Oracle IT Infrastructure Solutions for SAP

Servers

Oracle servers provide the necessary performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness to meet your business needs using SAP solutions. Oracle’s complete family of servers lets you choose the architecture that best supports your specific requirements.

Extreme Performance, Simplified Management

Oracle's servers are engineered to deliver record-breaking performance, simplified management, high availability, and cost-saving efficiencies to SAP deployments. These industry-leading systems include built-in virtualization, cloud management, and systems management; they are optimized to run Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. A wide variety of platforms are available, from x86 systems to high-performance SPARC and enterprise-class servers.

Oracle’s Sun x86 systems offer an economical, enterprise-class alternative. The combination of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux scalability and powerful, energy-efficient Intel processor-based systems creates a mission-critical platform that can deliver manageability, flexibility, security, and reliability to SAP applications at less cost.

Oracle’s SPARC servers are ideal for small to huge SAP deployments. SPARC Enterprise M8 Series or SPARC T8 Series servers deliver affordable virtualization and consolidation for web tier, cloud computing, database, and large-scale enterprise application environments. SPARC servers with chip multithreading technology (CMT) deliver exceptional throughput and performance for SAP applications. SPARC T7 servers extend the most advanced enterprise computing platform into scale-out applications and cloud infrastructure, with unique capabilities for information security, core efficiency and acceleration of analytics, big data, and machine learning, while offering x86 commodity cost points.

The combination of Oracle servers and Oracle Solaris yields proven performance advances. In fact, Oracle platforms continue to set performance and price/performance world records on a wide range of industry-standard benchmarks.

You can also turn to the SAP Standard Application Benchmarks to help find the appropriate hardware configuration for your IT solutions. This standardized, well-defined benchmarking procedure is monitored by the SAP Benchmark Council, which consists of SAP representatives and other technology partners, including Oracle. Oracle actively engages in the benchmark process, viewing it as an opportunity to strengthen quality assurance, as well as test and verify scalability, concurrency, and multiuser behaviour of system software components, RDBMS, and business applications.

Storage

Oracle optimized storage enables enterprises to simplify IT environments so they can operate more efficiently, reduce costs, and respond quickly to dynamic business needs.

Our best-of-breed storage products and business-ready storage solutions are engineered to enable business-critical software to run faster and more efficiently, offering unsurpassed capabilities for heterogeneous data centers. Oracle storage systems optimize performance, maximize data protection, and reduce the total cost of ownership for Oracle databases, SAP applications, and heterogeneous data management. Choose from a wide range of storage systems, from individual tape drives and high-capacity tape library solutions, to fiber-channel disk arrays and SAN solutions. Oracle’s application-engineered storage reduces storage sprawl, complexity, and cost with industry-leading Oracle integration, management simplicity, and high performance, including an innovative storage architecture and unparalleled efficiency. Storing SAP data on NAS-filers like the latest Oracle ZFS Storage products is easy and safe. Oracle offers application engineered SAN storage, architected to exploit the power of flash for greater performance predictability and better economics through automated tiering of flash and disk. For the utmost in performance, Oracle offers integrated storage appliances such as Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Oracle StorageTek Tape Automatisation to safely backup SAP applications.

Operating Systems

SAP supports Oracle Solaris, the most advanced platform available for today’s demanding enterprise, as well as Oracle Linux and Linux environments on Oracle servers, as operating system platforms for both database servers and SAP application server installations.

In the face of diminishing budgets, SAP customers require high-availability solutions to operate effectively in a 24/7 global economy characterized by continuous security demands. A strategic platform for SAP applications, SAP NetWeaver solutions running on Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux can help IT organizations to deliver dynamic business solutions much more effectively.

Oracle Solaris for SAP

Innovative, built-in features deliver a number of advantages:

Flexibility. Oracle Solaris is an enterprise-class operating system that runs on both commodity x86 hardware and Oracle’s SPARC processor-based servers. Oracle Solaris draws on built-in binary compatibility to increase system utilization through scalability, consolidation, and virtualization. Price/performance. Oracle Solaris is ideal for applications such as SAP that require high-performance systems, massive threading and batch processing, high I/O rates, and large memory-addressing capabilities at an attractive price point.

