

Oracle Virtualization

Virtualization offers key cost savings benefits– Server consolidation– Lower energy, facility, and labor costs

Oracle’s virtualization strategy offers much more– Application-centric: Integrated management of the

full hardware and software stack from servers andstorage to the end-user device

– Integrated support

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Oracle Solaris Zones Zero Performance Loss

• Oracle Solaris Zones

• Fully supported for SAP applications, Zones for Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 offer easy implementation and minimal impact on performance, making these tools a popular choice with SAP customers. Oracle Solaris Zones easily support the consolidation of old and new projects on one server, such as a Solaris 10 zone on Solaris 11. Virtualization with Oracle Solaris Contain-ers, Oracle VM Server, and Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers for Oracle Solaris 8 and Oracle Solaris 9 on Solaris 10 is also available under controlled availability.

Zero Overhead VirtualizationIncrease Utilization and Performance with Solaris Zone

• Oracle VM Server for SPARC

Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization capabilities for supported Oracle SPARC servers. Oracle VM Server leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide a supported platform’s resources using partitions called logical (or virtual) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC flexibly deploys multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. OVM Ser-ver also creates up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by Oracle SPARC servers.

Free of charge! Virtualization license is included with Systems purchases.

Oracle continues to work with SAP to integrate and validate its virtualization technologies with SAP Business Applications and the SAP NetWeaver platform, helping SAP and Oracle customers improve productivity and system utilization rates through virtualization andconsolidation.

Upgrading SAP on Oracle technology can improve user productivity, consolidate workloads, and better utilize resources – resulting in dramatically reduced data center costs. Oracle‘s IT infrastructure solutions for SAP provide a methodology for upgrading or migrating existing SAP Business Suite applications with its industry-leading virtualization technologies, as well as eco-efficient Oracle servers and storage, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Linux.

Complete Virtualization Portfolio

Oracle’s cross-platform virtualization management tech-nology provisions and manages flexible pools of resources that users can share and allocate to many SAP instances. Built-in resource management features enable sharing of compute, memory, and I/O resources, improving serverutilization to up to 85 percent of capacity.

Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC enable Oracle Solaris 8, 9, 10, and 11 certified applica-tions 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 cluste-ring, dedicated zone clusters can be configured to run specific SAP applications according to predefined cluster management policies.

4Solaris generationson the latest Oracle

hardware • Fully supported for SAP applications • Consolidate old and new projects

onto one server


• Oracle VM Server for x86

• OVM Server for x86 is a free server virtualization and management solution that makes enterprise applica-tions easier to deploy, manage, and support. Backed worldwide by affordable enterprise-quality support for both Oracle and non-Oracle environments, Oracle VM facilitates application deployment and manage-ment on a fully certified platform reducing operations and support costs while simultan-eously increasing IT efficiency and agility


Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers running Windows, Linux, and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition comes with a wide range of options to extend the world’s #1database to help grow your business and meet your users’ performance, security and availability service level expectations.

SAP supports Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP pro-ducts based on SAP Kernel 6.40, 7.x and higher. Oracle Database 11g (single instance) and Oracle Real Appli-cation Clusters 11g for SAP are available for the major UNIX platforms (Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX), Linux, and Windows – as listed with details regarding the OS ver-sions in SAP Note 1398634. The SAP release of Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g occurred at the same time as the general release of Oracle Database 11g in the SAP environment. For information about Oracle RAC support, see SAP Note 527843. It contains important details about the released RAC configurations.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 already demonstrated its performance leadership by delivering a world record result for a two-tier configuration on the SAP Business Intelligence-Data Mart (BI-D) standard application benchmark. Some of the major new features for SAP customers are Advanced Compression (Table, Index, Secure Files, and Backup Compression), Real Application Testing, Online Patching, Deferred Segment Creation, Dictionary-Only Add Column, Sub- and Interval Par-titioning, Direct NFS, Advanced Security (Tablespace, SecureFile and Backup Encryption), and Database Vault.

The 2014 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure” report is now published.

Oracle VM moved up to the Challenger position the Magic Quadrant in 2012, since then we continue to maintain our position in the Challenger quadrant. Our ranking is further validation of our virtualization strategy and differentiation in the market in the following key areas:

Oracle is unique vendor to test and tune the hypervisor for optimal application performance

Our success with an application-driven virtualization product category

Oracle goes beyond the hypervisor to provide full integration across software portfolio (hardware, database & applications)

Full stack management and IaaS using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

Ready-to-use VM Templates for Linux, DB, RAC and Applications

•

•

•

•

•

Flexible Virtualization OptionsChoose the Right Virtualization for Your Requirements

• Integrated and validated with SAP Business Applications and SAP NetWeaver platform

• Cross-platform virtualization and resource management

technology

– Provision/manage flexible resource pool • Compute

• Memory

• I/O

– Improve server utilization up to 85% of capacity

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Middleware and Systems Management

High-Availability, Security and Identity Management

Both Solaris features plus Oracle middleware tools help SAP customers to run their environment safe and secure, provision users and services and prevent risk from daily IT operations. Some examples are:Meet stringent access-control demands – Provide the strong mandatory access controls required by governments and financial institutions using Oracle Solaris Trusted Exten-sions

• Validate system security – Verify the integrity of your system using Oracle Solaris Secure Execution and file verification features

• Delegate appropriate privileges – Reduce risk bygranting only the privileges needed with user and process rights management

• Simplify administration – Use the open standards based Oracle Solaris cryptographic and key manage-ment frameworks for file and network encryption

• Ensure strong defenses – Protect your system against attack using the Secure By Default networking profile, IP Filter firewall, TCP Wrappers and IPsec/IKE

Customers who want to implement the new features provided by Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Real Application Clusters 11g can find detailed information in a series of technical white papers as well as in technical skill workshops offered by Oracle Services and Support for SAP.

Oracle Database 12c for SAP Roadmap

Oracle Database 12c has been certified by SAP. By certifying Oracle Database 12.1.0.2, SAP will break the “terminal release” custom (certification of Oracle Data-base release x.2, no certification of release x.1) valid to date, in order to ensure sufficient overlap with Oracle Database 11g.

The release process will start with a base certification (includes only Oracle Database 12c features that do not require considerable integration efforts) for SAP NetWeaver 7.x based applications. A staged rollout of more features and options will follow later.More information please see http://www.oracle.com/sap-database

Oracle Identity Management enables customers to efficiently comply with regulatory requirements, secure critical applications and sensitive data, and lower opera-tional costs. Using the most complete and best-in-class suite of identity management solutions available, enter-prises can manage the entire user identity life cycle across all enterprise resources – both within and beyond the firewall. Oracle Access Manager, a former Sun IDM product, is integrated and works together with SAP BO Access Control to provide an end-to-end security and governance and risk solution for SAP customers.

IT Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c helps IT organizations achieve an ROI of 149% for their IT managementinvestments while also helping them to reduce customer-reported IT issues by as much as 80%. Oracle Systems has integrated Oracle Solaris with SAP Landscape Virtu-alization Manager (LVM) and thus lets SAP customers deploy and configure their SAP landscape on Oracle Systems and IT layers more easily.

Efficiently Manage Your Oracle Hardware with EM Ops Center

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center is the most comprehensive solution for managing physical and virtual Oracle infrastructure, including Oracle servers, Solaris operating systems, and Solaris and SPARC (OVM) virtualization technologies. It also provides management for Linux operating systems from Oracle, Red Hat, and SUSE. With its rich lifecycle management capabilities and built-in automation, Ops Center dramatically impro-ves the efficiency of IT operations while reducing system downtime. Ops Center’s world-class configuration and patch management capabilities ensure that systems stay accurate and up to date, providing greater security and compliance in the data center.

Gain Direct Infrastructure Visibility Through Application-to-

Disk Management

With the Management Connector for Ops Center, Oracle Enterprise Manager is the industry’s first and only manage-ment solution that can provide management visibility and control across the entire application stack. Using it, IT can maximize service quality while minimizing management cost and effort. For more information on Oracle’s complete stack offering (combined or parts thereof) please visitwww.oracle.com/sap or http://www.oracle.com/us/solu-tions/sap/it-infrastructure/overview/index.html

Oracle - complete Infrastructure Stack

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Within the Oracle stack, SAP LVM can be used to man-age SAP processes for the underlying Oracle database, operating systems, virtualization hypervisor, virtual ma-chines, and storage. Installing the SAP host agent with adaptive extensions on your Oracle systems allows SAP LVM to discover and manage them in the following ways.

SAP Landscape Management

SAP System Provisioning

End-to-end clone, copy, and refresh of SAP systems*

Post-copy automation (PCA) for ABAP and Java

Renaming of SAP systems

Application server provisioning

Custom provisioning

* Related storage adapter required.

The SAP host agent with adaptive extensions can be installed on service-virtualized bare-metal and virtualized systems running Oracle Solaris. In both cases, the agent must be installed on all of server nodes and Solaris zones to be managed by SAP LVM. Additionally, the operating environment of either the target server node or the target Solaris zone must be SAP-ready. Once this is done, SAP LVM can discover, provision, and automate management of those systems and zones.

S A P L V M A N D T H E O R A C L E S T A C K : S I M P L I F Y A N D A U T O M A T E M A N A G E M E N T O F Y O U R S A P I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

Introduction

Your SAP infrastructure is critical to business operations, but like many other IT organizations today, you’re being asked to boost efficiency, cut costs, and respond more quickly to business demands. With a complex SAP en-vironment consisting of a multitude of systems, this can be challenging. Repetitive, day-to-day management tasks overload your staff and take up most of your budget and resources, and keep your team from supporting new stra-tegic initiatives in a timely manner. Deploying your SAP environment on the Oracle hardware and software stack and using SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM) lets you improve efficiency and agility by automating common system administration tasks, so you can focus your budget and resources on differentiating your business.

SAP LVM simplifies and automates the management and operation of SAP systems and landscapes running on physical and virtual infrastructures. SAP LVM lets you centrally configure, deploy, monitor, and manage SAP and non-SAP systems across your infrastructure, including private clouds. And, integration with Oracle’s virtualization technologies lets you manage and automate additional aspects of your SAP environment running on Oracle infrastructure.

SAP LVM Integration with the Oracle Stack

Oracle’s complete, vertically-integrated hardware and software stack provides an ideal foundation for your SAP infrastructure. Oracle hardware and Oracle Solaris gives you the reliability and performance you need for mission-critical SAP operations while helping to reduce costs. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance supplies efficient, high-performance storage. And, Oracle’s virtualization technologies, including Oracle Solaris Zones, deliver powerful, easy-to-use, flexible, reliable, no-overhead built-in virtualization, at no extra cost, for your SAP systems.

Landscape virtualization

Landscape reporting

Single and mass operations on SAP systems and hosts, including

start, stop, and relocate

Automatic capacity management

Task scheduling

Customizable dashboards

SAP LVM Integration with the Oracle Stack

86 SAP LVM Integration with the Oracle Stack

Example: Clone, Copy, and Refresh a Complete SAP

System

SAP LVM can clone, copy, and refresh entire SAP systems. For this process, the target node can be either a physical server or Solaris zone; either must have an SAP-ready op-erating environment with the SAP LVM agent installed.

The scenarios for creating a new SAP system from an existing production system are described below.

Scenario 1: System CloneSAP LVM creates a ZFS snapshot and clone of the SAP and Oracle binaries and database files. The new SAP system will have the same SID as the source system, e.g. P01. Through Oracle Solaris, IP fencing is used to pre-vent the new system from connecting to other resources in the infrastructure. Until changes on the new system are made, it consumes no additional disk space.

Scenario 2: System CopySAP LVM first creates a system clone, as described above, and then performs a system rename and post-copy activities on the cloned system. The new system will then have a different SID, e.g. D01, than the source system.

Scenario 3: System RefreshSAP LVM updates a system that was created via the system copy process with the latest data from the source system. In the example, quality assurance system Q01 would be updated with the current data from production system P01.

Conclusion

Integration between SAP LVM and the Oracle stack allows you to more efficiently manage your SAP environ-ment through automation. As a result, you can boost efficiency, enhance agility, and support new IT initiatives all while reducing costs. Oracle has been a member of the SAP LVM partner community since the first release SAP ACC (the predecessor to SAP LVM) and continues to work with SAP to further integrate Oracle technologies with SAP LVM. Email [email protected] or see the resources below for more information on managing your Oracle-based SAP environment with SAP LVM.

Sidebars:

Additional Resources

SAP Landscape Virtualization Managementhttp://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25771

Post-Copy Automationhttp://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-43270

Oracle White Paper: “Installing New SAP Application Server Instances with SAP LVM 2.0 on Oracle Solaris”http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-49505

SAP Note: “Oracle Solaris Platform Library for SAP LVM”http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1786220

Oracle technologies for SAP

Oracle Solaris, including Oracle Solaris ZonesOracle ZFS Storage Appliance

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Introduction

More often than not, discussions about security solutions for SAP environments are talks about what are commonly called, “security silos”. Administrators discover a security hole and discuss how to protect their systems. Vendors promote new security products or features. Managers wonder how relevant news about security breaches or new compliance regulations apply in their particular case.

None of them can be blamed. There is no single solution that could provide complete security for SAP environ-ments. SAP tried to define what “complete security” means when they published the SAP Security Solution Map.

