06.07.2010

Optimizing SAP Performance

By: Ralph K. Treitz

Incidents, program failures, and long response times are some of the performance killers IT managers have to minimize. In complex SAP environments, determining the causes of these problems is often difficult. By applying a special method of measurement and comparison, however, technicians can track down the roots of declines in efficiency and take appropriate action.

800 aircrafts at SR Technics: Business processes have to run smoothly (photo: SR Technics)

Poor performance, stability, and availability can have various causes in SAP systems. In some industries, the “only” culprit is data quantities that are growing at a disproportionate rate. Large retail chains, for instance, process millions of movement data records in their SAP applications every day.

In most cases, however, the reasons behind drops in performance are more complex. The Swiss aviation services provider SR Technics, for example – which shares real-time information on the 800 aircraft it supports with around 500 customers – counts on its central SAP ERP application to always be up and running at a high level of efficiency. “Our business processes have to run smoothly; we can’t risk any reduction in performance,” explains Adrian Wirth, vice president of SR Technics’ IT group. Due to its constantly increasing amounts of data, the company planned and carried out a migration of its SAP application from an aging UNIX platform to a modern, highly accessible hardware platform with a corresponding storage solution. However, the move did not produce the performance boost SR Technics had hoped for. Quite the opposite, in fact: Despite the platform’s more powerful components, the SAP software’s dialog response times and batch program runtimes were even longer than before. “The performance improvements we were expecting from the migration to more potent hardware never materialized, so we had to switch back to our old infrastructure a few days later,” Wirth recalls. Then the investigation into the cause of these events began.

Hardware not always at fault

As this example shows, performance shortfalls in SAP applications cannot always be traced back to a lack of hardware resources. Individual issues can combine to cause greater problems that place unnecessary strain on these systems. In the case described, incorrectly configured hard drive systems, unstable clusters, and performance problems related to the ZFS file system were responsible.
On their own, each of these problems would have been compensated by SR Technics’ new and improved hardware; only the combination of all three led to the company’s serious performance issues. The nature of this conundrum was also such that even more powerful hardware would not have made the slightest difference.

Next Page: VMS Benchmarks

• 1
• 2
•  

• Comment
• Recommend
• Print