Database Conversions
Overview In today’s turbulent business climate, enterprises struggle to maintain a competitive edge. To achieve an advantage, companies must be able to create innovative, high-quality products and services and quickly bring them to market. At the same time, the business must optimize profitability by improving efficiencies, increasing productivity, and driving down costs. For many companies, SAP solutions are a key factor in the ability to compete. As companies evolve, they need to respond to changes in the marketplace and within the organization. Consequently, the SAP applications and IT infrastructure that support mission-critical business functions must be able to adapt more quickly to these changes than ever before.
Migration Considerations
As IT managers plan for the future, they must closely examine existing SAP applications and infrastructure to determine how the IT landscape can best evolve to deliver strategic new business initiatives. Obsolete technology, out-of-date applications, unmanageable growth of systems, or multiple product silos can drive the need to upgrade to a new platform. Among the many benefits of performing such an upgrade are the following:
Increase utilization
As servers are added to the SAP landscape to support new applications or more users, the result is often server sprawl. Managing a large number of small servers typically means greater administrative overhead and increasing maintenance costs. Consolidating the SAP environment during a platform transition can help to simplify administration, decrease licensing and administrative costs, and improve utilization, resulting in lower overall TCO. Oracle’s ability to consolidate and virtualize IT resources offers greater flexibility and increased efficiency in managing the SAP infrastructure.
Upgrade technology
Often, the expected savings on maintenance and administration fees through the use of more efficient systems can help justify anticipated capital expenditures and provide a quick ROI. Furthermore, Oracle’s commitment to ecoconscious computing — with new processors that require significantly less power and cooling while delivering high throughput — can also help to reduce operational costs.
Enhance performance
In existing SAP deployments, the underlying database can exhibit a high degree of fragmentation that might adversely impact performance. A benefit of a platform migration is that, during the data transfer process, the existing database can be redesigned and tables can be reindexed. This fine tuning helps improve the overall performance of the SAP environment.
Expand capacity
Over time, many enterprises require greater capacity in their SAP infrastructure. In some cases, corporate mergers, acquisitions, and new business partnerships drive this need. In others, strategic initiatives such as addressing new regulatory requirements, adding new application capabilities, and increasing data acquisition drive the need. A transition to scalable Sun systems from Oracle adds the ability to grow capacity, helping enable future expansion
The Migration Process
In the migration process data is exported from the source system, which is left untouched, and then transferred to the target Oracle Sun system. Since the migration freezes the source system in its original state, access to SAP applications can be restored using the source system if for some reason a problem is encountered during the migration process. In this way, the source system acts as a safety net in the event that application access cannot be properly validated on the target system.