But this architecture clearly shows why no single vendor – including SAP – will ever be able to build and offer a complete solution:

• The model contains a layer called Infrastructure Security. “Infrastructure” means everything underneath of which SAP applications run: from networks and servers to operating systems and databases. Infrastructure secu-rity is essential for the security of SAP environments: There is no point in spending a lot of time and money for SAP application security if the door of your data center is always open. On the other hand SAP cannot influence infrastructure security: SAP does not sell doors, and SAP applications do not even check during startup whether the door of your data center is locked.

• The model is called SAP Security Solution Map, and rightly so. But many managers and administrators are responsible for an enterprise IT environment, which also includes non-SAP applications. A holistic appro-ach then calls for as many general security functions as possible: functions that are implemented once and can handle all application requirements. The layer of these general functions can be called Superstructure Security.

This model is less complex, but more general than the SAP Security Solution Map. Nevertheless, it can be used by SAP partners to describe the security solutions they offer and to define the role that every single product plays as an element of this architecture.

Oracle Corporation offers infrastructure as well as superstructure solutions that can be and are used by SAP customers. The following article discusses operating system hardening (Part I) and Oracle Database security (Part III) as essential elements of infrastructure security. It describes Oracle Identity and Access Management solutions (Part II) and how they help implement superstructure security.

O R A C L E S E C U R I T Y S O L U T I O N S F O R S A P E N V I R O N M E N T S

Figure 1: General security model

Oracle Identity- and Access Management for SAP SAP (and non-SAP) Customers Benefit from a Tight Integration

Middleware / Key Infrastructure and Management Software

Database Technology Security

Operating System Security

Only by protecting all layers of a technology stack helps create an complete security mechanism for an end-to-end SAP landscape. It does not help to protect only the application level, or only operating system, you always have to protect all potential shortcomings.

Oracle Security Solution for SAP environments

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Operating System Security

Information is an essential asset for all companies and must be adequately protected. The information about the IT system (metadata), communication technology and organization should ensure that a server operating system is deployed, configured and managed to increase the security and reliability of the information in all kinds (SAP and non-SAP) of data centers, which are the essen-tial backbone of today’s work and business processes.Today’s IT infrastructures reside on widely distributed cloud centers with their networks commonly linked to the Internet (for example, SAP Hybrid Cloud), providing intruders with readily available entry points to corporate systems and data.

Oracle offers two valuable and well-accepted operating systems for the SAP market: Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. Both provide a comprehensive set of tools and technologies to protect IT environments and reduce security challenges associated with remote access and administration including network firewall control plus access control security policies. Deploying SAP Business Suite on Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux platforms offersunparalleled enterprise-class functionality as well as per-formance, density, and energy efficiency.

The following general and special strategies in this article cover the hardening security aspects of Oracle Solaris used in SAP environments.

The first step in creating a secure environment is securing the underlying operating system. Many security issues can be avoided if the operating system’s fundamentalservices are configured appropriately. Especially in the

SAP world, it is essential to have a properly configured operating system environment in place to be able to ensure that all business components are securely deployed on top.

As a leading supplier for IT hardware and software platforms, Oracle has also provided specialized solutions, integration, operating systems, networking, built-in virtualization features, performance and support for SAP applications for many years.

The first question is: Why use Oracle Solaris as an essen-tial backbone for today’s enterprise applications? Answer:

• Defending: With Oracle Solaris you can provide a strong assurance of system integrity and defend systems from unauthorized access (for example, a privileged SAP Admin Account)

• Enabling: Oracle Solaris provides secure authentica-tion of all active subjects and protects communica-tions between endpoints (for example, SSH, telnet, rsh, and rlogin)

• Deploying: Oracle Solaris offers an IT infrastructure stack that is well integrated; it is architected to inter- operate with other security architectures. In addition,

it provides ease of management, use of security features, independent assessment of security, and built-in virtu-alization with Oracle Solaris Zones

• Compliance Enforcement and Auditing: With Oracle Solaris, reports on configuration management for internal and regulatory security policies can be created. These reports are fully integrable into the Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) stacks

Figure 2: Infrastructure Security - Operating System Hardening (Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux)

89Oracle Security Solution for SAP environments

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Privileges are discrete rights that can be granted to a command, a user, or a role. Role-based access control (RBAC), a feature of Oracle Solaris, reduces the security risk of intruder or regular user actions by implementing administrative hierarchies, constraining applications to specific actions, isolating zones from each other, elevating administrative capabilities, and setting software restriction policies.

RBAC controls user access tasks that would normally be restricted to the root user. By applying security attributes to processes and to users, RBAC can distribute administrati-ve rights among several administrations.

Users or applications with root access can make major changes to the Oracle Solaris operating system and SAP applications. With Oracle Solaris, administrators can secure the system by granting fine-grained privileges to users and applications, giving them the minimal access rights needed to perform specific tasks. The root user account is defined as a role, and only users with approp-riate privileges can assume that role. Any changes made are traceable to users, providing greater security and accountability.

Protecting Logins

Remote logins are initially limited to an authenticated channel through the Secure Shell (SSH) feature of Oracle Solaris for protected encrypted communications with other systems. Since administrators commonly use the Secure Shell (SSH) to communicate with other systems and it is an entry point into the system, it should be disabled if it is not needed. Oracle Solaris provides two building blocks as accelerated cryptography, the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework and OpenSSL. OpenSSL is typically used by open source applications and is the preferred library for secure HTTP traffic. Oracle Solaris components such as Secure Shell (SSH), ZFS, Kerberos, and Internet Key Exchange Protocol (IKE) use the cryptographic framework by default with no additional configuration needed to take advantage of high-performance cryptography on platforms.

Virtualization – Increase Security,

Flexibility and Scalability

Oracle Solaris server virtualization securely divides sys-tems into smaller virtual servers, enabling administrators to place more applications on a single system. Secure, built-in virtualization services enable system, network and SAP environments to be consolidated and used opti-mally for greater data center efficiency and thus take the advantage of a platform that constantly offers new features to address the difficult task of supporting large-scale mission-critical environments.

Organizational Security and Compliance

Security is expanding from primarily technical issues(such as changing telnet to SSH) to organizational issues. Oracle Solaris eases the burden of organizational security by providing a compliant base platform supported by an ecosystem that supports higher-level security goals and major trends such as compliance enforcement and auditing.

Comprehensive auditing on an environment can help detect unusual behavior before an event occurs. Understanding the status of a running system can reduce the risk of a data theft event. Records generated are application defined and report on what applications developers decide to log. It is not appropriate to treat logs as fully trusted sources of data. Although logs can be used as a very helpful diagnostic step, a compromised application can change generated log events.

Instead, analysis of risk should be performed using tam-per-proof auditing data that is administrator controlled and kernel mediated. By default auditing is enabled on Oracle Solaris for key events (such as login and privilege escalation). However, there are many classes of audit data available to record. A unique capability of Oracle Solaris is the ability to tag administrative files and record any changes in the audit log. This administrative edit command is a simple mechanism to record any privileged configuration edits.

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Configure and Manage the Software and Services

Eliminating unnecessary software packages, services, applications and network protocols minimizes possible avenues of attack. Installing new software packages or patches is a potential source of corrupting user provisi-oning, network services and libraries. When installing the Oracle Solaris operating system, users can reduce the attack surface by installing only the software packages needed for operation.Similar to minimizing software, restricting services to only those required for the server to deliver application services can help to eliminate potential avenues of attack.

Identity and Access ManagementToday‘s businesses demand an ever-increasing focus on identity and access management (IAM) solutions to be able to understand who has physical and logical access to their facilities, networks and information. The major dri-vers behind this security trend are mixed and virtualized OS, application and database deployments with diffe-rent user management engines, B2B – service-oriented architecture implementations, cloud computing, mobile computing (such as BYOD), IT governance, risk and compliance policies/rules and new Internet paradigms such as Internet of Things. All of this needs to be seen in a coherent SAP ERP security approach with the needed flexibility to also integrate other third party platforms which are used to establish full end-to-end business pro-cesses and transactions over all available business layers.

The Service Management Facility (SMF) is a feature of the operating system that provides a uniform mechanism to manage system and application services (enable, disable,refresh, restart, and so on) on Oracle Solaris. SMF improves

the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously even in the event of any hardware or software failures. SMF is one of the components of the wider Oracle Solaris predictive self-healing capability.

To increase the security on the operating system, remove or disable software packages associated with a service if the service is not in use.

Oracle offers an enterprise identity and access manage-ment suite that exactly fulfills this kind of demand,

delivering a converged, comprehensive platform for identity administration, access request, role lifecycle management, access certification, closed loop remediation and privileged account management for mixed platform deployments. This product suite enhances regulatory compliance by enforcing and attesting to regulatory requirements (such as Sarbanes-Oxley, 21 CFR Part 11, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, and KonTraG) associated with identifying who has access privileges to sensitive, high risk data on SAP and non-SAP system by offering a direct integration into the SAP GRC stack. It also eliminates potential security threats from rogue, expired and unauthorized accounts and privileges, which goes hand in hand with a privile-ged account management allowing root users (administ-rators) to gain access to sensitive applications in a timely manner, while providing sufficient audit trails about their activities. Oracle offers this converged solution with the Oracle Identity Governance Suite.

Figure 3: Application Security - Oracle Identity and Access Management


demands are driving organizations to externalize security services, integrate with partners, and evaluate the risk of internal and external transactions. Oracle Access Manage-ment Suite Plus addresses these challenges with a com-plete solution for controlling access to applications, data, web services, and cloud-based services across and beyond the enterprise. The package includes features such as the “Pluggable authentication and WebSSO” service for the SAP NW Enterprise Portal which is able to provide a full WebSSO solution for SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal deployments which are used in conjunction with other third party web applications. In addition, Oracle Identity Federation offers a cross-domain and cloud-ready single-sign-on solution for a variety of application plat-forms including SAP ERP on the basis of highly accepted market standards such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite PlusOracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus securely eliminates the need for users to remember and manage passwords for virtually any application, web or non-web. With OESSO Logon Manager, employees sign on to Windows and OESSO Logon Manager does the rest. As they launch their other applications, OESSO Logon Ma-nager automatically logs them on with each application’s password. It can be installed on corporate computers and is also accessible via a website from any non-corporate computer – anywhere, anytime. It also includes a secure, reliable, but also simple integration for all SAP power users on the basis of the SAP GUI for Windows.

Oracle API GatewayCompanies worldwide are actively deploying service-ori-ented architecture (SOA) infrastructures using web ser-vices, both in intranet and extranet environments. While web services offer many advantages over traditional alter-natives (such as distributed objects or custom software), deploying networks of interconnected web services still presents key challenges, especially in terms of security and management. Oracle API Gateway is a software solution that provides application-level routing (based on source, target, sender identity, and XML message type); XML conversion, validation and threat scanning; XML acceleration; security (selective encryption and signature of XML messages, decryption and signature validation); monitoring (response time, logging, and alerting) and governance (service access and usage). It can be deployed

Oracle Identity Governance Suite

Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA), and Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) work together to create a complete governance process for the enterprise. The suite offers a highly flexible and scalable enterprise identity administration system that pro-vides operational and business efficiency by delivering centralized administration and complete automation of identity and user provisioning events across enterprise as well as extranet applications. It manages the entire identity and role lifecycle to meet changing business and regula-tory requirements and provides essential reporting and compliance functionalities. It ensures consistent enforcement of identity-based controls, reducing ongoing operational and compliance cost and offers dedicated connectors for SAP ERP (ABAP and Java), supports special SAP HCM scenarios, and integrates into SAP Business Objects Access Control (V5.3 and V10) for SAP specific Segregation of Duty validations.

The components of the Oracle Identity Governance Suite (OIG) provide enterprises with the ability to effectively achieve and manage access compliance and automate critical identity-based controls (SoD). OIG also allows business/functional roles to be defined, certified, and assigned, and then continues to deliver value throughout the user access lifecycle by direct integration into the SAP product stack. OIG also allows the usage of the SAP Org-Structures as the basis for the development of a central enterprise-wide business role model with integratable cross segregation-of-duty checks over all assigned systems accounts (SAP and non-SAP).

Oracle Access Management Suite Plus

In the last years, access management has covered application and web service security focusing primarily on authenti-cation, authorization and audit. This has extended to new levels of protection. For example, enterprises need to provide employees with access to company resources from personal mobile devices. Similarly, some organizations need to grant customers access to applications on the he basis of the user’s identities on social networking sites. And most organizations need to manage sign-on to cloud services as they would for on-premise applications. Further, organizations are being transformed by the need to provide end-to-end, standards-based security services to their applications, data, web services, and cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Such business

92

standalone or as an integral component of a strategic enterprise SOA infrastructure, interfacing with an enter-prise service bus such as SAP NW Process Integration Engine (SAP SOA Engine), enterprise management, and identity management platforms.

