Introducing the IBM System z9 Advantage for SAP Applications

IBM helps boost price/performance for SAP applications on the System z9 mainframe

SAP applications play a critical role in core functional areas of many modern businesses. Your Business planning, logistics, financials, HR or other key business functions may run on SAP and these applications may reach out across the value chain. If you rely on your SAP applications to run your business, you know that you must minimize downtime or security breaches and you know you have to manage complexity and administration costs. The lynchpin of your SAP application infrastructure is the SAP data server. If this server goes down, your SAP applications - and quite often your business — may stop running altogether. You need an SAP data server environment that delivers core capabilities to help ensure continued operations and reduce the escalating "hidden" costs to the business. You need a system that offers:

• High availability — helping to reduce the costs of downtime
• High security — helping to reduce the cost of breaches
• Ease of management — helping to reduce the costs of administration and control

A system that can allow flexible growth without building in extra complexity. A system with features that can interoperate with other technologies and applications within the business.

IBM announces the IBM System z9 Advantage for SAP Applications, which brings together many recent enhancements to the mainframe environment to deliver the legendary availability, security and managability features of the System z9 mainframe along with significant improvements to price/performance options for SAP applications data serving environments. Built on years of experience with business-critical SAP solutions and with close collaboration between SAP and IBM, it begins with the System z9 Enterprise Class or System z9 Business Class mainframes - systems optimized for large scale data and transaction serving. These systems offer reliability and security features for the critical SAP database server. They also leverage the IBM System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) which may help improve resource optimization and manage software costs for eligible workloads, including those from SAP or other business applications. The final key piece of the puzzle is latest version of IBM DB2 for z/OS which has dozens of new features specifically designed to optimize the database operations for your SAP applications.

Since SAP applications typically stop functioning if the data server goes down, you need your SAP data server to be constantly available. The System z9 Advantage for SAP Applications was created with this in mind. The System z9 platform and z/OS are designed with a "never go down" philosophy and offer fast, integrated backup and recovery functions to help your production environment stays online. It also supports failover for key components and extensive error checking and recovery code to help ensure data and transaction integrity. With IBM System z9, operating system and database maintenance can be done concurrently - with the SAP application running. DB2 for z/OS builds on these capabilities by offering fast recovery to currency or to a selected point in time. It also supports volume-level recovery and highly efficient online reorganization capabilities. IBM also offers a high availability option designed to let you implement data sharing and Parallel Sysplex® configurations with multiple System z9 servers to enable high levels of scalability and near-continuous database availability for the most demanding environments. Based on the IBM Tivoli® System Automation products, together with a redesign of the SAP central instance concept, the high availability option further augments this capability. This can be achieved by combining the concepts of system automation and transparent failover in a Parallel Sysplex. The new SAP standalone enqueue server, the enqueue replication server, dynamic virtual IP addresses (VIPA), shared file system, and DB2 data sharing are all exploited to allow a minimum of SAP system outages along with a maximum of automation.

The System z9 Advantage for SAP Application is designed to help you build an SAP data server environment that can meets your business needs now and into the future. With over 150 available configurations of System z9 EC and System z9 BC mainframes, you can build a system that can meet your capacity needs now. And as your needs expand, capacity upgrade options can enable you to grow without disrupting your production SAP applications environment. On/Off Capacity on Demand can enable you to meet unexpected peak workload demands without disrupting operations while also allowing you to manage costs by turning off added capacity when it's no longer needed. Other non-disruptive upgrade options are also available. A range of SAP application servers are supported and available to meet your unique requirements. If appropriate, you can run your entire SAP application infrastructure on the System z9. Other options include Intel processor-based and AMD-processor based IBM BladeCenter and IBM xSeries servers. POWER processor-based BladeCenter and System p servers offer extraordinary performance and open systems capabilities.

Optimized to address the infrastructure requirements of the SAP database landscape, customers can run business-critical mySAP Business Suite applications and components on a single System z9 server. Or a single System z9 can host multiple virtual servers for production, test, quality assurance, and development — which can eliminate the need for standalone servers with all of their associated cabling, power, cooling, and software maintenance costs. This may reduce complexity in the data center and additionally reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for SAP applications on System z9. Both the z9 EC and z9 BC servers utilize z/OS and provides customers the flexibility to run legacy applications along side the SAP application workloads. Offering an exploitation of Workload Manager capabilities, the application can prioritize SAP application workloads, DB2 queries and transactions from browser to storage. z/OS also provides policy-based disk and tape management supporting virtualization over external storage resources.

• IBM System z9 Business Class or IBM System z9 Enterprise Class
• IBM System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP)
• Integrated Facility for Linux
• z/OS version 1.6 or higher
• DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for z/OS version 8 or higher
• DB2 Connect
• DB2 Utility Suite
• DB2 Toolkits such as DB2 Performance Toolkit for z/OS (SAP Edition)
• IBM Tivoli System Automation, for high availability
• IBM Dynamic Infrastructure for mySAP Business Suite, for IT resource optimization
• Service offerings for SAP implementation and DB2 migration