12.30.06
Data Center Operations: Cool Air
Last year I was confronted with a customer who had to acquire new datacenter facilities because he ran out of floor space. Not for his servers. The guys couldn’t add additional compute capacity because they ran out of cooling capacity. In this specific case we were looking at a 20+ million EUR investment – because of cooling!?!
A recent white paper (Air-Cooled High-Performance Data Centers: Case Studies and Best Methods), available for download from my partners at Intel had a closer look at the issue. While some people still question the enterprise credibility of commoditized hardware and software, Doug Garday and Daniel Costello were researching the following:
“By combining innovations and best-known methods for air-cooled data center design, we have achieved breakthrough power and heat densities of 15 kilowatts per cabinet and more than 500 watts per square foot of server room area, at a lower cost than other data center designs. Our models indicate that it is possible to double that density in future.“
12.29.06
SQL Server Maintenance for SAP
A colleague recently asked for best practices concerning database maintenance in SAP environments. The top-ten advise from MSKK’s Takayuki Hoshino, which should be adjusted individually:
- “SAP database full backup daily. Technically there’s no problems to backup SAP database online, means end users or nightly batch jobs can continue to use SAP applications without problems. Everything required for SAP (business data, metadata and ABAP applications etc) is included in one database named “<SID>”. Sometimes the time to take a full backup (like a few hours) might become a problem, so the usage of SAN storage in SAP systems has become more popular because the backup time can be dramatically reduced to only seconds.
- SAP database t-log backup every 10 to 30 minutes. SQL’s recovery model setting recommended by SAP is “Full”, so if customers forget to backup t-log periodically, sooner or later t-log becomes full which makes SAP systems shut down. In general SAP customers tend to execute lots of heavy batch jobs during night, in this case SAP admins carefully need to calculate the volume size of t-log in advance.
- System partition backup in case of configuration changes. Use W2k3 ASR, third party tool like Symantec Ghost or SAN boot in case of restoring the systems partitions.
- System databases backup in case of configuration changes. Quite the same as usual systems (master, msdb, model and resource).
- Execute DBCC CheckDB periodically (Ideally before full backup). We need to understand CheckDB is a very time/resource consuming activity and puts heavy workload on SAP production systems especially on over TB SAP database. I know some customers who don’t execute CheckDB due to this reason, however sometimes commodity servers for SAP suddenly fail in an unexpected way, means there’re still possibilities to face with DB physical destructions. In my experience I have ever seen almost ten customers who lost SAP business data actually, furthermore very unfortunately two of them had failed even to get SAP database backups, which was nothing other than a nightmare. My recommendation to customers is to have a SQL log-ship secondary server on which DB admins can execute CheckDB. Ideally customers should start full database backup just after finishing CheckDB.
- Evaluate security patches monthly (and install if “really” necessary). I’d say for most of SAP customers availability is the most important thing. Especially if customers need to serve a single SAP instance globally, they don’t want to stop/restart tens of SAP servers to apply security patches. Plus, some testing in customer’s environment is definitely necessary before security patch installations. My opinion is that carefully evaluating patches and reduce the frequency of patch installations, hopefully almost to zero, is a realistic scenario for SAP customers. Unnecessary packet filtering, unnecessary service disabling and anti-virus real-time monitoring etc can also become good security measures.
- Evaluate update modules of hardware drivers and firm-wares and install if necessary. I’ve ever seen so many critical troubles due to bugs in hardware drivers and firm-wares within commodity servers. It’s really tough to find this kind of troubles from Microsoft side, and furthermore hardware companies tend not to provide commodity server customers with enough support services. So I’d say it’s a customer’s responsibility to some extent to manage drivers/firm-ware updates regularly. In this sense Datacenter Edition will find its position bringing very high level support services.
- Update statistics on the largest tables weekly or monthly. Although SAP recommends to turn on “auto update stats” which is a SQL’s functionality, SAP admins should not trust it too much because it waits until as many as 20% of records are modified to update stats automatically. Therefore I recommend to manually update statistics on the biggest tables to reduce the risk.
- Execute index defrag (online) or index rebuild (basically offline, online possible since SQL2k5) on the most important indexes. I understand most of SAP customers execute either indexdefrag or dbreindex. A example of the threshold to execute these commands is : (1) Average page density < 80%, (2) Logical scan fragmentation > 40%. This is a learning from a SAP engineer. However these days I’ve started to doubt the real performance impact of these index maintenance commands (I know that MSIT hasn’t execute any index maintenance activities for their over 2TB SAP database.)