Oracle Secure Global Desktop

Oracle Secure Global Desktop is a secure remote access solution providing access to applications running on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris and mainframe servers, from a wide variety of popular client devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, and tablets such as the Apple iPad and Android-based devices. Oracle Secure Global Desktop allows administrators the freedom to use a single solution to provide secure access to a variety of applications and desktop environments resident in the data center. It supports users connecting to the applications they need from inside and outside the corporate firewall (for example, SAP GUI or SAP NW Portal). This means users are free to work from any location. But this freedom also extends to the device choice. With the broad supported client list that Oracle Secure Global Desktop offers, users are free to connect from whichever device they choose, without consideration to the client platform. So, for example, users can access Windows applications on iPads, or access Linux applications from Windows laptops. And because Oracle Secure Glo-bal Desktop offers session persistence, users can jump between devices, resuming sessions on different devices without interruption.

Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition

Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition is the only high-performance directory server to provide a core di-rectory service with embedded database, directory proxy, synchronization with Microsoft Active Directory, and a web console to manage your software all in one packa-ge. It includes key components that together provide a complete directory service and is certified for the integration with the SAP NetWeaver application stack.

Oracle Mobile Security Suite

More and more employees bring their own devices to work (BYOD) and use them to get access to internal and publicly available applications (apps) over the enterprise intranet. In addition they share files and data inside or outside of the office. This is a difficult security situation

for every IT department because of the missing visibility and control over the devices. Oracle offers IT depart-ments a way to enforce data leakage protection policies while at the same time offering secure access to inter-nal applications – without the use of a virtual private network (VPN) connection jumping from one hot spot to the other without a re-authentication/re-authorization procedure. This software adds a complete new isolation level for all corporate data within an end-user-owned mobile device and allows companies to easily mobilize any enterprise data across iPhone, Android and Blackberry natively in just 30 minutes. It is based on a container concept by which the product sets up a secure sandbox on the end-user mobile device. Enterprise applications or other third-party applications can be trusted by Oracle Mobile Security Suite, and are considered at that point to be „containerized“ and secured the same way as are the na-tive Oracle Mobile Security Suite apps. All applications will be accessed based on the included secure Web tunnel through the OMSS gateway, providing access to inter-nal-only applications including, for example, SAP EG ERP mobile apps which are specifically developed for mobile and smart devices.

Summary

Provisioning, privileged access request (including Single Sign On) and approval management, role management and compliance products evolved independently of each other, which led to companies implementing multiple products from multiple vendors as point solutions to address these needs. As regulatory and provisioning requirements continue to grow and change, such multi-vendor solutions only increase the complexity and costs of managing and integrating these products. As a result, enterprises are in an inevitable position of having to rely heavily on each of these vendors for support and also committing significant resources to governance efforts for integration and manual processes with little assurance that they will prove successful. Recent research also has made it evident that organizations can save up to 48% in overall costs deploying a single-vendor platform so-lution when compared to deploying multi-vendor point solutions. Therefore Oracle with its single, converged IAM platform is the right partner for all heterogeneous multi-vendor application and operating system deploy-ments. Oracle’s IAM suite of products can serve as a starting point and basis for a non-silo based and highly flexible SAP IAM solution.


Encrypting data in transit prevents this sort of activity. Therefore, the first data protection technology, imple-mented in the Oracle Database, provides Network Encryp-tion. In this context, network encryption means: Oracle software installed on both the SAP application server and Oracle Database server machines encrypts data before and decrypts them after they are sent over the network.

Attack Scenario 2: Database File Copies

Attackers could also steal a copy of the database files and read the files directly. Of course, these files are not simple text files, so a lot of knowledge about SAP’s data model and Oracle’s data storage algorithms would be required. So it is difficult, but it is not impossible.

Therefore data at rest need to be protected as well. Trans-parent Data Encryption – a set of technologies provided by Oracle Advanced Security – means that data are not stored as plain text, but in a coded form. Therefore the informa-tion in the data files looks like nonsense and is completely meaningless to everybody who tries to read the data files directly.

Especially if you decide to encrypt not all data, but only a few tables in your production database, you may want to increase the security level of your database backups, as it is generally much easier to steal backup copies of the database files than the production database itself. Backup Set Encryption – a second set of technologies provided by Oracle Advanced Security – allows you to encrypt the backup of your database files completely.

Database Security

If a user wants to read or update data in an Oracle Data-base that is used as a data store by an SAP application, the first and obvious way is to use the interfaces provided by SAP’s applications. From an Oracle Database perspective, this is the easiest case, because all questions – which people should be able to access the data and which people should not? Which part of the data should a particular person be able to access? What exactly should this person be able to do with the data? – are asked and answered by SAP’s user and privilege management with the possible support of identity and access management solutions pro-vided by Oracle. This means: All legal data accesses are managed by identity and access management, and there is not much the Oracle Database could or would need to add, as long as there are only well-behaved users. Putting this statement the other way round, we get this rule:

Oracle’s database-related security features and options help prevent data accesses which bypass the SAP applications, use non-SAP tools to access SAP data, and are at least potentially illegal.

Attack Scenario 1: Network Sniffing

Attackers could use a sniffer tool to capture the data while they are in transit. This would allow them to intercept sensitive data like logins and passwords, table and column names, and even actual table data (such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information) going to or coming back from the database server.

Figure 4: Database Security - Oracle Database Vault - General Security Model

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database administrator should be able to access the data as well, then he or she – as everybody else – should be granted the required object privileges explicitly.

This is exactly what Oracle Database Vault does. It elimi-nates all implicit grants and instead provides a means to explicitly define access rights as well as the circumstan-ces under which they are effective. This goes far beyond traditional user-privilege or user-role correlations. Oracle Database Vault allows companies to implement and enforce concepts such as the segregation of duties or the four eyes principle.

Putting the Pieces Together

Putting the pieces together, it can be said that all data accesses using SAP’s applications are handled by SAP, so there is not much Oracle can or needs to do. However, if people use other strategies to access the data in your database, there is not much SAP can do, and this is exactly when the security features implemented in Oracle Database and Oracle Database options can help you protect your data.

Encryption prevents people from directly reading the database files. Database Vault prevents people from acces-sing the data via standard database tools.

Additional Information

The SAP Security Solution Map can be downloaded from http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-17098.

The goal of this article is to provide a simple, but complete picture of the security solutions which Oracle provides for SAP customers. A more detailed version of this text is available as a white paper at http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/oracle-security-for-sap-2148703.pdf

A complementary, but not SAP-specific, white paper on Oracle Linux hardening is available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/tips-harden-oracle-linux-1695888.html.

Attack Scenario 3: Direct Database Connect

But there is yet another “unusual” way to the data. Privi-leged database users – like database administrators – can use DBA tools and directly connect to the database, thus bypassing SAP’s security checks. The first aspect that needs to be understood when considering this scenario is that encryption does not help against this kind of threat. If someone is able to connect to the Oracle Database using a sufficiently privileged account, and if he or she is then able to build an appropriate SELECT statement and send it to the database, then Oracle Database will gene-rously deliver the result set to this user. And if the data is encrypted on disk, then Oracle will even decrypt them, because from an Oracle Database perspective the request sent by this user seems to be a perfectly valid request.

The second aspect that needs to be understood is the rea-son for Oracle’s behavior. As a database user, you can be granted object privileges and system privileges. There are many different kinds of objects in a database, but average database users as well as people who want to steal data are only interested in tables, so for simplicity’s sake we will assume that database “objects” means just “tables”. An “object privilege” for a table, then, means that you are allowed to access the data in that table. A system privilege, on the other hand, means that you are allowed to manipulate the database structure. You may add disk space to (or release it from) the database, you may create new tables (or drop old ones), you may add an additional column to an existing table. Now, in traditional databases (including the Oracle Database), if you were explicitly granted a sufficient number of system privileges, you implicitly received object privileges for all tables as well. For decades people found this quite natural and unpro-blematic. Only recently companies began to ask: Is it really necessary and is it really desirable that a database administrator, who is supposed to manage the database structure, is by default able to read (and even change) all data in the database?

So the third aspect that needs to be understood is that the third scenario requires a new privilege management strategy in the database. This strategy should continue to provide system privileges and object privileges, but it should get rid of implicitly granted object privileges. In other words: A “normal” database user needs object pri-vileges only, and a database administrator in most cases needs system privileges only. If there is a reason why the


transport independent and places no additional burden on the application server or the network. Storage level encryption protects organizations from the threat of a security breach. In the event of a successful breach of other security layers, encrypted data residing on the storage system is useless to hackers without the encryption keys.

It’s All About The KeysEncryption keys determine the functional output of a given encryption algorithm. Keys convert data into “cipher text” and are employed again to convert the data back to a readable form or “clear text”. The strength of any encryption scheme is directly proportional to the “strength” of the encryption keys. The longer the key length, the more secure the encryption scheme. Customers should look for AES-256 encryption. AES-256 is a block level encryption scheme that uses a 256 bit key length. It is the strongest encryption standard available today.

In addition to employing the AES-256 standard, the management of keys is also critical. Key management systems must be highly performance, highly available and highly secure. If you lose the keys, or access to the keys, you lose the data. Similarly, if an outside entity gains access to the key management system, they then have the ability to un-encrypt any data they gain access to.

Consequently, best practices for key management include the following:

• The key management system should be a highly available system • It should be fully protected with a “3-2-1” backup/

recovery scheme. This means keeping three copies of the data on a minimum two different storage mediums with one copy residing off-site. The three copies in-clude the primary copy and two data protection copies (one of which is off-site)

• The key management system must be highly secure including proper access control and FIPS compliance• The key management system must be highly scalable • Includes an easy-to-use interface with simple client enrollment & setup• Based on an open architecture to support a wide range of environments, client end points and standard protocols• Must offer auditing &reporting tools for key lifecycle management, policy compliance, alerts, etc.

Data Encryption: Adding the Storage View

Data security professionals are engaged in a constant battle against a never ending barrage of viruses, malware and other threats. In light of recent, high profile cases, threat management is at the forefront of IT planning today. But regardless of how much planning or how many layers of security technology is in place, data breaches do occasio-nally occur.

In the rare case of a data breach, data encryption provides an additional layer of protection. Data encryption uses very sophisticated algorithms to transform plain text into cipher text, that’s unreadable without the encryption keys. Encryption is not only considered “best practices” in most business environments, but is fast becoming a compliance requirement mandated by many businesses and government agencies worldwide.

There are several different options for deploying encryption capabilities, including encryption at the application level, the network level or the storage level. At the application level, encryption of data is done by the application, at the source, at the time of data creation. This type of encryp-tion is specific to the application, often puts a very heavy load on the application server, and can result in degraded application performance and response times.

At the network level, or “inline encryption”, data is encrypted by either a network switch or router; or by a dedicated encryption appliance. While this eliminates the issues associated with encrypting at the application layer, it introduces an additional hardware bump in the network path increasing administrative workload, it can add management overhead and overall cost. It can also impact network performance and increases pipe costs as encrypted data cannot be compressed or de-duplicated, two of the most common ways of saving bandwidth when moving large amounts of data over a network, i.e. for business continuity or disaster recovery purposes. In effect, this is a redundant form of data encryption as most “in flight” data is already protected by numerous network security and encryption standards and protocols, such as SSL and TLS.

Encryption at the storage level or encryption “at rest” is accomplished by the storage system itself. This is done either by the controller or with self-encrypting drives (SED). Storage level encryption is application, host and

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Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is Oracle’s enterprise class solution for network attached storage (NAS). It is a robust storage platform that offers unique integration points with Oracle Database for faster application performance and significant increases in storage utilization and efficiency. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance supports highly granular data encryption at the storage level. Encryption can be set at the project, share or LUN level supporting both encrypted and un-encrypted (clear text) volumes within the same storage system. Encrypting only volumes that contain sensitive data and leaving other volumes un-en-crypted optimizes storage performance, efficiency and cost.

Built around a two tier, 256 bit encryption architecture, encryption with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is highly secure. The first level of encryption stores the encryption key with the volume. The second level encrypts the key itself using a “key wrapper” which is retained in the key-store of the associated key management system. Customers have a choice to utilize a local key manager built into Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance or for added flexibility an external, centralized key management system such as Oracle Key Manager (OKM) can be used.

Oracle Key Manager

Oracle Key Manager (OKM) is an appliance based encryp-tion key management solution. OKM is an enterprise class key management solution incorporating best practices for availability, security, scalability, support for industry standards and compliance auditing and reporting. OKM is for key management only and is not involved in the actual encrypting/de-encrypting of data and as an appliance based solution, OKM is infrastructure and application neutral.

OKM is a third generation, hardened solution with many thousands of hours of testing and scores of production systems in place across the globe. OKM supports high availability with clustering of two to twenty individual OKM appliances. OKM clustering supports dynamic load balancing and automated failover. OKM’s clustering op-tion make it a highly scalable solution. A single, clustered OKM pair can support over 1 million keys and up to 2,000 storage devices. Scalability can be achieved non-disruptively by simply adding additional OKM devices wherever and whenever necessary.

OKM management and operation is simple and flexible, yet powerful. With “set and forget” policies, OKM is designed to support unattended, lights out operation. Multiple OKMs at multiple sites can be managed to-gether from a single console. OKM management is via an easy to use GUI or CLI interface and includes role-based access control.

As an open, standards based architecture, OKM supports all relevant standards and protocols including AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), PKCS#11 (Public Key Cryptography Standard), NIST SP 800-57 for key lifecycle definition and NIST SP 800-60 for segregation of operational roles and functions, SOAP, TLS, KMIP (OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol), FIPS 140-2 level 3 and many others. Supported encryp-tion end points include Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, Oracle FS1 Flash Storage System, Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Storage, Oracle Database 11g or 12c, Solaris, Java applications and more.


