Our SAP Hosting Migration from SAP Hosting in Germany to Secure-24 in Michigan was a success! The down-time was only 42 hours from start to finish. We handed the system over at 7PM Pacific on Friday and we were up and running in the new production environment at Secure-24 by Sunday at noon. That was 4 hours ahead of schedule!
After the Production migration was complete, we started working on the DEV & QA system migrations. The QA systems were copied from Production so that was relatively easy. The DEV systems were restored from USB drives as exported from our original DEV systems at SAP Hosting in Germany. The exception was our DEV Enterprise Portals and DEV BI instances. Those we wanted "configuration only" copies of our production environment.
The only problem that we experiences was with the creating of our DEV BI instance. The BCS configuration was not copied correctly. BCS stands for Business Consolidation System. It is the financial consolidation tool that sits on BI. SAP is now promoting Outlook Soft for this, but we are fairly happy with BCS.
We had to re-do the restore of our DEV BI environment.
Overall, I am very happy with Secure-24. They are priced competitively and have a professional staff that has proved to be very knowledgeable.
We gained a significant cost savings with this move. Some of that was do to utilization of Virtual Servers in the DEV & QA environments. I though our DEV & QA environments are a good place to test the different virtualization solutions for HP Unix and Windows platforms. We may consider virtualization on our production landscapes when our existing contract is up for renewal in a few years.
I would like to congratulate Secure-24 on a job well done. I would also like to thank SAP Hosting for all they had done for use over the last few years. SAP Hosting had the best service we have ever experience from a hosting partner. We will see how well Secure-24 compares. So far, so good.
Showing posts with label Application Hosting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Application Hosting. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Friday, October 31, 2008
SAP Hosting Migration
I was a very happy SAP Hosting customer until SAP decided to discontinue their hosting offering. We looked at many SAP Certified Hosting partners before deciding on Secure-24.
Now we are in the middle of the migration and so far I am a fairly happy customer. We have a complex SAP NetWeaver environment including ECC 6.0 in a clustered environment, BI 7.0, BCS, GTS, Solution Manager, and an Enterprise Portals Environment with security for external as well as internal exposure.
We are scheduled to complete the migration the weekend of November 8, 2008. I will keep you posted on how it goes.
This is the second SAP Hosting migration I have undertaken. The first was a migration from HP Hosting in Atlanta to SAP Hosting in Germany. Now we are moving our data from SAP Germany to Secure-24 in Michigan.
I really like the approach this time. SAP Hosting has backed up our environment to USB drives and sent the to Secure24. S24 will receive the drives today, extract / decompress the data and restore it to new servers. In the mean time, SAP is collecting log files and sending them over the WAN on an hourly basis. Once S24 has completed the restore from the drives, they will begin to decompress and restore the log files. This will allow us to complete the migration over a weekend resulting in downtime of only 1 weekend for our users! We will hand over the system on Friday evening and S24 will give it back to us by Saturday at noon. This will allow us to complete the Single Sign-On configuration, test printers, perform a financial validation and our golden transaction all before our facility in Asia comes on line Sunday afternoon (Asia's Monday morning).
If this is successful, it will the fastest migration (with the least amount of downtime) we have done.
I will let you know how it goes.
Now we are in the middle of the migration and so far I am a fairly happy customer. We have a complex SAP NetWeaver environment including ECC 6.0 in a clustered environment, BI 7.0, BCS, GTS, Solution Manager, and an Enterprise Portals Environment with security for external as well as internal exposure.
We are scheduled to complete the migration the weekend of November 8, 2008. I will keep you posted on how it goes.
This is the second SAP Hosting migration I have undertaken. The first was a migration from HP Hosting in Atlanta to SAP Hosting in Germany. Now we are moving our data from SAP Germany to Secure-24 in Michigan.
I really like the approach this time. SAP Hosting has backed up our environment to USB drives and sent the to Secure24. S24 will receive the drives today, extract / decompress the data and restore it to new servers. In the mean time, SAP is collecting log files and sending them over the WAN on an hourly basis. Once S24 has completed the restore from the drives, they will begin to decompress and restore the log files. This will allow us to complete the migration over a weekend resulting in downtime of only 1 weekend for our users! We will hand over the system on Friday evening and S24 will give it back to us by Saturday at noon. This will allow us to complete the Single Sign-On configuration, test printers, perform a financial validation and our golden transaction all before our facility in Asia comes on line Sunday afternoon (Asia's Monday morning).
If this is successful, it will the fastest migration (with the least amount of downtime) we have done.
I will let you know how it goes.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
SAP - Getting out of the Hosting Business
SAP has announced that they are getting out of the hosting business. They have signed a deal with AT&T and plan to migrate thier hosted customers to AT&T as each customer's contract expires.
