Oracle White Paper — Best Practices for Migrating SAP Environments
4
Overview
In today’s turbulent business climate, enterprises struggle to maintain a competitive edge. To achieve
an advantage, companies must be able to create innovative, high-quality products and services and
quickly bring them to market. At the same time, the business must optimize profitability by improving
efficiencies, increasing productivity, and driving down costs.
For many companies, SAP solutions are a key factor in the ability to compete. As companies evolve,
they need to respond to changes in the marketplace and within the organization. Consequently, the
SAP applications and IT infrastructure that support mission-critical business functions must be able to
adapt more quickly to these changes than ever before.
Migration Considerations
As IT managers plan for the future, they must closely examine existing SAP applications and
infrastructure to determine how the IT landscape can best evolve to deliver strategic new business
initiatives. Obsolete technology, out-of-date applications, unmanageable growth of systems, or multiple
product silos can drive the need to upgrade to a new platform. Among the many benefits of
performing such an upgrade are the following:
• Increase utilization. As servers are added to the SAP landscape to support new applications or
more users, the result is often server sprawl. Managing a large number of small servers typically
means greater administrative overhead and increasing maintenance costs. Consolidating the SAP
environment during a platform transition can help to simplify administration, decrease licensing and
administrative costs, and improve utilization, resulting in lower overall TCO. Oracle’s ability to
consolidate and virtualize IT resources offers greater flexibility and increased efficiency in managing
the SAP infrastructure.
• Upgrade technology. Often, the expected savings on maintenance and administration fees through
the use of more efficient systems can help justify anticipated capital expenditures and provide a quick
ROI. Furthermore, Oracle’s commitment to ecoconscious computing — with new processors that
require significantly less power and cooling while delivering high throughput — can also help to
reduce operational costs.
• Enhance performance. In existing SAP deployments, the underlying database can exhibit a high
degree of fragmentation that might adversely impact performance. A benefit of a platform migration
is that, during the data transfer process, the existing database can be redesigned and tables can be re-
indexed. This fine tuning helps improve the overall performance of the SAP environment.
• Expand capacity. Over time, many enterprises require greater capacity in their SAP infrastructure.
In some cases, corporate mergers, acquisitions, and new business partnerships drive this need. In
others, strategic initiatives such as addressing new regulatory requirements, adding new application
capabilities, and increasing data acquisition drive the need. A transition to scalable Sun systems from
Oracle adds the ability to grow capacity, helping enable future expansion.