Oracle’s StorageTek T10000 and LTO Tape Technology

Tape storage is used as both secondary storage for data protection and as primary storage for large object stores and deep archives. As an off-line and removable medium, tape cartridges can at times be misplaced, lost or stolen, so it is just as important to encrypt sensitive data re-siding on tape as it is sensitive data residing on-line on spinning disk or flash media. But not to worry, Oracle offers encryption capabilities on its StorageTek tape storage solutions. Both Oracle’s StorageTek T10000 enterprise and LTO midrange drives can encrypt data written to tape.

Oracle provides powerful data encryption capabilities across the breadth of its storage portfolio. When com-bined with additional layers of security available in Oracle Database, Oracle OS products and Oracle Access & Identity Management, data encryption provides an “all inclusive, end-to-end” approach to IT security. In this way, Oracle software running on Oracle hardware is uniquely positioned to deliver the safest IT environment for Oracle customers around the globe.

Oracle FS1 Flash Storage System

Oracle FS1 Flash Storage System is Oracle’s SAN solution purpose-built to exploit the power of flash for its perfor-mance and latency characteristic and to drive improved economics through automated tiering of flash and disk. With enterprise-grade high availability and no single point of failure FS1 is designed for 24x7 operations. Using FS1’s patented QoS Plus technology, customers can automate data tiering across flash and disk and align storage resources with business priorities. Architected to maximize the advantages of flash storage in enterprise environments, FS1 excels at consolidating workloads and maintaining predictable performance for multiple mission critical applications.

To encrypt data, FS1 uses self-encrypting drives (SED) and relies on Oracle Key Manager for encryption key management. Encrypted and clear text data are supported simultaneously on FS1, but must be separated in individual storage domains within FS1. Consequently, encrypted domains can only include SED drives whereas clear text domains may include both regular disk drives and SEDs, though it is recommended to not mix drive types in any domain.

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S PA R Ö S T E R R E I C H - G R U P P E I N C R E A S E S E M P L O Y E E E F F I C I E N C Y W I T H B A C K G R O U N D S I N G L E S I G N - O N , E N S U R E S O N B O A R D I N G O F N E W S T A F F W I T H I N M I N U T E S

Introduction

SPAR Österreich-Gruppe, a 100 % privately owned Austrian company founded in 1954, is one of Austria’s largest, most modern, and most innovative trading com-panies. The group’s core business in Austria and abroad (Northern Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, and Croatia) is the food retail business. With its subsidiary Hervis, SPAR has also been successful in the sports retail business for more than 40 years across seven countries. SPAR Öster-reich-Gruppe includes SES Spar European Shopping Centers, Austria’s biggest developer, builder, and manager of shopping centers in the country. With a workforce of 41,000 in Austria alone, SPAR is one of the largest employers in Austria and, with more than 2,700 interns, it is the country’s largest apprentice trainer. According to Nielsen, SPAR holds a market share of 30.1 % in Austria.

Challenges

• Address authentication-related challenges – such as managing and revoking access rights throughout the user lifecycle and providing single identity across applications for each employee – to protect SPAR’s confidential information against misuse, as users move between roles or leave the diverse food retail organization

• Replace multiple identity management tools and directories with a single source of identity and access information across the organization to optimize data access and credentials management and reduce IT costs

• Automate the creation, modification, and termination of user privileges throughout the entire user lifecycle to accelerate employee onboarding and ensure that workers across all business units – from food and sports retail business to facility management – can be productive without interruption from hiring to end of contract

• Gain visibility into who has access to what information within the organization – as well as whether they should have that access – to enable compliance with evolving regulatory requirements

Solution

• Deployed Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus to give employees a unique identity across SPAR applications, and credentials that can flow across lines of business – in case of a role change – ensuring that users have access only to the information they need

• Created a single source of truth for identity and access information and made credentials easy to audit by importing more than 4,700 employee identities from obsolete repositories – such as ForgeRock OpenDJ – into Oracle Unified Directory via Oracle Directory Integration Platform

• Increased employee efficiency by using consistent sign-on to authenticate users with applications when they log into their workstations using their normal Windows account, eliminating the need to manage user lifecycles for more than 60 applications manually

“With Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus, we have created a single source of truth for identity and access information. It enabled us to increase staff efficiency and ensure a better user experience through single sign-on, get new employees much faster on board, and automate the user lifecycle management for more than 60 applications”

– B E R N H A R D H U E B L , Teamleader Middleware, SPAR Österreich-Gruppe

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• Ensured that corporate data is safeguarded from misuse by extending Oracle Access Manager to efficiently manage and revoke user credentials as employees change roles or leave the workforce

• Integrated information from local human resources (HR) management systems with Oracle Application Adapters for SAP, creating an employee repository that HR analysts can access to obtain information about SPAR employees in any subsidiary or retail outlet

• Protected employee and customer personal information against security threats by choosing Oracle Consulting as a trusted advisor to lead the implementation and provide best practices that prevent unauthorized access and maintain compliance with industry and regulatory standards

• Engaged in replacing paper-based onboarding for new employees with Oracle Identity Manager’s policy-based automated provisioning of resources – reducing admin-istrative overhead and user approval times significantly and eliminating manual errors

Why Oracle

“We conducted a market study to evaluate the available products and shortlisted two vendors with similar prod-ucts in terms of functionality. We chose Oracle because we have significant Oracle technology in our landscape, we enjoy an excellent partnership with Oracle,” said the Teamleader Middleware at SPAR Österreich-Gruppe, Bernhard Hübl.

Oracle at SPAR Austria Group


Phase one of the implementation lasted seven months and was targeted at SPAR Austria head-quarters with more than 4,500 users. Oracle Consulting helped with project planning, imple-mentation, as well as integration with existing Microsoft and SAP applications. SPAR plans to expand the roll-out to 80,000 more identities over the next years.

Customer and Partner Information

Customer Name as it should appear within the story:

SPAR Österreich Gruppe

Customer Name as it will appear in Customer Search:

SPAR Austria Group (SPAR Österreich Gruppe)

Customer URL: www.spar.at

Customer Headquarters: Salzburg, Austria

Customer Revenue: US$ 14,3 billion

Go to Market Products:

• Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus

• Oracle Access Manager

• Oracle Identity Manager

• Oracle Unified Directory

• Oracle Directory Integration Platform

• Oracle Application Adaptefor SAP

• Oracle Consulting

Industry: Retail

Region: EMEA

Country: Austria

Employees: 73,000

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SOLUTION CENTER

E N D - T O - E N D S E R V I C E S A N D S U P P O R T F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S

Oracle offers a support model that combines Oracle/SAP technical specialists with SAP integrated support processes to provide customers with a unified support structure and a single point of contact (SAP).

The SAP and Oracle partnership does not end with technology exchange. Customer support and satisfaction are the tangible day-to-day benefits of this partnership. A key enabler of this customer support is SAP‘s require-ment for permanent on-site consulting staff to provide immediate support ranging from application development to critical problem response. The SAP Support and Services group at Oracle‘s Solution Center was created to coordinate this focused customer support.

Validate your „SAP on Oracle“ Solution with Oracle

Solution Centers

In order to meet future business challenges, organizations are regularly updating the architecture of their enterprise applications (EAM) and adjusting the IT infrastructure portfolio (server, storage, network). These decisions quite often directly affect the operational business they support and thus require that the right choices are made as well as careful preparation and validation of the solution. Let‘s assume in the following example that a company wants to consolidate their regionally dispersed SAP systems into one ECC installation for global logistic operations. The requirements on IT infrastructure will change dramatically: not only that the performance of the one but larger system must be sustained, data compression techniques needs to be established, maintenance windows must be decreased further, recovery point and time ob-jectives are to be sharpened. In addition to these core IT services, middleware components and access management are now deemed to be mandatory due to the global use of the SAP system.

Although organizations are usually experienced in the selection process of single products they have a discomfort when multiple technology layers from application to disk are affected and products from different vendors need to be integrated for their enterprise applications:

• will all products interplay seamlessly together?

• can the required performance be achieved and if so, which size/capacity do I need?

• does the new technology stack scale when my demand is changing (up/down-scaling)?

• which skills do I need for implementation?

• how to operate the new technology stack? Oracle Solution Center (OSC) is an organization which is exactly focusing on answering these questions. It can be engaged during solution design and validation phase.

The unique assets from Oracle Solutions Center are:

• operates eleven facilities around the globe equipped with IT infrastructure to run customer POCs and perfor-mance tests, demonstrate the value of Oracle products and to host customer workshops

• provides in-depth technical expertise on core functionalareas (i.e. backup, data replication, database migration...)

• drives an ecosystem of partner software solutionsincluding SAP

• integrates with Oracle‘s SAP Competence Center making the expertise of certified NetWeaver technology and development consultants available for validations

-1-Contact your

Oracle representative anddetermine your needs

-2-Within 48hours after OSC

engagement, Oracle will startdiscuss SOW & planning with

you

-3-Lead-time 1-2 weeks, to kick-off project andenvironment build-out

for your biz needs

-4-Lead time 1-4 weeks to get

validated ArchitectureBlueprint and

Recommendations

101Validate your „SAP on Oracle“ Solution with Oracle Solution Centers

Just recently, SAP Competence Center introduced a new customer on-site service to assess the impact of Oracle Engineered Systems on total SAP global performance (SAP Acceleration Pre-Check).

During two half days, the SAP Acceleration Pre-Check is evaluating SAP statistic data (STAD, ST03) along with workload information from the underlying Oracle database (AWR report). System usage-specific parameters will be extracted and combined with key performance metrics from Oracle Engineered Systems. At the end of this analysis session, a projection will be provided reflecting the expected new performance for each transaction, batch job and query.

Interested in SAP on Oracle?

Email: [email protected]

But our Services for SAP customers do not stop with pre-sales activities; also during and after the systems are architected, reviewed and purchased, Oracle offers support and Services through its Consulting or Advances Customer Support (ACS) organization.

Ask for a SAP OSC Service

In other words: at Oracle Solution Center, all the pieces from application down to the disk come together and can be installed, integrated and tested in a fast and easy way.

Besides the in-center activities, SAP architectural consultancy is also offered for remote and customer on-site execution: sizings according to the SAP Quicksizer methodology, infrastructure proposal validations and capacity planning exercises can be requested by customers when engaging with Oracle sales.

Be part of the OSC experience

EMEA Team locations

Broomfield,

Global OSC,Santa Clara

Reston, VA

Mexico City,Mexico

Walldorf-SAP, DE

Sao Paulo,Brazil

Linlithgow, UK

Reading, UK

Sydney,Australia

Tokyo,Japan

Beijing,China

EMEA Team locations

Frankfurt, DE

Walldorf-SAP, DE

Munich, DE

Milan, IT

Linlithgow, UK

Manchester, UK

Colombes, FR

Lyon/Grenoble, FR

Reading, UK

3 Predictive & comparative sizing based on Quicksizer methodology3 Certified architecture proposals3 3-5 days

3 Measure current resources utilization3 Estimate future demand 3 3-5 days

3 On site analysis of expected gain with Oracle Engineered System

3 5 days

3 Technology updates3 Trends in customer adoption

3 1-2 days

3 Validate IT infrastructure solutions 3 Eliminate Risk

3 2-4 weeks

5000+ hi-touch customersgo thru the Global OSCexperience each year

Sizing and Architecture

Design

Customerbriefings &workshops

Capacityanalysis andforecasting

Proof ofconcepts,

performancetests

EngineeredSystems

Accelerationpre-check

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Before we start: How many nines do you really need?

It usually starts with 4 nines – 99.99%, which means less than 9 hours per year downtime – availability. This is true for SAP landscapes as well, where general availa-bility starts here, but usually goes even higher due to required high system availability for related business availability. Therefore, we need to look at various availa-bility levels and how they can work together to increase and optimize availability for always-on SAP users.

How is availability defined?

It is relatively easy to measure the uptime or availability looking back to the past. Looking forward, without kno-wing what will happen and calculating the risks, is much harder and therefore often not stated or defined. Another reason is the complexity of a SAP landscape, consisting of and collaborating on various levels and technologies.

A pragmatic approach, therefore, is the definition of the time which is allowed to start up the system again after a failure occurred, along with the description what’s needed to make this happen.

It’s important to realize that there are two main cate-gories for downtime: planned downtime (for planned maintenance windows) and unplanned downtime (which happens, for example, when systems crash).

Unplanned Downtime

Unplanned downtime in particular is a key concern and

must therefore be analyzed very closely. We differentiate four main error cases:

• Simple errors mostly come from hardware failures such as disks, power, or networking

• Other errors are software-related errors, such as operating system or management software or complete system crashes

• Even stronger errors are failures of several systems (servers, storage) at the same time, or the sudden crash of components that are used in various systems, or management software (such as virtualization or cluster software) that is used to provide higher availability

• A most severe error is then a data corruption or data loss, no matter where it happens

Errors in the first mentioned three cases can be handled quite easily. Redundant power supplies, disks, networks, and so on make a system much more reliable and availa-ble. Parallel operation or use of clustered systems is ano-ther countermeasure to improve availability. Examples here include automatic failover and automatic restart by using Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) or Oracle Solaris cluster technologies.