I am very dissapointed to hear this news. My company has used SAP hosting for the past 4 years and it was the best experience we have had. Our monthly application availability was at 100% with the exception of 3 incidences over the past 4 years. Even in the months of those incidents our application availability did not drop below 99.5%.
Application Availability is defined as the percentage of time the application is available to users. It is sometimes comfused with server availability. If the servers are up, but the network is down or the application is down, it does not do you any good. Application availablity is the best measurement to use because it means that everything is up and running and users can actually use the systems.
SAP Hosting service are outstanding. We have never had a situation where the hosting side of the business said our problem required SAP Software involvement. With other hosting companies, our requests were often put on hold until the hosting partner "checked with SAP" on something. SAP Hosting was always able to handle such things internally and we never needed to deal with issues between hosting and software or professional services. SAP Hosting is the best at upgrades, and the installation of new SAP software. All of these types of projects were handled seemlessly. That says a lot given the complexity of our SAP environment.
We have implemented many SAP applications on the NetWeaver platform. Our upgrade from R/3 4.7 to ECC 6.0 only took about 10 weeks - and that included an upgrade from BW 3.5 to BI 7.0 which was done at the same time! The delays were on our side trying to get the downtime approved from all of our plants globally. It also included a unix and oracle upgrade! We have also upgraded our EP (Enterprise Portals) environment without a hitch. Our portals environment is used internally as an intranet site and it is exposed externally as our customer and supplier portals. The security is designed very well to ensure that customers and suppliers cannot see our intranet, but they can see thier reports and commit to orders and forecast on line. We are also running SAP APO and SAP GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance) Access Enforcer and Compliance Calibrator on our (SCM)Supply Chain Management server. We are also running BCS (Business Consolidation System) on our BI servers. Plus we are in the process of adding GTS (Global Trade Server) to the environment.
SAP Hosting has done an outstanding job implementing and upgrading all of these systems. They help keep these applications running together seemlessly on the NetWeaver platform. I am very sad to see them leaving the hosting arena.
They never had a hidden agenda. Hardware manufacturers that offer hosting services often use the hosting service as a venu for additional hardware sales. Professional Services companies that offer hosting service often use the hosting service to as a venu for additional professional services income. SAP, of course, is a software provider. But I never felt pressure from the hosting organization to buy more software.
I wish they would reconsider thier decision to leave the business.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.
Cheers,
Dan
I am very dissapointed to hear this news. My company has used SAP hosting for the past 4 years and it was the best experience we have had. Our monthly application availability was at 100% with the exception of 3 incidences over the past 4 years. Even in the months of those incidents our application availability did not drop below 99.5%.
Application Availability is defined as the percentage of time the application is available to users. It is sometimes comfused with server availability. If the servers are up, but the network is down or the application is down, it does not do you any good. Application availablity is the best measurement to use because it means that everything is up and running and users can actually use the systems.
SAP Hosting service are outstanding. We have never had a situation where the hosting side of the business said our problem required SAP Software involvement. With other hosting companies, our requests were often put on hold until the hosting partner "checked with SAP" on something. SAP Hosting was always able to handle such things internally and we never needed to deal with issues between hosting and software or professional services. SAP Hosting is the best at upgrades, and the installation of new SAP software. All of these types of projects were handled seemlessly. That says a lot given the complexity of our SAP environment.
We have implemented many SAP applications on the NetWeaver platform. Our upgrade from R/3 4.7 to ECC 6.0 only took about 10 weeks - and that included an upgrade from BW 3.5 to BI 7.0 which was done at the same time! The delays were on our side trying to get the downtime approved from all of our plants globally. It also included a unix and oracle upgrade! We have also upgraded our EP (Enterprise Portals) environment without a hitch. Our portals environment is used internally as an intranet site and it is exposed externally as our customer and supplier portals. The security is designed very well to ensure that customers and suppliers cannot see our intranet, but they can see thier reports and commit to orders and forecast on line. We are also running SAP APO and SAP GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance) Access Enforcer and Compliance Calibrator on our (SCM)Supply Chain Management server. We are also running BCS (Business Consolidation System) on our BI servers. Plus we are in the process of adding GTS (Global Trade Server) to the environment.
SAP Hosting has done an outstanding job implementing and upgrading all of these systems. They help keep these applications running together seemlessly on the NetWeaver platform. I am very sad to see them leaving the hosting arena.
They never had a hidden agenda. Hardware manufacturers that offer hosting services often use the hosting service as a venu for additional hardware sales. Professional Services companies that offer hosting service often use the hosting service to as a venu for additional professional services income. SAP, of course, is a software provider. But I never felt pressure from the hosting organization to buy more software.
I wish they would reconsider thier decision to leave the business.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.
Cheers,
Dan
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)