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March 4, 2002 |
Feature Article
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Platform Decisions: Upgrade or New? Good advice for matching the server infrastructure with an evolving business comes from consultants who make a lot of these decisions — here's a perspective from the consulting group that keeps Hewlett-Packard's corporate SAP environment in top running order.by Jo Morano & Peter Gibbels In a national economy that's playing catch-up, companies of all sizes are more carefully evaluating their enterprise hardware strategies. This is a time when corporate funding for platform upgrades or new servers comes under close scrutiny. According to an October 2001 report by IDC, "It's simply too easy right now to put off a hardware purchase decision, particularly if the platform in question is performing at or close to expectations."
When, then, does it truly make sense to add new enterprise servers, or upgrade previously deployed servers instead? Can companies assess how well upgrades to legacy systems will support new releases of such supply chain management and enterprise applications as SAP? These are the types of questions that Hewlett-Packard's Operations group began answering for its internal customers. HPO's model provides practices and processes that can be used to assess when companies should take advantage of the latest and most powerful features of server technology and enterprise solutions as they come out.
The mission of HPO is to provide deep technical support and proactive technical planning for new functionality and growth. This organization works specifically with customers in the HP account that are running the SAP environment. For example, if the customer needs to integrate new modules of SAP, or add a significant number of new users or new applications that hook into SAP, HPO walks them through a process to scope a full picture of their infrastructure, including what hardware they might need, and what bandwidth they need to accommodate it.
HPO works very closely with the HP SAP Competency Center, an organization specifically focused on how to run SAP the most efficiently on HP servers. The Competency Center gathers vital information about existing and new modules of SAP, along with performance benchmarks, through a very close working relationship with the application provider. In fact, one of the charters of the Competency Center is to run and chart the necessary benchmarks, along with SAPs findings and reported customer experience, to create and maintain HP's Sizing Model. The HP Consulting Group then uses this sizing approach, along with findings gained through customer measurements and interviews, to calculate new hardware and select the right configuration that meets a customer's requirements.
Experience with customers combined with requirements documentation from SAP shape a five-step process by which to arrive at platform decisions. The process begins with crucial big-picture questions for corporate executives and IT managers to determine whether they are considering some type of enterprise expansion, or simply projecting regular operational growth. We supplement that information with advanced capacity planning, such as whether or not there is room for expansion, if applications instances can be moved around, or if resources can be shared. The study concludes with recommendations for the infrastructure, supported by specific pros and cons.
At a high level, the step-by-step process looks like this:
Decision Making Variables Evaluating platforms requires extensive consulting with customers, whether internally or through an organization like HP's Consulting Group. This process also benefits from multiple analyses of the processes that go into evaluation/selection, configuring, sizing for performance, and deploying new platforms. Each new customer situation unearths new variables towards helping determine the decision to upgrade or add on. The steps below include some examples from real customer environments. 1. Evaluate the customer's growth plans. Our objective is to learn how the company expects to grow in 18 months to 2 years. We collect and factor in this information, along with a complete infrastructure inventory for new customers, through a series of standard questionnaires from both the HP SAP Competency Center and SAP itself. For example, the questions might include:
In conjunction with the business growth may come concrete plans to add SAP modules, or to increasingly use existing modules. As these changes occur, it is very likely that the system as originally sized will be placed under increasing pressure to support the new requirements, and will require some modification and enhancements in order to maintain acceptable levels of performance.2. Profile customer's current environment and size their application. How exactly is an infrastructure evaluated for its capacity to meet new demands? It starts with sizing the application itself, based on responses to the standard questionnaires. Typically, customers using SAP start out with a few modules, like the finance and manufacturing modules. As they grow they might integrate the warehousing module, which requires a resizing. Or maybe they're adding a whole new product line that would significantly increase the amount of data that's running through their system. This would also require a resizing. There are a number of factors that govern the size of system configured to support an SAP R/3 implementation:
This factor, when combined with the changes mentioned earlier both in your business and the functionality provided by SAP R/3, make it advisable to periodically review operational growth and hardware sizing throughout the SAP R/3 project life cycle. For example, HPO customers can receive a service by which operational growth is constantly monitored, which makes peak capacity periods easier to predict.In addition to detailed measurement processes, we recommend an extensive assessment of the customer's current environment. To accomplish this, HPO formalized an approach to making these assessments. The components of this approach ensure that a whole-systems view is captured of the elements that comprise service delivery. The approach itself was detailed in Jane Sogge's Manufacturing Report feature article, "Accelerating Innovation," December 2001, at http://www.lionhrtpub.com/tmr/features01/121201-hpo.html.
Information is polled from basic areas on the service wheel such as the actual server environment, network connectivity, application support and user support. Some questions in this data collection process include:
3. Assess appropriate new technology and the value of each release There's a lot of repositioning going on in the industry. Industry market documents are now referring to the IT business sector as mature. Technology is changing at an unprecedented rate, which explains why the growth plans are two years out as opposed to the five-year plans of the 1990s.
We recommend a constant and thorough tracking of new platforms and application performance on those platforms. To that end, we utilize information from the HP SAP Competency Center but also pull information from SAP sites.