In case of catastrophes or outages of whole sites, even those measures will not help you: here you need dedicated Disaster Recovery (DR) concepts in place, such as Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN).

H I G H E S T A V A I L A B I L I T Y F O R Y O U R S A P L A N D S C A P E W I T H O R A C L E H A A N D D R S O L U T I O N S

Availability

Highest Availability for your SAP landscape with Oracle HA and DR

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Which parts of a SAP system need highest attention?

SAP systems consist of many parts, and not all are equally important. Some layers like application servers can support each other and therefore do not cause the whole system to go down if they are failing, perhaps causing a performance slowdown instead. However, the database or central ser-vices (such as the enqueue server or message server) can present themselves as “single point of failures” and cause the whole system to shut down if they are failing. Thus it is most important to introduce special measures to keep the database(s) and central services always on.

Technologies to make SAP systems highly available

There are three options available to increase availability of the SAP database.

The first is a so-called failover cluster. In case of failure of the underlying system, the database gets automatically restarted on another system. To achieve this an orchest-ration of various steps is required, such as re-mounting file systems and restarting the database including an automatic crash recovery. This is a very complex process that requires the use of adequate cluster systems with related agents.

A second option is a technology called Data Guard: in the background runs a second system on which a second database is synchronized. In case of failure the observer software, as part of Data Guard, notices that the first system went down and automatically switches operation to the second system.

A third option is Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC). This database option allows several servers to use the database. If one server or node goes down, the database continues to run on the other servers in the system. Using this technology the user might notice the system become a little slower for some short time, but it would be a contin-uous service in place without any downtime.

While SAP offers enqueue servers as a replication me-chanism for SAP central services, the process to observe and coordinate switchover from one enqueue server to the standby server needs to be handled by third-party – in our case, Oracle – high availability technology like Oracle Solaris Cluster.

Oracle Solaris Cluster comes with agents for SAP central services.

With Oracle RAC there is an option available by using SAPCTL that integrates with enqueue replication mecha-nisms. SAPCTL is based on Oracle Grid Infrastructure and establishes high availability of central services on one or several Oracle RAC nodes.

A combination of various options

Oracle Solaris Cluster offers the deepest integration into SAP of the aforementioned options. It can be combined with disaster recovery – across multiple sites – as well. Using Solaris Cluster can still bring a short period of downtime until the system gets switched and the service restarted. Therefore it can be advantageous to combine Oracle Solaris Cluster with Oracle RAC to avoid any downtime for the user.

Most severe errors caused by human intervention

(not system error)

These errors are most difficult to avoid, as SAP systems are complex and various operators and users have access to the system. Simple means to address these types of errors include technologies like Flashback Database, which quickly switches back to the status before the error hap-pened. To be able to use this, one must know when and how the error happened. And it means that all operations that happened between setback points are lost.

Planned downtime

The unplanned downtime of a system, as stated above, is an important part to consider when planning high avai-lability of a SAP system. Equally important is planned downtime, the time the system is not available that is caused by actions such as patching, upgrading, or main-tenance of the SAP system. The optimal case would be to do all maintenance work during operation and while the system is in use. But it is sometimes so complex and causes such high cost to achieve this that shutting down the system seems the better alternative. In this case, you want to make sure that those maintenance windows are as short as possible.

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To increase availability during planned downtime, a number of proven procedures can be used:

• Rolling Patching/Upgrades: Redundant parts get maintenance in a serial fashion. While redundant parts remain in service, individual parts take turns being upgraded and then return to service.

• Copy: System data is copied and patches are applied while the original system continues to work; the upgraded copy is then ported back and takes over for the original system.

• Maintenance of a running system: Not all changes require a restart of the system; some (such as operating system upgrades or a change of database parameters) can be done on a running system.

Conclusion

There are a number of technologies and procedures to increase availability of a SAP system.

Oracle is uniquely positioned in the industry by offering customers a comprehensive set of high availability capa-bilities that seamlessly work together to help reduce both planned and unplanned downtime.

Oracle Solaris Cluster is engineered for business-critical applications such as SAP, providing application and ser-vice recovery for both traditional Oracle Solaris enterprise deployments and Oracle Solaris-based private, public, and hybrid clouds. Thoroughly tested with Oracle Sun servers, storage systems, and networking components, Oracle Solaris Cluster delivers a high-availability infra-structure for Oracle Sun servers, protecting mission-cri-tical applications and databases in multitier, virtualized configurations. Built-in support for Oracle Database and SAP applications results in solution-specific failure detection and recovery, resulting in minimal outages due to component failure.

Tightly coupled with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Solaris Cluster detects system failures instantly and consistently. Its faster notification and application failover significantly reduces overall service recovery time, thus drastically cutting application outages. Oracle Solaris Cluster provides out-of-the-box support for applications and databases from Oracle and SAP, avoiding any development and scripting tasks and facilitating immediate deployment in traditional

systems or virtual environments. The Oracle Solaris Cluster agent toolkit supports custom applications with minimal effort. Oracle Solaris Cluster also includes mul-tisite, multi-cluster disaster recovery services that feature automated application failover and coordination with application, storage, and host-based replication solutions.

With tight integration, Oracle HA products are certified by SAP to work with SAP.

Protect your mission-critical enterprise application

deployments

Oracle Solaris Cluster delivers uncompromised high availability and business continuity for your physical and virtualized infrastructures.

• Advanced integration with SAP and Oracle applications, databases, servers, and engineered systems

• Virtual clusters for mission-critical clouds

• Automated, multisite clustering for non-stop servicesand disaster recovery

• Built-in high availability support for 40+ enterprise applications

Oracle Solaris Cluster:

• All type of instances

• Timeout, retries, groups

• Traditional non-HA installation: DVGBMS + SCS + ERS in one

• Geographic edition

• Control of local zone


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Unbeatable database performance, scalability, and

reliability

Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) is a cluste-red version of Oracle Database based on a comprehensive high-availability stack that can be used as the foundation of a database cloud system as well as a shared infrastruc-ture, ensuring high availability, scalability, and agility for any application.

Overview

• Clustered database deployments for high availability, performance, and agility

• Timeout, retries, groups

• Oracle’s premier shared disk database clustering techno-logy

• Efficiently runs any packaged or custom application

• Choice of administrator-managed or policy-managed deployments

Benefits

• Runs all database workloads

• Foundation for database clouds

• On-demand scale out and scale up

• Highest availability for the database

• Flexible workload management

Oracle RAC

Oracle RAC supports the transparent deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers, providing fault tolerance from hardware failures and planned outages. Available as an option with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle RAC is a key component of Oracle‘s private cloud architec-ture. Oracle RAC is supported with SAP applications.

The SAP and Oracle partnership does not end with technology exchange. Customer support and satisfaction are the tangible day-to-day benefits of this partnership. A key enabler of this customer support is SAP‘s require-ment for permanent on-site consulting staff to provide immediate support ranging from application develop-ment to critical problem response. The SAP Support and Services group at Oracle‘s Solution Center was created to coordinate this focused customer support.

Oracle Infrastructure Services and Support – another

dimension to increase High Availability

Oracle systems support includes integrated packages of support services that deliver comprehensive Oracle hard-ware and software support for SAP users with mission-cri-tical and business-critical applications.

• As part of the Oracle service and support offerings, you have access to SAP-specific systems support. Based on their long-lasting relationship, Oracle and SAP conti-nue to collaborate in resolving complex interoperability issues.

• Oracle provides the highest level of consulting expertise available for IT infrastructure. Presales architects with SAP expertise are available to answer questions and assist with infrastructure, assessment, and deployment, depending on geography. In addition, customers can utilize consulting services in conjunction with the Oracle Solution Center for SAP Competency in Walldorf, Germany, or regional Oracle Solution Centers for SAP, for optimal results in the most challenging technical situations.

Oracle Database Services and Support

Database Services for SAP Environments help to reduce complexity and issue resolution times for implementation, upgrade, and production issues.

• We provide knowledge and insight to engineer your system for increased performance, adaptability, availability, and ease of maintenance. With Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, you can accelerate your

IT productivity, manage risks, lower operational costs, and focus on what really matters – your business objec-tives.

• Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services offers specialized workshops for SAP customers. Practical training is the focus and format of these workshops.

• In addition, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Ser-vices offers Assisted Services Engagements. Our speci-ally trained staff not only know the Oracle Database in detail, they are also experts in the SAP environment. They can provide advice and assistance in areas such as performance analysis, high availability, backup/restore/recovery, implementation of optional database features, and non-Oracle-to-Oracle and Oracle-to-Oracle Data-base migrations.


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W H Y O R A C L E D A T A B A S E R U N S B E S T O N O R A C L E S E R V E R S A N D S T O R A G E

Bringing together Oracle products and technologies at each tier of the solution stack, Oracle IT infrastructure layers are designed to save money, reduce integration risk, improve user productivity, and shorten time-to-de-ployment. Combined in an Oracle Optimized Solution it acts as a blueprint to implement an effective infrastruc-ture solution by applying validated configurations and proven best practices to address critical business challen-ges in the enterprise. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP create an ideal infra-structure for consolidating Oracle Database services in SAP landscapes. They define a flexible architecture for delivering fast, scalable, and continuous services for mission-critical database applications. The solution takes advantage of investments that Oracle has made in technology innova-tions and solution engineering to provide a robust infra-structure for consolidating database systems. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database helps to consolidate multiple Oracle Database releases securely within a single system, using less hardware, fewer licen-ses, and a smaller footprint. It is designed specifically to simplify datacenter cost and complexity and lower the total cost of ownership for database delivery.

Like Oracle engineered systems, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database follows an “Oracle-on-Oracle” approach that takes advantage of Oracle technologies and engineering expertise and supplies a single touch point for service and support. Unlike engineered systems, however, the Oracle Opti-mized Solution for Oracle Database is not a factory-built configuration. Instead, it is an architectural blueprint that combines Oracle technologies in proven and thor-oughly tested configurations to help simplify and accelerate database deployments. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Optimized Solution for SAP offer tremendous flexibili-ty in its ability to, adapt to existing environments, and adjust configurations as needed to meet business require-ments.

Customers that already have a significant investment in enterprise SAN storage, for example, can configure the solution to complement and leverage those resources. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can support Oracle Database 11g, and Oracle Database 12c making this solution ideal for sites that wish to modernize on current releases, and consolidate databases into a more cost-effective virtualized environment.

Since deploying the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP with the latest Oracle software and hardware technologies provides the greatest benefit and highest level of optimiza-tion on infrastructure with the latest features that may not be available with previous generation components it is recommended that customers deploy their Oracle Data-base Solutions with Oracle Database 11g and/or Oracle Database 12c.

Engineered to Work Together

Powering Your Organization

Your databases should power your organization, driving mission-critical applications, day-to-day processes – and ultimately, productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage. As an organization grows and IT infrastructure complexity increases, databases can become slow and difficult to manage. Costs rise and productivity drops, as systems and software lack the performance to meet evolving business needs. Meanwhile, upgrading seems expensive and fraught with risk. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Run Oracle’s world-leading database on Oracle’s latest hardware, and it’s easy to keep things simple, productive, low-risk – and high-performance.

Unique Oracle Integration

Oracle’s complete hardware and software stack is engineered and optimized to work together, helping you consolidate and streamline your IT infrastructure, maximize database performance, and minimize risk.

Optimize the Performance of the #1 Enterprise Database used by SAP Customers.

Why Oracle Database runs best

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This unique full-stack integration can help you:

• Reduce TCO with simpler upgrades, managementand support

• Speed ROI and enhance business agility with faster, more predictable deployments

• Drive IT innovation with world-leading performance and price/performance

• Enhance productivity with less downtime and smarter disaster recovery

With each component of your database environment built to integrate seamlessly (and to bring out the absolute best in each of the others) you are free to focus your IT resources on the innovations that will really keep you ahead of the competition. The huge performance, efficiency, reliabi-lity and security gains that running Oracle Database on Oracle systems delivers can ultimately help transform productivity and agility across the enterprise. Enabling the rapid development of new applications and services, in support of meeting the ever-changing business needs and requirements.

Solution Benefits

IT organizations often spend multiple weeks to plan, architect, troubleshoot, and deploy an infrastructure for Oracle Database and applications. Deployment teams must assemble and integrate a range of hardware and software components from different vendors (e.g., servers, storage, network, virtualization software, and operating systems). The process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, making it hard to meet schedules and achieve a profitable return on investment. Complex integration tasks can expose even the most carefully planned deployments to unanticipated risks that result in delays, downtime, costly upgrades, inefficient performance, or poor utilization.The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP reduces the effort required to plan, architect, build, and test a database infrastructure, shortening time-to-deployment and reducing risks. It allows enterprises to leverage a flexible architecture and operating model that Oracle has deve-loped and tested, rather than building an infrastructure from scratch.And because the components are all from Oracle, the solution includes the advantage of a single point of accountability, from purchasing to deployment, mainte-nance, and ongoing support.

Running Oracle Database on a complete Oracle stack brings the simplicity and reliability of having a single vendor to call. In multivendor solutions, production teams can spend hours debugging or tracing an issue before they can determine whether the source of the problem is the application, the virtual machine, the OS, or the physical server. When running an Oracle Optimi-zed Solution, Oracle Support can be engaged right away, resolving problems more quickly and helping to avoid downtime.

