Dell and SAP provide Competence Centers located in Austin (Texas), Walldorf (Germany), and Kawasaki (Japan) that serve as central points-of-contact for customers who want to run their SAP applications on Dell™ systems. Experienced engineers at these centers can provide custom sizings of the best-suited platform architectures for your SAP implementation needs. Dell also conducts SAP benchmarks and publishes technical papers about SAP to assist its customers when deploying SAP software.

Certified Hardware

Find a list of SAP-certified Dell hardware:

• For Windows at www.saponwin.com/pub/hardware.asp?l=vendor&sl=26&la=en
• For Linux at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/linux?rid=/webcontent/uuid/8be216ae-0e01-0010-bf8e-b0e892790371

Similar to the certification there is

• An SAP Adaptive Compliance Test

You will only require this if you plan to use the ACC (Adaptive Computing Controller). More information on https://service.sap.com/adaptive.

• A BWA (Business Warehouse Accelerator) Validation

Your hardware vendor needs this to sell BWA solutions. Dell has a validated configuration, see below.

SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA)

SAP's BW is a data warehouse providing analytical tools against multi-dimensional business data. BWA is an optional in-memory accelerator for BW.

Both BW and BWA can run on a certified subset of Dell's standard range of servers and storage. BWA holds the BW data in memory across a set of blade servers. Dell doesn't sell SAP's BWA software but the hardware along with system integrator's services on the installation. The blades used are PowerEdge M610 in a M1000e chassis and connect to a Dell/EMC CX SAN storage array.

Having the data in memory greatly accelerates the queries run against it. It’s sized and licensed by the total amount of memory required. The user count of BWA is not a significant sizing factor. Determining the needed memory is a joint activity between the customer, SAP and Dell. Once determined, BWA is licensed for that amount of memory in 4GB increments. Typical amounts are between 32GB and 256GB of RAM, though can be much higher. The BWA memory is distributed over a number of blades, each blade can have up to half of its physical memory assigned to BWA. In addition to these production blades there would typically be two cold spare blades and some test blades.

Blades

Configuration: Dell PowerEdge M610 with Processor: 2 Intel Xeon X5570 RAM: 48GB Harddisk: 2x146GB Storage HBA: QME2572

Blade count: Production: Roundup(memory / 48GB); up to 16 Test: 2

Blade Chassis	M1000e with Cisco 3032 or PowerConnect switch, Brocade fiber switch
Storage	Dell/EMC CX storage. Size: 3*BWA-assigned memory (see SAP note 917803).
Cluster File System	OCFS2
Operating System	SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP 2, kernel 2.6.16.60-0.42.7-smp and higher

For more information contact sap_sizing@dell.com.

Virtualization

You want to virtualize your SAP environment? Here are some hints that have made life easier:

• SAP-supported virtualization solutions for X64 hardware are VMware, Xen and Hyper-V. Consider the SAP notes
  • 674851 for Windows: VMware and Hyper-V
  • 1122387 for Linux: up to the hardware vendor. For Dell, VMware and Xen is supported, see Dell/SAP note 300900. Be aware that SAP only supports Xen from Novell and Red Hat. This means that you cannot choose the Citrix XenServer integrated hypervisor with productive SAP systems.
    
• Consider your backup strategy

Do you use fibrechannel tape drives for your backups? Please consider that you cannot attach fibre channel cable to every virtual machine. There will soon be a solution from VMware for that, VMDirectPath.

• Consider your database

Do you want a virtualized database server? Do not forget some databases do not support virtualization or demand that you be able to reproduce a support issue on "bare metal". Info on

• DB2: SAP note 1130801
  
• MaxDB: SAP note 1142243
• Oracle: SAP note 1173954
• SQL Server: Microsoft knowledge base article 956893
  

Performance Advice

As discussed in the SAP Portal InfoBrief, the prefetcher setting in the BIOS has a major influence on SAP performance. On ABAP, switching OFF the prefetcher (in a benchmark scenario) increased the system throughput (in Dialogsteps per second) by about 8 percent, and even more could be observed in Java-stack-based SAP software. To switch OFF the prefetcher (as in a Dell PowerEdge™ R900's example):

1. Reboot your PowerEdge server.
2. Enter your system BIOS by pressing F2.
3. Chose CPU Information -> Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch.
4. Set this option to "disabled."

Note: This option may also be called "Sequential Memory Access". It is not available on every server.

Setting HT Tech to HT 3 (where available) showed a performance increase of more than 10% in an SAP-specific load scenario. Here is an example from the PowerEdge M905:



Note: This performance hint was only tested in a 4-processor-configuration.

Support Limitations

Please be aware that SAP does not support SAP on the Linux® OS with PowerPath. SAP support can be denied if you use SAP on Linux with any binary-only kernel module. For more information, see SAP note 784391. For storage multipathing with SAP and Linux, you can safely chose MPIO.

Sub-topics

• understanding the SAPS number

Dell and SAP Quick Links

• Dell SAP Competency Center – The Dell SAP competency centers on DELL.COM/SAP
  
• SAP White Papers – See what Dell can do for SAP customers