- Health check using monitoring tool (Performance, availability etc). The unplanned downtime depends on how quickly system failures are notified to administrators and they could start the recovery processes. As for availability, SAP admins shouldn’t trust automatic failover mechanism of MSCS or DBM too much, because during failover SAP update requests and batch loads would fail and be written in the SAP error log which needs to be reviewed before restarting SAP services.”
SAP on Microsoft Platforms: Managing Modernization and Optimization
At the end of November, Ziff Davis had webcasted an eSeminar entitled “SAP on Microsoft Platforms: Managing Modernization and Optimization”, sponsored by Unisys and Microsoft.
Increasingly, SAP customers consider Microsoft’s application platform to be viable alternative for maintaining business continuity. As a result, more SAP installations run under Microsoft Windows than all other platforms combined, including two-thirds of all new implementations. But maintaining high performance levels for SAP applications on Windows is a demanding challenge. Ziff Davis’ webcast addresses this task: How can you guarantee top SAP performance, regardless of the workload, number of users, or degree of customization required? The webcast provides insight on:
- Creating flexible platforms and innovative SAP applications that maintain and maximize your organization’s competitiveness,
- Selecting an effective optimization strategy, including:
- Unix-to-Windows migration
- Upgrading SAP
- Upgrading SQL Server versions supporting SAP
- Implementing the new Office front end for SAP
- Data center consolidation, virtualization and more
- Integrating Sharepoint Portal Server with SAP Enterprise Portal
- Understanding the roadmap and alignment between Microsoft and SAP, including Duet
Speakers include:
- Albert Pang, Director, Enterprise Applications Research, IDC, talking about “Risks and Rewards of ERP Modernization and Optimization”
- Kyle Warfield, SAP Performance Specialist and Disaster Recovery Specialist, Unisys, speaking about “Modernization and Optimization of SAP Infrastructure with Microsoft and Unisys Technology”.
The recorded webcast requires a registration but the one-hour presentation content, including several interesting customer examples, is worthwhile listening and watching. The session slides are available for download.
My two favorite take-homes are the SAP Landscape Formula
- ((( (DEV + QAS + PRD) + App Servers) * (SAP Modules)) + (Portals) + (XI)) = Server Sprawl
caused by SAP continuously adding modules, and customers upgrading their hardware every two years. Kyle’s other noteable remark is on Netweaver’s usage of federated databases and the impact of this feature on disaster recovery.
2007 Microsoft Events
Aside from the major product launches starting January 29th, Microsoft recently announced the date of its other major customer events planned for 2007:
- MIX07: Microsoft’s Premier conference for Web Developers, designers and business professionals is scheduled for April 30th to May 2nd. Event location will be Las Vegas, Nevada.
- Tech·Ed 2007: Microsoft’s premier all-in-one event for IT Professionals and developers is scheduled for June 4th to 8th. Event location will be Orlando, Florida.
- PDC 2007: Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference is scheduled for October 2nd to October 5th, with pre-conference activities starting September 30th. Event location will be Los Angeles, California.
The difference between the three events? While MIX and PDC both target the developer community, PDC is focused on the future of the Microsoft platform while MIX explores the next generation Web technologies that move user experience forward. PDC addresses the developer community, MIX also targets designers and business professionals. TechEd targets both IT Professionals and developers, with a strong focus on training for current technologies and shipping products. The PDC is primarily focused on the future, and Microsoft’s roadmap of what’s to come.
12.22.06
Sales training – for Main Frame Sellers
I love mainframes. I really do. A friend of mine uses two of them as emergency heaters (and he doesn’t even live in Washington state 
).