Oracle Optimized Solutions Oracle Optimized Solutions make gaining outstanding efficiency, productivity, and performance even easier, by providing a clearly defined blueprint for success.

To create each Oracle Optimized Solution, Oracle hard-ware and software engineers join forces to identify the optimum combination of Oracle’s best-in-class software, servers and storage to run specific applications.

Each component is then exhaustively tested, validated, and optimized as part of the complete solution:

• Maximizing performance and productivity• Minimizing time-to-deployment, risk, and cost

Based on our engineers’ findings, each Oracle Optimized Solution provides everything you need to complete a proven, best-practice, optimized deployment, and to do so in record time – slashing your own integration and optimization costs and accelerating ROI.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and SAPBuilding a database environment with equipment from multiple vendors is complex, expensive, and risky work. Simply getting systems to work together can be slow and costly, and that’s before you even begin to tune performance and management.

With the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP, building, tuning, and managing high-performance, high-availability, mis-sion-critical databases is fast, cost-effective and simple.Taking full advantage of Oracle’s latest technologies, and unique hardware and software integration, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Opti-mized Solution for SAP can help you:

• Consolidate legacy environments 7:1, resulting in a 78 percent reduction in space and power costs, and a 2.7x lower TCO

109Why Oracle Database runs best

• Accelerate testing and development with up to 50x faster cloning of production databases

• Improve productivity with the latest SPARC servers and the SPARC T5, the world’s fastest microprocessor

A complete, pre-tested solution combining Oracle servers, software and storage, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP drives down cost and risk while boosting productivity across the enterprise.

Lower TCO

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can help you reduce:

• Deployment costs, cutting time from project concep-tion to full operation by as much as 50 percent, with reduced need for trial-and-error tuning, integration testing and validation

• Energy costs, with powerful SPARC servers to enable the consolidation and virtualization of multiple data-bases and to shrink hardware footprint

• Resource wastage, letting IT staff maximize utilization through consolidation, virtualization and effective, fine-grained resource management

• Administration costs, with the ability to manage your entire database environment – from the database itself to your operating system, storage, network and more – with a single set of tools, designed and optimized to work together

• Upgrade and training costs, with support for legacy software versions and utilities

Less Risk

Delivering a proven, pre-validated architecture, Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP dramatically reduces risk at every stage.Minimize deployment and interoperability risks with patches and updates that have been tested on the full solution, not just individual components. Minimize downtime with the tools to keep systems up and running during upgrades and repairs, and predict and respond to problems before they actually occur – backed up with extensive hardware redundancy, hot-pluggable components and smart prioritization of workloads. Enhance security

with sophisticated user and process rights management, and powerful encryption features that work together across applications and hardware.

Greater Productivity and Agility

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database enables new productivity, efficiency and business agility, helping you get new applications and services to market faster.

• Support larger workloads and more users with the latest SPARC servers and the world’s fastest microprocessor, the SPARC T5

• Simplify IT architecture and boost agility with up to 7:1 consolidation of existing environments, delivering a 78 percent reduction in space and power costs and a 2.7x lower TCO

• Shorten development and test cycles with on-demand cloning of production databases – 50x faster than manual methods

• Speed strategic planning and decision-making with reduced query and response times

With a simple, flexible architecture and exceptional scalability across its components, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized So-lution for SAP are ready to meet even the fastest-evolving business needs.

Oracle-Only Technologies and Optimizations

All components in the Oracle solution stack are engineer-ed and tested to work together. In addition, Oracle has made considerable engineering investments to add value when multiple Oracle products are used together. These cross-product optimizations deliver advantages in areas like performance, security, system reliability, and ease of data center operations.While Oracle Database releases are available for a number of commercially available operating systems, virtualization technologies, and hardware platforms, there are distinct advantages of running Oracle Database services on an Oracle infrastructure.

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database allows sites to realize the benefits of Oracle’s cross-product engineering efforts, including:

• Fast cloning of production database systems. DBAs frequently need to clone production databases to

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validate software changes, analyze query performance, or troubleshoot problems. Using Oracle Solaris Zones in conjunction with storage snapshots and clones (inherent in the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance) and Oracle RMAN backups, Oracle engineers have deve-loped procedures that automate the database cloning process, duplicating databases and the supporting Oracle Solaris Zones environments up to 50x faster than manual methods.

• Secure Live Migration.Migrating virtual environments provides a means of moving database workloads to other machines to support planned downtime or disaster recovery scenarios. Oracle VM Server for SPARC technology supports the migration of active domains while main-taining application services to users. In addition, in combination with on-chip cryptographic accelerators in SPARC T-Series and M6-32 servers, these migra-tions can be fully encrypted. Other virtualization solutions migrate VM data in the clear, which can leave sensitive data (such as passwords, account numbers, etc.) unprotected, compelling the use of dedicated networks or the addition of encryption devices. Instead, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database enables secure, wire-speed encryption capabilities for live VM migrations, without any additional hardware or software investment required.

Built-in acceleration of Oracle Transparent Data Encryption

The same on-core cryptography features in SPARC T- Series and M6-32 servers are applied to Oracle Databases workloads that use Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt sensitive data. In recent Oracle TDE testing, the SPARC T4 proved to be 43% faster on secure database queries in comparison to Intel Xeon X5600 processors using AES/NI technology.

Because on-chip encryption can occur at high speeds, organizations that must protect sensitive data can use encryption pervasively to reduce risk.

• Kernel acceleration in Oracle Solaris for Oracle RAC.The Oracle RAC distributed database uses the Lock Management System (LMS), a user-level distributed lock protocol that mediates requests for database blocks between processes on cluster nodes. Fulfilling a request requires traversing and copying data across the user/kernel boundary on the requesting and serving

nodes, even for the significant number of requests for blocks with uncontended locks. Oracle Solaris includes a kernel accelerator to filter database block requests destined for LMS processes, directly granting requests for blocks with uncontended locks, elimi-nating user-kernel context switches, associated data copying, and LMS application-level processing for those requests.

• I/O throughput at native speeds in VMs. Oracle‘s SPARC T4 and T5 platforms deliver superior application workload performance with Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) and PCIe Direct I/O. SR-IOV enables the efficient sharing of PCIe network devices among I/O domains so application workloads can achieve near-native I/O performance, even in virtual environments. PCIe Direct I/O extends current PCIe support to enable the assignment of either individual PCIe cards or entire PCIe buses to an Oracle VM for SPARC domain. This helps to deliver native I/O throughput for applications needing maximum perfor-mance, and provides I/O configuration flexibility.

• Memory optimizations that improve Oracle Database performance. Oracle Solaris features memory manage-ment functionality and enhancements that are targeted at accelerating Oracle Database performance:

– NUMA optimization and memory placement.Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 include memory placement intelligence that enhances performance for NUMA architectures like the SPARC T4, T5, and M6-32 servers.

– Large memory pages. Because of scalability enhancements to the virtual memory system in Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Database can allocate 2GB page sizes to its System Global Area (SGA), a group of shared memory areas dedicated to Oracle Database instances. Large page sizes improve database performance by reducing costly Transaction Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses in the CPU architecture that cause paging. In addition, enhancements to the memory predictor in Oracle Solaris enable monitoring of memory page use and adjustments to the page size to match application and database needs, enhancing performance.

– Support for ISM (Intimate Shared Memory), Dynamic ISM (DISM) and Optimized Shared Memory (OSM). Oracle Database uses shared memory to store frequently


used data such as the database’s buffer cache and shared pool. For this reason, the OS includes support for specially tuned variants of shared memory known as ISM and DISM. (Similar to ISM, DISM is a shared memory region that can grow dynamically.) ISM and DISM shared memory segments take advantage of large pages locked in by the Oracle Solaris kernel that can‘t be paged out, making them always available and reducing context switches and overhead. With Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Database12c customers receive the benefit of the latest software support for Optimized Shared Memory (OSM).This can be fully automated and OSM is primarily designed to allow Dynamic Sizing of SGA at no performance loss (if dynamic sizing is not done). It is optimized for database use cases and SGA allocated using OSM, will use the largest available and possible page size on the given system for SGA.

– Multi-threaded shared memory operations. A new multithreaded kernel process in Oracle Solaris 11 called “vmtasks” accelerates the creation, locking, and destruction of pages in shared memory. The vmtasks process parallelizes the creation and destruction of shared memory segments, dramatically speeding up database startups and shutdowns.

• Hybrid Columnar Compression* (HCC) technology. When Oracle Database is used with either Pillar Axiom storage or the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, HCC enables substantial reductions in the overall storage footprint as well as performance enhancements since data is compressed. * full SAP support for HCC planned

with 12c

• Quality of Service (QoS) and storage integration. Oracle’s Pillar Axiom storage system adjusts the QoSfor SAN data storage according to defined priorities, making it easy to optimize I/O performance for business-critical databases. QoS policies can be modified at any time to reflect changes in business conditions and data value. The system’s QoS manager interprets QoS policy settings and makes decisions on where to physically place data, based on the QoS service level requested as well as the actual devices in the system. Migrating database storage across different devices is a simple one-click process of changing the associated storage class. The system then migrates the data while continuously providing database access.

• Management efficiency. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager portfolio, provides an intuitive interface for managing the solution hardware, firmware, virtual systems, operating system instances, administrative rights, patching, and updates. By adding other software in the Oracle Enterprise Manager family, administrators can also control Oracle Database instances and Oracle applications in the enterprise. An integrated and con-sistent set of management tools can save considerable labor costs in comparison to working with a variety of different multivendor tools.

A Choice of Customizable Configurations.

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can be deployed using one of several recommended configura-tions, making it easy to match expected workload and growth projections. Each configuration can be customized as needed to meet SAP objectives, including deployment requirements for applications, high availability, or disaster recovery. All configurations share the same underlying architecture and are based on enterprise-class Oracle components, creating a solution that is highly scalable, optimized for database performance, and engineered for high service levels for business-critical Oracle Databases.

Oracle’s SPARC Servers: The Best Servers for Oracle

Database

Oracle’s SPARC Servers deliver world-leading performance and value – and they’re the best platform for Oracle Database.

Oracle’s latest SPARC T5 and SPARC M-Series servers, running Oracle Solaris, have already set a number of world-record performance benchmarks, including a new world record for single-system database performance. “Critical threads” manage access to each core’s hardware resources – boosting Oracle Database performance by over 30 percent when compared to their predecessors.

Built to Banish Complexity and Cost

With Oracle’s powerful virtualization toolsbuilt in at no extra charge, Oracle’s SPARC servers help to take the complexity and inefficiency out of your data center, and the cost out of consolidation.

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Maximum Uptime, End-to-End Security

Oracle’s latest SPARC servers provide redundant power supplies, cooling, storage connections and network connections. And with Oracle VM Server for SPARC’s live migration capabilities, you can keep critical sys-tems operational during essential hardware and software maintenance. They also feature on-chip cryptography, designed to integrate seamlessly with Oracle Transparent Data Encryption – providing true end-to-end data security, with negligible overhead and administration.

Oracle Database 12c*:

Co-Engineered with SPARC Servers with Oracle Solaris

Oracle Database 12c delivers new levels of availability and security, and well as speeding database consolidation, and simplifying the deployment and management of database clouds. It’s been co-engineered with Oracle hardware and software for maximum performance and efficiency – so it’s unsurprising that Oracle Database runs best on Oracle’s SPARC servers with Oracle Solaris.

Oracle Solaris: The Best OS for Oracle Database Oracle Solaris 11 is the world’s #1 UNIX OS – and it’s engineered and optimized to unlock the full potential of your Oracle Database, and Oracle’s complete portfolio of software, servers and storage.

For applications such as SAP Business Suite that rely on Oracle Database, a high-performance operating system translates into faster transactions, better scalability to support more users, and the ability to support larger ca-pacity databases. When deployed in virtualized environ-ments, multiple Oracle Database servers can be consolidated on the same physical server.

Unmatched Scaling

Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered to scale to• Thousands of threads• Petabytes of memory

Combined with the advanced thread scale and memory density of Oracle’s latest SPARC servers, it delivers near-linear scaling on data warehouse queries.

* SAP Support planned for 2015

Faster Provisioning, Lower Risk

Pluggable Databases, a new option in Oracle Database 12c, enables the rapid provisioning, redeployment and duplication of databases. When run on Oracle Solaris 11, pluggable database cloning is almost instantaneous.

The Ultimate in Observability

Oracle Database 12c features unique integration with Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) analytics, giving Database Administrators the I/O observability they need to:

• Optimize database I/O performance • Resolve database I/O issues rapidly

Mission-Critical Reliability, Availability and Serviceability

Oracle Solaris 11 helps maximize system and service avai-lability, providing the tools to diagnose, isolate and speed recovery from hardware, database and application faults. When deployed with Oracle Solaris Cluster, Oracle Solaris 11 offers the most extensive range of RAS solutions, for the largest portfolio of mission-critical applications. With Oracle Solaris Predictive Self-Healing, SPARC servers can even monitor their own health and mitigate problems before they have a chance to affect performance.

