April 2012 Archiving SAP Data and Documents to the Cloud Strategies for Holding Down SAP Data Volume Growth and Costs Dolphin Whitepaper April 5, 2012
Cloud Storage for SAP Data and Document Archiving www.dolphin corp.com
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You can deliver performance and hold the line on costs Can you win the war against data volume growth? Data is being created faster than we re willing or able to destroy it. And that rising data volume requires management. What s more, our appetite for realtime information commands you to make it accessible whenever and wherever it is needed. What this means in practical terms is that IT departments must be strategic in how they manage data. You analyze and project volume growth. You develop data archiving blueprints and information lifecycle management strategies that set pragmatic retention and access requirements. You do your best to hold the line on expenses to balance the demands of the business for high system performance for SAP ERP and Business Warehouse systems. But keeping data and documents in any format comes at a price and that price is continuously rising. These challenges are what makes the idea of cloud storage so intriguing. What is the Cloud? While cloud computing is still in its infancy in the SAP world, using the cloud for SAP data and document archiving is here today. The cloud is the Internet. Or, more precisely, it s a networked set of servers on the Internet that will host your applications and data and make them available securely to you when and where you need them. They manage the infrastructure and service levels; you pay for what you use. Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture and utility computing. Details are abstracted from consumers who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports them. The SAP world has been abuzz about cloud computing, and the company is moving quickly toward enabling its applications to be hosted by companies like IBM, Dell and HP, and accessed by individual customers over the Web. Users of SAP applications are looking closely at the opportunity for faster
implementation, lower costs and reduced administration as these capabilities are realized and proven. But while cloud computing is still in its infancy in the SAP world, using the cloud for archived SAP data and documents is here today. Cloud-based Storage as a Service Cloud storage is also called storage as a service and this is a more accurate description. What makes cloud storage different from an outsourced, offsite IT system is that the cloud is a multi-tenant of shared service a storage utility from which you purchase the portion you need, much like you pay for electricity or gas. Like the power company, the storage utility is responsible for ensuring that there is enough storage to scale for all of its customers, and to ensure access as well as security. Dolphin has seen dramatic improvements in tools, stability, performance and bandwidth in cloud computing. We re not alone. Symantec s director for system engineering Anand Naik predicts in CXOToday that the growing maturity of cloud-based storage will be one of the biggest storage trends of 2011, saying that: enterprises will require the ability to manage storage resources whether they are local, campus-wide, multi-campus, global or in the cloud. Tools will emerge to manage this new complex storage environment and to help IT administrators better understand and capture information about unstructured data that resides within it. CXOToday, December 22, 2010. The main selling point for IT departments is that cloud service providers like AT&T, IBM, Google, Amazon and others maintain the infrastructure. They take on the cost of adding, maintaining, monitoring and Benefits of the Cloud for SAP Archived Data The benefits come in three areas: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) eliminating expenditures for software licenses, hardware and maintenance. Performance reduced overhead for content management and less need for optimization for SAP read access and high load throughput. Availability complex applications, ongoing backup and high availability systems are all covered in the service level agreement with the cloud service provider.
managing servers, disks and drives while you share the cost with the rest of the providers customer base. For users of SAP applications, this is critical. Applications like ERP and BI not only generate data that needs to be stored, they are also critical in running your business or delivering a competitive advantage. This makes performance of these systems critical business users need fast speed-to-screen for critical information and business intelligence queries. Data archiving addresses this issue by getting business complete and less frequently accessed information off of production databases and onto lowercost storage tiers. When done properly, the result is seamless access through the SAP system, and lower storage, infrastructure and administrative costs. A New Archiving Equation The advent of cloud storage creates an entirely new equation for SAP data and document archiving. Adding a cloud-based storage as a service option can reshape data and document management strategy. The cloud storage tier lets you align the cost of storage with the value of the data. It frees you to invest in high-performance access for current, frequently used data, while shifting seldom used data and documents to a lower cost and practically infinitely elastic cloud storage service. The cost savings can be dramatic the ability to store terabytes (TB) of must-retain but businesscomplete data for cents on the dollar. For example, a Dolphin customer in the food and beverage industry is archiving about 4 TB of business-complete accounts The cloud storage tier lets you align the cost of storage with the value of the data. payable documents and data using the solution provided by Dolphin and AT&T. Analysis shows that over five years during which time the database will rise to about 6 TB the new cloud-based archive strategy will save the customer about $750,000 and free their database and network for more current, mission-critical data (See Figure 1).