Check http://tdreller.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!9EDF0D14F4FD4C8D!518.entry
Unfortunately, neither wordpress nor Live seem to support embedded video – what a pitty
12.18.06
SQL Server 2005 und Windows Vista
Gerade finde ich wieder ein weiteres gutes Beispiel dafür, warum Journalisten auf meiner persönlichen Image- und Beliebtheitsskala der Berufsgruppen einen der letzten Plätze einnehmen – noch weit hinter Bestattungsunternehmern. Immer mehr Schreiberlinge sind nicht mehr in der Lage, Vorurteile und Meinungen von Fakten zu trennen. Es gibt natürlich auch Vertreter dieser Zunft, die ihre Aufgabe – der Übermittlung von Nachrichten – hervorragend erfüllen. Nur geht deren Stimme immer mehr in der sogenannten “Informations”-Überflutung unter. Wenn ich die Zeitung lese möchte ich nachrichtlich informiert werden. Über alles andere bilde ich mir meine eigene Meinung, ohne “Hilfestellung” schlecht informierter Dritter.
Den Anlaß für meine Verärgerung liefert Owen Thomas. Der gibt am 15. Dezember Folgendes von sich:
“But now Microsoft has a problem. Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can’t run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista – called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 – but it’s in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes. Microsoft hasn’t set a release date for the new SQL program.“
Mit seinem Artikel versucht er den Eindruck zu erwecken, SQL Server 2005 würde inkompatibel zu Windows Vista sein, und nicht auf dem neuen Betriebssystem laufen. Viel Geschwafel, noch mehr Meinungen, und so gut wie keine Fakten. Man kann Microsoft vielleicht vieles vorwerfen, aber sicher nicht ein dermaßen dilettantisches Vorgehen. Deshalb hier also ein paar Anmerkungen mit “kleineren” Korrekturen, deren Zusammenstellung mich keine zehn Minuten gekostet hat.
- Windows Vista ist ein Client-Betriebssystem. Es ist momentan für Unternehmenskunden verfügbar. Microsoft hat die Bereitstellung für private Anwender für Ende Januar 2007 angekündigt.
- SQL Server 2005 ist ein Datenbank-Server-System.
- SQL Server Express Edition ist eine kostenlose Version des Datenbank-Server-Systems mit eingeschränkter Funktionalität für private Anwender.
- Die Systemanforderungen für die jeweiligen Versionen sind auf der Microsoft Produktseite beschrieben.
Der Blog der für die Express Edition verantwortlichen Microsoft-Kollegen bestätigt folgenden Sachverhalt:
- Die kostenlose Version SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Service Pack 1 wird von Windows Vista mit Einschränkungen unterstützt.
- Der Einsatz der SQL Server 2005 Express Edition in Verbindung mit den Advanced Services, sowie alle anderen Produktversionen des SQL Server 2005 erfordern das Service Pack 2 bei der Verwendung mit Windows Vista .
Weitere Aufklärung über den Sachverhalt, und Zugang zur Software, bieten die Microsoft-CTP-Seite und die Artikel “Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on “Microsoft Windows Server Longhorn” or Microsoft Windows Vista” sowie “Running SQL Server on ‘Microsoft Windows Server Longhorn’ or Microsoft Windows Vista“.
Wenn also ein Privatanwender Windows Vista als Plattform für SQL Server 2005 verwenden möchte, dann kann er das (ab Februar) mit dem dann verfügbaren Service Pack 2 der SQL Server 2005 Express Edition tun.
Warum Unternehmenskunden die Vollversion des Datenbank-Servers SQL Server 2005 auf einer Client-Plattform betreiben sollten, und nicht auf dem ‘Server-Betriebssys-etm Longhorn’ ist mir im Augenblick nicht ganz klar – aber vielleicht liefert ja ein kundiger Journalist irgendwann einmal eine Erklärung nach.
12.13.06
Aus der Praxis lernen
Microsoft bietet Anwendern des SQL Server 2005 die Möglichkeit, anhand konkreter Anwendungsbeispiele, den Einsatz des Datenbankproduktes zu optimieren. Die Tips finden sich auf der Website SQL Server Best Practices:
Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. Drawing on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft as they walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues.
Materialien zum Datenbank-Vergleich: Oracle 10g oder Microsoft SQL Server 2005?
Falls sich jemand mit der Frage beschäftigen sollte, welche Datenbank er zukünftig einsetzen möchte, dann bietet Microsoft demjenigen einige Materialien zur Entscheidungsunterstützung.