Smarter Protection

Oracle Solaris security technologies protect data, applica-tions, users and the operating system itself, ensuring data privacy, guarding against insider threats and simplifying regulatory compliance.Running Oracle Solaris 11 on Oracle SPARC servers takes advantage of their built-in encryption capabilities, and offers end-to-end security at no additional cost and with no overhead – and ZFS, the default file system in Oracle Solaris 11, is the most efficient, reliable, and secure file system for your database.

Integrated Agility

With Oracle Solaris Zones and Network Virtualization built in, Oracle Solaris 11 supports the rapid provisioning of highly dynamic cloud environments for your database. Oracle Solaris simplifies consolidation, letting you

• Run multiple versions of Oracle Database and Oracle Solaris on the same server

• Easily assign and manage system resources and for each database instance


Oracle Optimized Storage: The Best Storage for Oracle

DatabaseLike Oracle Solaris and Oracle’s SPARC servers, Oracle storage solutions are engineered and optimized for Oracle Database – to minimize cost and risk, simplify management, and maximize efficiency, productivity and performance.

Unique Pioneering Features

With a host of unique and groundbreaking capabilities, Oracle’s storage systems are the perfect primary storage solutions for Oracle Database.

Oracle’s Pillar Axiom systems deliver:

• Optimized performance – with Oracle’s patented Quality of Service technology, you can prioritize access to resources, maximize utilization and protect SLAs

• Reduced costs – with Oracle Database’s Hybrid Columnar Compression, you can cut capacity require-ments by over 40 percent, deliver as much as a 5x reduction in storage footprint, and simultaneously boost application performance for historic data queries

• Increased uptime – with the ability to scale system bandwidth and storage capacity while the system is in use, you can prepare for new storage needs without compromising current performance.

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances also support Hybrid Columnar Compression, as well as delivering:

• Incredibly fast backup and recovery, and low overall costs – with built-in software, data services and nume-rous productivity-enhancing features, a ZFS Storage Appliance can speed backup by 3x, and reduce costs by up to 75 percent compared to traditional solutions

• Safer, quicker and cheaper database testing and development – with snapshot and cloning features for rapid database replication, seamless integration with Oracle Data Guard, and reduced licensing and operating costs

• Smarter read and write operations – with data auto-matically placed on the most appropriate storage media

The Optimum Combination

Uniquely engineered and optimized to work together, Oracle’s SPARC servers, Oracle Solaris and Oracle storage unleash the full power of the world’s #1 database. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database and Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP makes harnessing this power easy, minimizing cost and risk, and maximizing database performance, user productivity and business value.

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E N G I N E E R E D F O R I N N O V A T I O N , E F F I C I E N C Y A N D S I M P L I C I T Y : O R A C L E E N G I N E E R E D S Y S T E M S F O R S A P

Companies need to optimize their IT infrastructure to achieve best performance at attractive cost. Oracle innovates at every layer of the stack to design engineered systems that reduce the cost and complexity of IT infra-structures while increasing productivity and performance.

Oracle engineers systems that are integrated across the entire technology stack, so you don’t have to. Reduced IT complexity frees up time and money, leaving more to spend on innovation and opportunities.

Oracle innovates at every layer of the stack to design engineered systems that reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Database Appliance, Private Cloud Appliance and the Oracle SuperCluster are designed to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry.

Oracle’s engineered systems combine best-of-breed hardware and software components with game-changing technical innovations that simplify operations and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). With Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP, that extreme performance is optimized for SAP applications.

Where competitors stop with “ultra”, “highly” or “xy” converged systems, Oracle does not stop there, but moves one step ahead by really engineering all layers and inte-gration of all layers into one solution which is designed, tested, built and delivered based on own IP and industry standards.

Extreme Performance at Every Layer of the

Technology Stack

• Extreme performance means getting the job done faster, better, and more efficiently than it has been done before. It‘s the hallmark of Oracle‘s engineered systems and the ultimate embodiment of Oracle‘s drive to simplify IT

Oracle starts with the world’s most complete, open, and integrated technology stack – including database techno-logy, management software, operating systems, servers, and storage.

Oracle Engineered Systems

• While each of the IT infrastructure layers provide leading-edge technology in itself, Oracle went one step further and designed engineered systems that are pre-integrated to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance

• Only Oracle can innovate and optimize at every layer of the stack to simplify data center operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation

• Each system integrates Oracle‘s applications-to-disk technology stack – servers and storage, operating systems, database software, middleware, networking, and built-in virtualization features – to reduce the time and cost associated with purchasing, provisio-ning, deploying, and maintaining SAP infrastructure

• Oracle and SAP have jointly tested and certified Oracle’s Engineered Systems for SAP, making them available as a family of engineered systems that are pre-integrated, pre-tested, and pre-configured to simplify data center operations, ensure fast and easy SAP infrastructure deployment, and accelerate business innovation

• Optimized for Oracle Database and SAP applications, Oracle’s Engineered Systems for SAP reduce the time needed to get SAP landscapes up and running

Oracle Engineered Systems in the Datacenter

• Once deployed, consolidating SAP landscapes on Oracle’s engineered systems reduces data center management complexity

115Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP

• Administrators can use SAP’s BR*Tools and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to manage SAP landscapes and SAP infrastructure. Built-in automa-tion features simplify administration tasks and reduce day-to-day management demands.

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Data-base Appliance, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle SuperCluster and the Private Cloud Appliance are designed to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry.

Designed to deliver extreme performance to data ware-housing, online transaction processing (OLTP), and mixed-load database applications, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine is tailor-made to improve SAP performance and manageability.

A “data center in a box”, the Exadata Database Machine is an easy-to-deploy system that includes all the hardware needed for running the Oracle Database. From there, it adds Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Grid Infrastructure, storage management tools, and ad-ministration software – and optimizes the entire system for extreme performance, mission-critical availability, and reliability.

Using Exadata in SAP Environments

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the perfect choice for SAP environments on several levels.

• It delivers outstanding I/O and SQL processing performance for online transaction processing, (SAP ERP), business warehouse, (SAP BW) and consolidation of mixed workloads

• A massively parallel grid architecture using RAC and Exadata storage delivers extreme performance with linear I/O scalability, dramatically increasing data bandwidth between the database server and storage. Intensive query processing and data mining scoring are offloaded to storage servers, bringing processing closer to SAP data to improve query performance and concurrency

• All servers, storage, and networking components are pre-cabled in racks, and the complete package is pre-integrated and pre-tested, cutting weeks or

months from deployment schedules. It cuts manage-ment and maintenance chores by simplifying tasks such as patching with single vendor bundled patch sets, and provides high availability and disaster recovery out-of-the-box

• SAP customers can easily migrate their database to Exadata, which runs SAP applications unchanged. Depending on the source platform, the migration could be as smooth as an operating system platform upgrade

Designed for private clouds, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud delivers virtually unlimited scalability, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity to SAP applications.

Engineered and balanced for the compute-intensive workloads of middleware and packaged applications, each pre-assembled, pre-configured system contains fully in-tegrated, hot-swappable x86 compute nodes, a high-per-formance Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, high-bandwidth communications fabric, and switches.

Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP

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Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud for SAP

Exalogic is designed to simplify application management and improve operational efficiency.

• By offering modular building blocks that are designed, integrated, tested, shipped, installed, configured and operated as a whole, Exalogic radically reduces com-plexity for SAP environments. For SAP customers, this means a quick, efficient, and easy-to-deploy infrastructure for SAP landscapes

• All Exalogic configurations are fully redundant at every level and are designed with no single point of failure. Together with SAP‘s and Oracle‘s own high availability techniques, this offers unprecedented levels of reliabil-ity for SAP infrastructure deployments

• Exalogic’s highly standardized, factory-integrated, certified, and tested components feature a single point of contact for all storage, server, OS, and system management service needs, greatly simplifying set up and deployment, substantially reducing risk of errors, simplifying diagnosis, and standardizing operations

All SAP products based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x that are available on the Oracle Linux 5 and 6 platform can now be used in a virtual Exalogic configuration.

Oracle SuperCluster

Oracle innovations such as next-generation SPARC T5/M6 servers, Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, Oracle Data-base 11g, and Exadata storage come together in this scalable, engineered system that is optimized and tuned for consolidating enterprise SAP applications.

Oracle’s Optimized Solution for SAP based on Oracle SuperCluster is engineered to run SAP applications in conjunction with a wide range of complementary enter-prise applications at the highest levels of performance and reliability. Users can greatly simplify their SAP landscape by consolidating their SAP application instances, central services, and database software onto an Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 or Oracle SuperCluster M6-32 system.

Running an SAP Landscape on Oracle SuperCluster

Oracle SuperCluster is supported by SAP. It runs the Oracle parallel database, the SAP central instance, application, or web server, Oracle Enterprise Manager

management software, and all your SAP applications. This is especially suited for SAP customers who need a multi-purpose system to run SAP as well as additional enterprise applications, or have multi-tiered applications to consolidate and virtualize within their datacenter.

• With the Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP, enter-prises can modernize their infrastructure, consolidate SAP landscapes, and manage more workloads in a reduced data center footprint to achieve significantly better performance and productivity, reduced risk, and lower total cost of ownership

• The Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP provides a complete architecture that is designed, tested, and tuned to address the demands of mission-critical enter-prise SAP application environments

• Customers can consolidate landscapes, including development, testing, and production, onto a highly available and scalable platform to improve SAP application performance and availability

• Built-in virtualization technologies securely isolate SAP workloads and offer the fine-grained resource control needed to safely consolidate SAP onto a single platform. Compute, memory, and I/O resources can be managed to ensure applications have access to an appropriate amount of resources and that no workload consumes the entire platform. Built-in management streamlines operations and eliminates the need for different skills

Private Cloud Appliance is an engineered system that radically simplifies the way customers install, deploy, and manage converged infrastructures for Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris applications.

It offers a highly available, fully redundant converged infrastructure system combining networking, compute, management, and storage elements. It comes with one price for all the hardware in the system and all needed software. And supports Oracle Trusted Partitions that allows you the flexibility to license Oracle software on a virtual CPU basis. And it connects to your existing or new Oracle storage or third-party storage. It provides Software-Defined Network Infrastructure with Oracle Fa-bric Interconnect and Oracle SDN. You will benefit from a single point of support for the entire stack, including Oracle hardware and software.

117Oracle Engineered Systems for SAP

Private Cloud Appliance is Certified by SAP

All SAP products based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x available on Oracle Linux 5 and Oracle Linux 6 can now be used on the Oracle Engineered System designed for virtualiza-tion – the Private Cloud Appliance.

Three-Tier and Two-Tier installations (Oracle Database and SAP applications) are supported to run on the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.

Private Cloud Appliance can be used in SAP environ-ments when the following conditions are met:

• Minimum use of Private Cloud Appliance Release 1.1.3.

• Private Cloud Appliance is based on Oracle VM. Please follow the related Oracle VM information from SAP Note 1808268.

• The following Operating Systems in VMs are certified and supported for the use in SAP environ-ments.

• Oracle Linux Release 5.x with UEK • Oracle Linux Release 6.x with UEK • Oracle Solaris

Oracle Database Appliance is a complete turnkey, highly available clustered database system that has been certified by SAP. All SAP products based on SAP Net-Weaver 7.x that are also certified for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 can be used with the Oracle Database Appliance.

The Oracle Database Appliance is a 4U rack-mountable system specifically designed to run Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It supports high availability and accelerated database performance requirements with redundant and hot swappable components, and triple-mirrored and shared disk and flash storage. Pre-installed with Oracle Linux and Oracle appliance manager software, this appliance saves time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of a highly available database solution.

Using Oracle Database Appliance in SAP Environments

The Oracle Database Appliance provides the following capabilities for an SAP environment:

• Highly available active-active clustered data base server for SAP applications

• Highly available file server for SAP-required shared file systems

• Complete clustering solution for SAP high-availability resources such as central services for both ABAP and JAVA stack

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C U S T O M E R E X A M P L E : A T O S A N D S A P O N O R A C L E S U P E R C L U S T E R

Introduction

Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH provides informa-tion technology (IT) solutions and services. It operates one of Europe’s major data centers, managing the IT infrastructure for more than 100 Austrian companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and utilities. It offers IT outsourcing, business process management, systems integration, and consulting for a variety of customer en-vironments – business intelligence, customer relationship management, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources, product life-cycle, and supply chain management. Atos IT Solutions and Services is a subsidiary of Atos SE, an international IT services company delivering managed operations, consulting, and systems integration to a client base in 52 countries and multiple business sectors.

Atos wanted to minimize the effort required to deploy, operate, and maintain customer environments while still meeting the high performance and high availability service level agreements for business-critical services. By deploying Oracle SuperCluster, Atos reduced the number of IT administrators required to maintain the environ-ment by more than half and enabled IT staff to focus on faster, SLA-compliant outage resolution for customers.

The cost of software licensing purchased by Atos was reduced by 50%, lowering customer expenses and dri-ving a projected 1.5x growth in platform profitability. Replacing standalone servers with Oracle SuperCluster at a ratio of 4:1, the monthly spending on power, cooling, and space was reduced by 75%.

