Using SharePlex Reduces SAP Migration Downtime by 90%
Source: www.quest.com
Topic: SAP Tutorial
Short Desciption:Furthermore, Volvo IT has also proven that SharePlex is a suitable solution for additional migration needs,. including larger SAP systems. About Volvo IT ...
Content Inside: When Volvo IT needed to migrate a critical SAP system to a new hardware platform, the company turned to SharePlex for Oracle. Thanks to SharePlex, the downtime associated with this complex migration was reduced by 90%, meeting the customer’s requirement for minimal downtime and ensuring the availability of critical financial information. The Challenge When a customer decided to standardise on Sun servers, Volvo IT was faced with migrating several critical SAP applications from the existing IBM AIX servers to the new Sun Solaris machines. One of the first systems to be migrated was an SAP Financials application responsible for the collection and dissemination of currency exchange rates used in the other SAP systems throughout Volvo. The availability of this exchange rate system is vital to ensuring the accuracy of information in the dependant SAP systems. In fact, Volvo requires uptime of almost 100% for this system. A downtime window of only four hours is available on Sundays for maintenance. One of the most challenging parts of the migration was moving the application’s data, stored in an Oracle database, between different hardware platforms. It was first considered to use SAP copying facilities or Oracle’s native export/import utilities, but it was quickly realised that these standard methods would require an unacceptable amount of downtime. The customer wanted almost no downtime, so the 12 hours that these methods would have required was out of the question. Another concern was risk. What would happen if something went wrong during the migration? The worry was that it would be difficult to go back to a stable state without losing data, and that this could result in more downtime. To further complicate matters, time was running out. The lease on the IBM hardware was expiring so speed was essential. In fact, the administration team had committed to delivering the migration in just two weeks. The search for a solution was on. The Quest Soluti ...