12.11.06
Webcast 13. Dezember: Combining the power of SAP, Windows and 64-bit Processing
Hewlett-Packard sponsort einen Webcast, der sich mit den Vorteilen der 64.Bit Technologie des Windows Servers 2003 beschäftigt:
With the end of extended maintenance support for SAP R/3 versions 4.6C and SAP’s adoption of exclusive 64-bit support you now have the opportunity to run SAP on Windows and take advantage of 64-bit processing scalability.
This Webcast is a comprehensive discussion on SAP and 64-bit computing and how to begin implementing a SAP Windows strategy in your own company. See how the SAP/Windows performance compares and how an upgrade can dramatically change SAP application usability.
Attend this Webcast to learn about the advantages of combining SAP and your Windows platform and the steps you can take to ensure a successful upgrade in your organization:
- Discover why SAP customers are opting for a Windows platform.
- Gain valuable upgrade and migration techniques.
- Learn how to scale your SAP Windows landscape.
- Hear reviews from SAP customers who have deployed Windows solutions on an HP Integrity platform.
Click here to register.
Neue Beiträge im Architecture Center des MSDN
Den Namen Microsoft bringt man in den wenigsten Fällen mit Architekturkonzepten in Verbindung. Ist diese Ignoranz berechtigt? Schließlich ist Microsoft doch kein Ernst zu nehmender Anbieter von Enterprise Software, oder etwa doch? Die hellen Köpfe des Architecture Strategy Teams widerlegen dieses Vorurteil regelmässig, zuletzt auf dem von Teilnehmern hochgelobten Strategics Architects Forum. Leider ist die Teilnahme an dieser jährlichen Veranstaltung nur für die die wichtigsten Softwarearchitekten der Microsoft-Kunden auf Einladung möglich.
Umso erfreulicher deshalb, daß jetzt einige der interessanten Beiträge im Architecture Center des MSDN veröffentlicht wurden:
Measure Success with Software Factories and Visual Studio Team System
Software factories and Visual Studio Team System can be used together to improve quality, predictability, and productivity. The concepts and working methods presented here are targeted at systems integrators and enterprise customers who develop custom software.
Building an ESB on the Microsoft Platform (44MB ZIP)
Many organizations are considering an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a way to improve IT efficiencies and simplify integration efforts. However, there is significant confusion surrounding just what an ESB is.
Building Interoperable Insurance Systems with .NET 3.0 Technologies (PDF)
Through maturity of many enterprises, we live in a world where there is more than one stack of technology. As a result, there has been more than a few Band Aids applied to the various technologies. This whitepaper series is to provide guidance around integration challenges.
Master Data Management: The What, Why, and How
The recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, SOA, and mergers and acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business imperative. This paper covers the reasons for adopting master-data management, the process of developing a solution, and several options for the technological implementation of the solution.
What does a composite application built on the 2007 Office System feel like for end users? (video)
This presentation gives a feel for what the user experience will be like for end users, as they use an Office Business Application.
OBA Reference Application Pack for Retail Store Management
To demonstrate the use of service-oriented architecture to automate Retail scenario, a sample application was built using the IXRetail industry standard for retail enterprise, BizTalk 2006, Windows Communication Foundation, and Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager.
Building Distributed Applications: Food-Services Standards
Have you ever thought what would happen if railway tracks, car tires, and power sockets were all different sizes? It would be a chaotic world, one in which nothing functioned and life came to a standstill. This is where standardization helps.
Und zu den Beiträgen zählen natürlich auch folgende Beispiele von Referenzkunden:
Software as a Service (SaaS) is simply the idea that instead of paying for the bits and running them on your server, you ought to be able to buy the service you want and let somebody else manage it. Of course, this is nothing new. You may have my website hosted by people you’ve never met. You don’t care too much about the bits that actually run the server, you just want it to run and you don’t want to think about it. In this case study overview we meet Remend one of the new crop of companies who are moving to a SaaS business model.
Flatburger… a strange name but an interesting concept for a company that is enabling the little guys to have a marketplace for selling modular software and bringing together the three main components of Software as a Service (Saas) the customer, the hoster and the developer. In these type of 3 way relationships you almost always need a middleman to negotiate the deal and Flatburger aims to be just that.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia: CommSee Solution Case Study
This case study describes how the Commonwealth Bank of Australia designed, developed, and implemented a relationship banking solution using .NET technologies. After considering the business needs that CommSee was designed to address, this case study will examine the solution architecture, technical project details, and best practices employed in this major software development effort.