Benefits for ATOS

Atos has been working for decades with virtually all re-levant SAP infrastructure platforms, and always keeps its data center technology up to date, as a matter of principle. In 2012, as part of a regular system update, the company planned to implement Oracle SuperCluster as a sha-red Oracle Solaris platform for both SAP and non-SAP workloads. Atos carefully analyzed the possible business and technology benefits of using the complete Oracle SuperCluster solution on the basis of the optimized Oracle Engineered System architecture concept. A whole range of benefits quickly became obvious. The use of a multi-tenan-cy or private cloud infrastructure would allow for SAP landscape consolidation and Oracle database consolidation including a reduction in license costs and in total cost of ownership (TCO). It would bring significant performance enhancements in many areas, simplify system provision and IT operations, and increase efficiency with built-in virtualization and management. The Oracle SuperCluster solution would yield higher availability and enhanced productivity and efficiency thanks to tested, perfect-ly matched, and integrated components from a single source – not to forget the significantly optimized support management.

Atos wanted to transfer a large number of customer systems to Oracle SuperCluster and harness the efficien-cy and productivity benefits of an optimally engineered system for SAP deployment and operation, while helping its outsourcing customers to achieve tangible optimiz-ations in terms of application performance, availability, reliability, and TCO.

“In today’s competitive marketplace for IT outsourcing services, customer expectations are continuously increasing. Oracle SuperCluster gave us the extreme performance we need to stay competitive while reducing our total cost of ownership and time-to-market. Oracle helps us be successful at helping our customers be successful.”

– E D U A R D K O W A R S C H , COO, Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe, Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH

119Oracle SuperCluster at Atos

“By creating a multi-tenancy environment on Oracle SuperCluster, we gain the ability to put more than one customer on a single machine. It reduces the number of servers that we need to operate and lowers energy and floor consumption in our data center. That’s easily done with Oracle’s Engineered Systems because we have ever-ything in one box. And all system components are tested upfront, so the machine is easy to use and easy to upgrade,” said Eduard Kowarsch, COO Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe, Atos IT Solutions and Services.

Benefits for bauMax

The first SAP customer environment migrated to Oracle SuperCluster was that of bauMax, the leading Austrian do-it-yourself brand with annual revenue of approxi-mately 1.2 billion, 10,000 employees, and 158 stores in Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey. BauMax decided to switch to Atos’s Oracle SuperCluster solution to save both licensing costs and TCO while increasing application performance.The migration to Oracle SuperCluster has not altered bauMax’s SAP applications in any way, such as the ERP productive system, which has 1,700 concurrent users and 2,100 peak users. The Oracle Database also remained practically unchanged. Its current size is around 3.5 TB, having been compressed with Oracle Advanced Compres-sion.

The database and central instances now run on Oracle So-laris – on virtual and much more powerful systems in one box. “The productive migration and testing were com-pleted in about 12 hours on a weekend, by agreement with bauMax, and everything ran like clockwork. The migration was obviously planned down to the last detail and tested extensively in advance,” said Stefanie Wessely, SAP project manager, Atos IT Solutions and Services.

BauMax saved more than 50% on their licensing costs while seeing 40% faster processing versus the previous system. This helps them finish overnight batch jobs in time for the next business day. BauMax are extremely satisfied with the result of migrating to Oracle Super-Cluster with Atos‘s help. “After a smooth migration we now not only benefit from a state-of-the-art hardware platform but also from the reduced cost. Both factors are imperative for our business success and we appreciate the fact that Atos as a partner fully understood that and

made it happen,” said Dr. Susanne Kremser, head of IT, bauMax.Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP

With the Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP, enterpris-es can modernize their infrastructure, consolidate SAP landscapes, and manage more workloads in a reduced data center footprint to achieve significantly better performance and productivity, reduce risk, and lower TCO. Oracle SuperCluster is supported by SAP. It runs the Oracle parallel database, the SAP central instance, application, or web server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Management software, and all SAP applications. This is especially suitable for SAP customers who need a multi-purpose system to run SAP as well as additional enterprise applications, or have multi-tiered applications to consolidate and virtualize within their data center. The Oracle Optimized Solution for SAP provides a complete architecture that is designed, tested, and tuned to address the demands of mission-critical enterprise SAP applicati-on environments.

Challenges

• Consolidate end-of-life servers and replace them with a standardized, more secure, and faster platform to deploy and manage outsourced customer operations and business process management IT landscapes

• Reduce platform total cost of ownership by lowering hardware acquisition costs and long-term spending on maintenance, power, cooling, and space

• Minimize effort required to deploy, operate, and maintain customer environments to reduce operational costs

• Meet customers’ demanding high performance and high availability SLAs for business-critical services

• Increase profitability to secure its market position while also decreasing customers’ contract outsourcing costs to help ensure customer satisfaction

Solutions

• Oracle SuperCluster

• Oracle SuperCluster Installation Service

• Oracle Solaris

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

• Oracle Advanced Customer Support

120 Oracle SuperCluster at Atos

• Increased batch processing with 10x more input/output operations per second by replacing the IBM AIX platform with Oracle SuperCluster, a unified and high-performance engineered system that integrates virtualization, computing, storage, networking, and systems management, enabling service level optimiz-ation

• Supported multiple customer environments without buying standalone infrastructures for each by alloca-ting a different Oracle Solaris zone to each customer and managing virtual environments with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

• Reduced the cost of software licensing purchased byAtos by 50%, lowering customer expenses and driving a projected 1.5x growth in platform profitability

• Enabled customers who host their IT environments in the Atos data center to improve system performan-ce while reducing the cost of software licensing – such as Austria’s leading do-it-yourself company bauMax – which saved more than 50% on software licensing costs while seeing 40% faster batch processing of SAP applications

• Reduced monthly spending on power, cooling, and space by 75%, replacing standalone servers with Oracle SuperCluster at a ratio of 4:1 to run customer databases, middleware, and applications

• Lowered the number of IT administrators required to maintain the environment by more than half by removing many variables around supporting heteroge-neous deployments, such as multiple systems manage-ment, individual patches, and driver updates

• Decreased pre-production testing requirements and the risk of hard-to-identify malfunctions associated with integrating disparate components, enabling IT staff to focus on faster, SLA-compliant outage resolution for customers as well as further data center automation and cost savings

• Minimized Oracle SuperCluster deployment time

as Oracle engineers performed on-site standardized system installation and configuration to improve avai-lability, reduce risk, and optimize performance as part of the Oracle SuperCluster Installation Service

• Eliminated risks involved in managing critical software updates and feature enhancements by

working with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services experts who provide regular reviews, including patch and configuration recommendations

Why Oracle

“We chose Oracle SuperCluster because, unlike alter-natives from other vendors, it enabled us to operate a multi-tenancy environment to host more than one customer on one machine, which is critical for our IT outsourcing business. In addition, everything from Oracle is tested up front, easy to use and easy to upgrade, from firmware versions to middlewa-re and system management. Finally, we selected Oracle because the solution provides everything we need in one box, allowing us to reduce the num-ber of servers and lower energy consumption and space occupancy in our data center,” said Eduard Kowarsch, COO, Managed Services, Central Eastern

Europe, Atos IT Solutions and Services.


The big challenge for Atos’ project team was to ensure 24/7 operations continue of bauMax’ IT systems. Atos worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services engineers to establish standardized system installation and configuration steps and deployment best practices. Thanks to the careful planning, the migration to Oracle SuperCluster could be performed in only a few hours, without altering the SAP applications used by bauMax in any way and without business interruption. Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services experts provide regular reviews of the environment – including patch and configuration advice – to maximize availability, reduce risk, and optimize performance for Oracle SuperCluster.

Customer Name: Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH

Customer URL: http://at.atos.net/

Customer Headquarters: Vienna, Austria

Industry: Professional Services, IT Services

Employees: 16,000 (77,000 worldwide)

Customer Revenue: US$ 480 million

http://at.atos.net/de-at/home.html

121 iQor runs SAP on Oracle SuperCluster

“We optimized the production, business intelligence reporting, and disaster recovery environments for our mission-critical systems on Oracle SuperCluster, improving performance, scalability, and uptime, while managing to reduce operating cost.”

– E R I C C A R L S O N , Vice President, IT, iQor

I Q O R S E E S 3 0 % I M P R O V E M E N T I N P E R F O R M A N C E F O R C R I T I C A L S A P A P P L I C A T I O N S W H I L E L O W E R I N G I T M A N A G E D - S E R V I C E S C O S T S B Y 2 0 %

iQor is a global provider of business-process outsourcing and product-support services, with 32,000 employees in 17 countries. The company’s technology, logistics, and analytics platforms enable it to measure, monitor, and analyze brand interactions, improve business processes, and find operational efficiencies that lead to superior outcomes for its customers. iQor partners with many of the world’s best-known brands to deliver aftermarket product and customer support solutions that span the consumer value chain, from customer care and receivables management to product diagnostics and repair services. The company serves organizations across a number of industries, including consumer goods, telecommunications, and healthcare.

Challenges

• Improve SAP application performance for reporting, analytics, and core service and repair systems – as transaction growth continues to rapidly rise at an annual rate of 54% – to ensure that the company can continue to provide superior aftermarket product and customer support

• Ensure system stability and scalability to minimize employee restrictions to viewing and analyzing after-market support data

Why Oracle

iQor selected Oracle SuperCluster for its fast interconnect and virtualization capabilities, as well as its optimized, multitiered storage and application server.

The company selected Oracle Advanced Customer Support due to the provider’s more than 15 years of managed-service delivery, integration capabilities, and access to Oracle’s support, engineering, development, and product management. By leveraging the Oracle Advan-ced Monitoring and Resolution service, iQor could free up valuable IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives, while maintaining architectural control and the change-ma-nagement acceptance process. iQor also benefited from predictable IT operations costs and service-level agree-ment adherence.

122

“With Oracle, we can run all application tiers on one set of hardware. We can also run related applications on the same hardware by taking advantage of the Infiniband connection and excellent hardware performance. It’s a one-stop shop for running our database- and application-optimized environments, and for general-purpose nodes,” said Erik Carlson, vice president, IT, iQor.

“In addition, by working with Oracle Advanced Customer Support and its Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Reso-lution service, we have one vendor as the point of contact, access to experts across our IT environment, and detailed documentation for downtime and rollback plans. We are pleased to work with an organization that can scale and grow with us.”


iQor worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support on system installation, configuration, and migration of the Oracle SuperCluster environment, which was completed on budget. After the go live, iQor took advantage of Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Resolution for ongoing support services, including predictive system monitoring and incident resolution.

Solutions• Implemented Oracle SuperCluster to enable the com

pany to process 900 million transactions each year – from receipt of defective items, to issuing parts for repair, to shipping – and the ability to grow to 3x the current volumes before any further hardware investment would be needed

• Provide 6,000 online transaction processing (OLTP) operations users and 600 reporting users, spread across departments, with access to SAP and other applica-tions and reporting capabilities they need to provide excellent customer service, without restricting report generation or high-volume queries

• Eliminated the month-end reporting backlog – which required an average of approximately 500 reports on aftermarket product and customer support and took at least a half day to deliver all requested reports to users – enabling iQor’s management to accelerate important business decisions

• Reduced managed-services spend by 20% and cut Oracle enterprise licenses by 66% by working with Oracle Advanced Customer Support, which serves as a central point of contact, providing hardware, software, and managed services for iQor’s global production systems, running on Oracle SuperCluster

• Took advantage of the Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Resolution service, including predictive monitoring, proactive system status updates, and technology expertise for system administration and incident resolution

• Matched system uptime in the first 30 days post implementation while improving system performance by 30%—and has experienced 100% uptime since November 2013, which is critical as each hour of downtime equates to US$200,000 in lost revenue

Oracle Customer: iQor

Location: New York, New York, United States

Industry: Professional Services

Employees: 32,000

Annual Revenue: $1 to $5 Billion


• Oracle SuperCluster• Oracle Advanced Customer Support• Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Resolution

iQor.com

iQor runs SAP on Oracle SuperCluster

Exadata, Exalogic,

ODA, O-PCA,

SuperCluster

123

Oracle: Complete Infrastructure Stack for SAP Environments

For more information, please send an email to [email protected], Or visit us on http://www.oracle.com/us solutions/sap/introduction/overview/index.html or http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/index.html

Exadata, Exalogic,

ODA, O-PCA,

SuperCluster

Support: Advanced Customer Support (ACS)

Middleware/Management EnterpriseManager (EM) 12c,Audit Vault, IDM, Java, Open Stack

Database: Oracle Database, DB12c

Operating System: Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris 11

Virtual Machine: OVM, Solaris, Virtualization

Servers: SPARC, x86, Sun Server

StorageTek, ZFSA, Flash Storage

Hardware and SoftwareEngineered to Work Together

124 Imprint

Oracle Corporation

World Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores,

CA 94065

U.S.A.

Published by

Oracle Corporation,


Global Technology Center

Albrecht Haug

[email protected]

Altrottstr. 31

69190 Walldorf, Germany

Tel. ++49 (0) 6227 356-0

Fax++49 (0) 6227-3847366

Email: [email protected]

Photos: Gross Art,

Shutterstock, USA

Internet:

www.oracle.com/sap

http://scn.sap.com/

community/oracle

Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 0615

SAP has not certified or endorsed the Oracle results for the BW-EML benchmark. SAP® is a registered trademark of SAPSAP NetWeaver is a registered trademark of SAPSAP HANA® is a registered trademark of SAP

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