During the early phases of designing an SAP architecture we often face this question:

“which platform will you choose for an SAP system landscape?”

Well, after more than 15 years of experience in SAP consulting, we found our answer to this question:

Hardware: the cheapest one (assuring the same level of performance and technical features). If we are asked now which hardware partner to choose, We’ll say UNISYS.

Operating system: Linux, preferably SUSE

Database: Oracle

Technical infrastructure as required (TCP/IP, Cabling, SAN, NAS, etc.)

Nowadays hardware powered by INTEL CPUs (64bit architecture) are levelling performances with proprietary hardware (IBM, SUN) that are more expensive not only in purchasing but also in support and OS expenses.

Linux, as operating system, is ready for complex installations with mission-critical applications and Very Large Databases (VLDB).

Technical infrastructure on this kind of solution allow us to create – with simple configurations - a list of security features mandatory for core-business applications such as secure access to server (SSH) with crypto key, Secure FTP, etc.

SAP solutions, already fully supported on Linux, show excellent performance on Linux/Oracle combination on benchmarks (with the same hardware).

Oracle, as RDBMS, is still the best of breed in terms of performance, quickness of response, security and crash-proof.

Obviously, all that we’ve said does not imply that one should avoid normal maintenance operations on systems. All the landscape has always to be under control, but this is independent from which platform combination you choose.

Below is shown a success story for us:

http://www.novell.com/success/wolters_kluwer_italia.html

Even if is not descripted in the article, in this project we perform:

1. Preliminar architectural design

2. Hardware partner selection (support to Customer)

3. Final architectural design (team with selected hardware partner)

4. SAP OS/DB Migrations (FIVE productive systems in one weekend)

5. Technical upgrades and Unicode Migrations

6. Project Support for Upgrades and Unicode Migrations

7. Maintenance Support

8. Backup/Restore & Recovery Policy design and realization

9. Design and realization of technical infrastructure (NFS servers, file servers, FTP servers, SSH, etc.). Design and realization of maintenance policies.

We are available for a first analysis of your systems, proposing a migration of your landscapes towards Linux.

Nonetheless our expertise is in any way limited to Linux or Oracle, on SAP solutions.