Reliability. Oracle servers feature hot-swappable, redundant components and can leverage powerful Oracle Solaris capabilities such as Predictive Self Healing, Oracle Solaris Fault Manager, and Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) to maximize SAP uptime. In addition, you can minimize downtime for SAP upgrades using a combination of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris ZFS. High availability and disaster recovery are possible with Oracle Solaris Cluster and with Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition.

Security. Oracle continues its 20-plus year commitment to building security into the operating system with capabilities that include user and process rights management, role-based access control, secure execution, and an integrated firewall.

Oracle Linux for SAP

Oracle Linux is certified by SAP on x86 64 (Intel, AMD) hardware. Both the Red Hat-compatible kernel and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel are supported. Oracle Linux can be used as an operating system platform for database server as well as for SAP Application Server installations. Oracle Linux is a supported OS platform for Oracle Database 11g , 12c and 18c. Single-instance and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) implementations are possible. Oracle Cloud File System can be used as storage platform.

If SAP runs on Oracle Database Oracle Database 12c or Database 18c, Oracle Linux is also a supported platform for SAP Application Server and SAP applications (Unicode versions only, NetWeaver 7.0x or higher).

High Availability

Oracle Solaris Cluster expands Oracle Solaris’ high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, delivering the best Unix availability for SAP deployments.

Oracle Solaris Cluster is engineered for business-critical applications such as SAP, providing application and service recovery for both traditional Oracle Solaris enterprise deployments and Oracle Solaris-based private, public, and hybrid clouds. Thoroughly tested with Oracle Sun servers, storage systems, and networking components, Oracle Solaris Cluster delivers a high-availability infrastructure for Oracle Sun servers, protecting mission-critical applications and databases in multi-tier, virtualized configurations. Built-in support for Oracle databases and SAP applications results in solution-specific failure detection and recovery, resulting in minimal outages due to component failure.

Extreme Availability for Enterprise Applications

Tightly coupled with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Solaris Cluster detects system failures instantly and consistently. Its faster notification and application failover significantly reduces overall service recovery time, thus drastically cutting application outages. Oracle Solaris Cluster provides out-of-the-box support for applications and databases from Oracle and SAP, avoiding any development and scripting tasks and facilitating immediate deployment in traditional systems or virtual environments. The Oracle Solaris Cluster agent toolkit supports custom applications with minimal effort. Oracle Solaris Cluster also includes multi-site, multi-cluster disaster recovery services that feature automated application failover and coordination with application, storage, and host-based replication solutions.

Related Products

Oracle Clusterware. Oracle’s portable cluster software allows independent servers to work as a single system. As an independent server pool infrastructure that is fully integrated with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Clusterware protects any kind of application in a failover cluster.

Oracle Grid Infrastructure. Oracle Clusterware combines with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) to create Oracle Grid Infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure software that sets a new level in the management of private cloud-based applications.

SAP Control. Oracle has created an Oracle Clusterware tool, SAP Control (SAPCTL), to enable you to easily manage SAP high availability resources. SAPCTL provides an easy-to-use user interface, scripts, and dependencies of Oracle Clusterware and SAP high availability components. Oracle RAC. Oracle Real Application Clusters support the transparent deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers, providing fault tolerance from hardware failures or planned outages. Available as an option with Oracle Database 12c or 18c, Oracle RAC is a key component of Oracle's private cloud architecture. Oracle RAC is supported with SAP applications.

SAP Certified: Integration with SAP NetWeaver

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, Cluster 4.x, and Clusterware certified by SAP for integration with SAP NetWeaver.

Virtualization

Extreme Performance, Simplified Management

Oracle continues to work with SAP to integrate and validate its virtualization technologies with SAP Business Applications and the SAP NetWeaver platform, helping SAP and Oracle customers improve productivity and system utilization rates through virtualization and consolidation.

Upgrading SAP on Oracle technology can improve user productivity, consolidate workloads, and better utilize resources — resulting in dramatically reduced data center costs. Oracle's IT infrastructure solutions for SAP provide a methodology for upgrading or migrating existing SAP Business Suite applications with its industry-leading virtualization technologies, as well as eco-efficient Oracle servers and storage, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Linux.