Our research yields big considerations with regard to servers alone. Cost is always a factor. What is the additional cost? Are there hidden costs? How firm is the company in the direction it's going in the next two years? What insights does taking a deeper look at the technology reveal? For example, is a new release significantly more powerful than the previous box? Does it introduce hidden challenges such as slots or connections that render current components incompatible?
These considerations can be especially important for companies in certain circumstances. The nature of applications, their maintenance and deployment has made IT more centralized now. Where there is an industry-wide IT shift to consolidate data centers running global applications, this should prompt the IT group to take the prerequisite step of making the infrastructure more powerful. Keeping current on the latest server features and technology is important in order to take advantage of other areas of technology growth. For example, the storage industry has propagated innovations more rapidly than any other. If in six months a fiber channel I/O card won't be able to attach to disk, or if the cost of such a solution is prohibitive, this is a likely situation where a company with a larger growth plan would consider adding new server technology over upgrading. Conversely, if the original servers are current and powerful enough to support additional CPU's, today's answer might be to favor expansion over purchasing new servers.
What role do benchmarks play in evaluating new technology? Some benchmarks can be used for assessing how well a new platform is matched to new releases of supply chain solutions. They indicate that the vendor and application provider have partnered closely together. For example, the knowledge gained from the HP/SAP Competency Center has helped tune the design of HP's RP8400 server to run SAP's latest R/3 release at optimum performance in the consolidated environment. SAP approves all platform benchmarks before they are released.
Benchmark results might be used to influence a purchase decision only when the Sizing Model shows the customer will need a bigger system. Benchmarks can indicate which vendor's systems will be the most powerful for a certain application. Typically, however, the benchmark is simply a starting point, because the load factors on the real customer system will vary from the load factors on a benchmark system.4. Determine options for creative reuse or upgrading of existing infrastructure Reusing equipment is important: the hardware still runs well, but it's just out of capacity in one area, or the database grew or...you fill in the blank with what changes might be happening in your environment. A common example in the HP environment involves reusing our middle range server, the N-class. We can keep that server and focus on how to increase its processing speed by changing out boards. This assumes we know the N class will continue to get faster over the years, which is the current plan according to our research. The N class used to process at 360 MHz. Now it's up to 750 MHz, all from the same box.
In general, if we've got something running out of capacity, we usually move the most powerful hardware to support the SAP production environment, and backfill development and integration with existing or slightly augmented infrastructure. Or, in a completely different case, if the customer needs to support a new group of users, but already has a powerful enough server and room to add CPUs, then that customer is probably looking at an upgrade.5. Develop list of pros and cons for upgrading and for new purchases; make recommendations to customer It would certainly be efficient to boil our recommendations down to a simple formula. For example, if W and X exist, then add CPUs and memory to existing systems. If Y and Z exist, however, then buy a new HP RP8400 server. We are frequently reminded, however, that simply having certain indicators does not map neatly to a given recipe and corresponding list of ingredients for upgrading the infrastructure.
The reality is that each customer environment is so different that this step of the weighing process is when the upgrade decision really starts. For new businesses, we are exploring if we can fit them into an existing business by adding into an R/3 environment. If the customer is adding applications or modules of SAP, resizing needs to occur. Then we are exploring if all parts of the existing infrastructure support this, or if we need to look at new technology. If we are looking at new technology, what up-to-date information can be pulled from our ongoing tracking research?
Looking back at the HPO service wheel, when you recognize that each of the eight analysis sections contain many more associated deployment elements, you can imagine that no two customer environments are exactly alike.
One scenario where we do NOT resize is for ongoing or operational growth. We keep tabs on yearly growth and percentage growth in a standard environment where no major changes have occurred. For instance if the CPU has increased 6% in the last six months, and does the same in the next six months, that group might be out of capacity. We will then work with the customer on a quarterly basis to make sure they still have capacity.
Even capacity thresholds vary from one environment to another. For the HP customer, average capacity is 50%. On a busy day, this can peak up to 70% capacity. Some CPUs are even more limited by the disk capacity. We don't want systems running above their thresholds because the fuller the server capacity, the slower the operations. The same principle holds for network thresholds — the higher the capacity, the more retries because the environment is busy.Be Creative, Be Flexible Sometimes the recommendations combine creative reuse and new technology. Always, however, the final decision is to do what makes sense. Here's an example of the type of thing we might do with a customer whose growth projections have changed from 6 to 10 %. In an SAP environment you have a development, integration and production instance as a standard infrastructure. Let's say we know that production is growing, and maybe one of the other instances has started seeing high CPU peaks, or perhaps we're running out of slots because the database has grown and we can't increase the number of disk connections on the current hardware. What we might do instead of buying new hardware for that integration is to move the production hardware down to the integration infrastructure and then, having identified the pros and cons for each new server recommendation, buy new server technology to support the fast growth in production.
HPO's experience during the last, very dynamic five years, shows that companies should frequently gauge the performance and service levels of their platforms, while also collaborating with hardware and software vendors as partners to assess the potential benefits of new releases. It may also help to keep in mind an IDC proviso that both gigabytes and budget dollars can be more effectively managed and stretched in tough financial times, while just-in-time purchases of new server platforms can boost performance exactly when that optimization is needed in periods of peak corporate growth.
About the Authors Jo Morano is a technical support engineer for the Hewlett Packard Operations group.
Peter Gibbels is Global Services Development Manager for SAP Services within Hewlett-Packard's Consulting group.
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