Two recent posts on the SAP Community Network blog offer some good insight on designing and running various computing environments on Itanium. Zoran Popovic is a Senior Systems Engineer at Hemofarm, an international pharmaceutical group based in Serbia. The content is geared toward those who own SAP on Itanium and Windows, and for those interested in SAP, Itanium and virtualization.
In “SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium …” Zoran talks about how his firm’s IT infrastructure, originally based on 10 Integrity servers with HP-UX, then Windows, has grown and evolved over the years. Today, five years later, their system is twice as large with a 1TB database. Zoran states:
“We never had any serious unplanned downtime or system failures, performance, reliability, availability and stability was predictable (apart from some OS problems with Microsoft MSCS and one short storage outage).”
Hemofarm’s SAP landscape is quite diverse and currently consists of: ERP systems, BI systems, CEN system, NW04, Solution Manager, EWA, monitoring, SAP routers, SAP Web Dispatchers, network printing servers, and different sandbox and other systems.
The main argument for Itanium system application is usage within OLTP systems and databases. In order to address low server utilization rates, Zoran suggests that consolidated OS environments be isolated and that is usually done through some form of virtualization.
In a follow up post “SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium … continued” he illustrates some new findings and results from the system and speaks to those interested in SAP with virtualization about moving from Windows or Unix to Linux.
Some approximate tests were run and improvised benchmarks with virtualized and bare metal SAP systems are posted for ERP, ERM, and ERC. The goal was to make a comparison with similar bare metal systems and different platforms — not making exact results comparable with some official tests.
About Itanium in the data center, Zoran States:
“If it’s about critical business environment and _not_ about best price/performance ratio or HPC, there is no good reason to change CPU architecture to other than Itanium.”
Zoran is interested in making further inquiries and welcomes any suggestions and recommendations both about benchmarking and this environment in general.
Read Zoran’s posts in full here:
SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium …
SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium … continued.