If the data is required to meet a customer request, fiduciary need or regulatory investigation, access will be slightly slower than for online data, but delivered at an appropriate speed. Figure 1: Working with a customer to lower archive costs for accounts payable data and documents, Dolphin s cloud-based SAP archiving solution enabled dramatic cost savings. Cost estimates are for 4-6+ terabytes over 5 years. Making Cloud-based Storage as a Service Work for SAP Archiving For SAP users, the practical concern of any data archiving strategy is to ensure seamless access through the SAP application to data and documents, regardless of where the data is stored online, nearline, offline and now, in the cloud. To facilitate cloud-based data archiving for users of SAP applications, Dolphin developed the Content Archive Service for Cloud (CAS-C). The service allows a
direct connection from the SAP archiving layer to major public cloud providers such as AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud. Typically, ArchiveLink servers are connectors that link enterprise content management (ECM), document management or local storage devices to SAP applications for long-term storage of documents and archived data. These connectors require a server infrastructure outside of the SAP application. Dolphin s Content Archive Service for Cloud interface leverages the SAP NetWeaver server s built-in secure communication capabilities to connect to the cloud. This unique approach allows Dolphin to offer a very lean ArchiveLink server architecture that requires no additional infrastructure component and fits right in to the SAP landscape as an SAP ABAP add-on. This direct connection to cloud storage offers a better implementation than the classic file system-based cloud connection options, where content is streamed to and from cloud through an intermediate file system. Dolphin's directconnection solution results in faster performance and byte/offset based access to the archived content, a critical factor for efficient retrieval of archived SAP data and print lists. Because the CAS-C implements the SAP ArchiveLink protocol, all existing applications in the SAP solution that use ArchiveLink can seamlessly use cloud storage for those operations. Common operations include: Outbound document archiving, e.g., SAP billing output Inbound document archiving (e.g., inbound AP invoices) SAP print list archiving SAP data archiving DART file archiving KPro based content storage (e.g., SAP DMS, SAPOffice) The point is not to shift all SAP data archiving to the cloud, but to add a cloudbased tier to your data management architecture. The result is the ability to lower total costs by spending less to manage infrequently accessed data while ensuring seamless access.
Conclusion Maybe you can t win the battle against data volume growth, but you can lower the cost of managing it. Cloud-based storage as a service offerings present an effective alternative to expanding in-house infrastructure, at a reduced spend. Effective, secure, well-managed storage as a service makes it further possible to align the value of your data with the cost of storage. In other words, you can deliver the performance your business demands and hold the line on costs and maybe even push back a little. And in our book, that means you win. About Dolphin Dolphin makes crucial business operations like data archiving for ERP and BW, accounts payable, accounts receivable and order management run better and smarter for organizations using SAP solutions. Founded in 1995, Dolphin produces the right solution for each customer, faster, through its unmatched experience in SAP solutions and its proven best practices, tools and SAP add-on applications. Dolphin solutions improve business and IT performance, lower total cost of ownership and deliver high return on investment. Based in Philadelphia, PA and San Jose, CA, Dolphin solutions are implemented across North America and around the world. Contact: Phone: 1 (888) 305-9033 Email: contact@dolphin corp.com Website: www.dolphin corp.com Blog: www.my dolphin corp.com/blog