Complete Virtualization Portfolio

Oracle’s cross-platform virtualization management technology provisions and manages flexible pools of resources that users can share and allocate to many SAP instances. Built-in resource management features enable sharing of compute, memory, and I/O resources, improving server utilization to up to 85 percent of capacity.

Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC enable Oracle Solaris 8, 9, 10, and 11 certified applications to run simultaneously on the system without modification. With these virtualization technologies built into Oracle Solaris, the SAP workload can be allocated to isolate I/O or CPU-intense applications to their own virtual machines, with dedicated resources that can easily be managed and reassigned as needed. With virtual clustering, dedicated zone clusters can be configured to run specific SAP applications according to predefined cluster management policies.

Oracle Solaris Zones

Fully supported for SAP applications, Zones for Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 offer easy implementation and minimal impact on performance, making these tools a popular choice with SAP customers. Oracle Solaris Zones easily support the consolidation of old and new projects on one server, such as a Solaris 10 zone on Solaris 11. Virtualization with Oracle Solaris Containers, Oracle VM Server, and Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers for Oracle Solaris 8 and Oracle Solaris 9 on Solaris 10 is also available under controlled availability.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC

Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization capabilities for supported Oracle SPARC servers. Oracle VM Server leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide a supported platform’s resources using partitions called logical (or virtual) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC flexibly deploys multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. OVM Server also creates up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by Oracle SPARC servers.

Oracle VM Server for x86

OVM Server for x86 is a free server virtualization and management solution that makes enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support. Backed worldwide by affordable enterprise-quality support for both Oracle and non-Oracle environments, Oracle VM facilitates application deployment and management on a fully certified platform reducing operations and support costs while simultaneously increasing IT efficiency and agility.

Management

Oracle's extensive portfolio of infrastructure management solutions help streamline IT management processes.

Customers can easily operate heterogeneous SAP system landscapes using automated and standardized processes to manage tasks such as provisioning, updates, and patching.

Comprehensive Infrastructure Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c helps cut user-reported incidents as well as problem resolution times more than 50%. It provides out-of-the-box availability and performance monitoring, robust diagnostics, configuration management, and lifecycle management across the complete IT infrastructure.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides an integrated and cost-effective solution for complete physical and virtual server lifecycle management. By delivering comprehensive provisioning, patching, monitoring, administration, and configuration management capabilities via web-based user interface, Enterprise Manager significantly reduces the complexity and cost associated with managing Oracle VM, Linux, Unix, and Windows operating system environments. In addition, enterprises using Oracle Sun hardware can get deep insight into their server, storage, and network infrastructure layers and manage thousands of systems in a scalable manner. By accelerating virtualization and cloud computing adoption, Oracle Enterprise Manager helps customers reduce costs, optimize IT resources, and streamline processes.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center offers extreme automation of infrastructure tasks for Oracle Linux and Solaris while establishing a cloud infrastructure solution for Solaris and SPARC technologies. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control offers host-level awareness and management in concert with application targets within the Cloud Control user interface.

Oracle and SAP have jointly tested and certified Oracle’s Engineered Systems for SAP, now available as a family of engineered systems that are pre-integrated, pre-tested, and pre-configured to simplify data center operations, ensure fast and easy SAP infrastructure deployment, and accelerate business innovation.

Security and Identity Governance

Oracle Identity Management is a complete and integrated next-generation identity management platform. It provides breakthrough scalability, enables organizations to achieve rapid compliance with regulatory mandates, secures sensitive applications and data regardless of whether they are hosted on-premise or in a cloud, and reduces operational costs.

Oracle Identity Governance and Compliance Management for SAP ERP

Oracle Identity Governance and Compliance Management for SAP can connect via Oracle-provided connectors to bridge an important technology and business gap for customers with mixed SAP and non-SAP-based system environments. For example, combining Oracle Identity Governance with SAP GRC creates a reliable and secure Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution that manages user identity and access in compliance with security policies and legal requirements across the entire IT landscape.

Directory Services

Oracle delivers the industry’s only integrated directory solution optimized for cloud, mobile, and social ecosystems. With a complete set of directory capabilities, including identity virtualization, storage, and synchronization services, Oracle provides breakthrough performance for mission-critical enterprise- and carrier-grade environments.