Too many SAP servers can sap your productivity

By James Jefferd, Business Manager, FlexFrame Solutions, Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand

It’s not the upfront expense of buying technology systems as much as the cost and complexity of keeping them running that’s the problem. How many times have you found this to be the case when you examine where your IT budget is actually being spent?

Enterprise software is no exception. Enterprise resource planning tools like SAP have gradually progressed from mainframes and big iron servers to multiple smaller distributed servers. While this trend has helped reduce the acquisition cost of the hardware, the technology environment has actually become more complex and therefore more expensive to run. Fortunately, a solution is now at hand for SAP systems.

FlexFrame - a more flexible SAP environment

Organisations can drastically reduce costs and slash implementation times for new mySAP applications by using the FlexFrame environment from Fujitsu. FlexFrame has helped many of our global clients free up the significant capital that is locked into supporting existing infrastructure so they can invest in new programs to drive business change.

Fujitsu, SAP and Network Appliance jointly developed the concept of ‘Adaptive Computing’ that allows servers and other hardware resources to be dynamically applied to specific applications. Using this concept, Fujitsu has developed FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite to reduce the management load of running SAP systems.

Fujitsu’s FlexFrame consolidates all of an organisation’s SAP applications and servers into a single solution that is easy to manage, very scalable and highly available.

Reduce TCO and time to delivery

BearingPoint conducted a study on behalf of Fujitsu to evaluate how FlexFrame can transform the costs of running an SAP environment. The study found that organisations can save up to 62 per cent of the cost of owning SAP infrastructure over three years using FlexFrame. It also found that organisations could achieve a 168 per cent return on investment with a payback period of 1.6 years.

FlexFrame uses the grid computing and virtualisation capabilities built into the Linux and Sun Solaris operating systems to create a single instance of the operating system. Logical instances of the mySAP environment can run on any server in the system. It is the world’s first technology to achieve certification for SAP’s Adaptive Computing model.

Using FlexFrame, servers can dynamically change their roles to run different SAP applications within minutes. If additional computing power is required, new servers can be plugged into FlexFrame and are ready to run within hours. To increase the availability of applications, FlexFrame can restart faulty SAP processes or fall back on backup servers.

FlexFrame breaks the traditional model of dedicating servers to specific roles. Fujitsu has engineered out the multiple layers of complex technology common to most SAP computing landscapes, allowing FlexFrame systems to be managed with minimal effort and relatively little technical knowledge. It is a simple but highly reliable and scalable environment that delivers on the promises of grid and dynamic computing.

One physical FlexFrame can be subdivided into multiple smaller virtual FlexFrames – an ideal solution for multi-customer or multi-department SAP consolidation projects. The cost savings of the FlexFrame model can be shared across all the users of the FlexFrame solution.

FlexFrame is already working

More than 60 organisations around the world including automotive components manufacturer Hella KG in Germany and the Netherlands’ TPG Post have successfully implemented FlexFrame and are now reaping the benefits.

Hella KG is a worldwide supplier of automotive lights and electronics. The company use the mySAP Business Suite to optimise many of its business processes. However, over time the company had accumulated an unmanageable number of SAP systems.

Using FlexFrame, Hella consolidated 92 separate SAP instances into a single scalable, adaptable and manageable system. The entire infrastructure transformation process took just over a week and the company has reduced its total cost of SAP ownership by 30 per cent.

In addition to hard dollar savings, Hella’s SAP infrastructure can now respond dynamically to the often unpredictable changes in demand for SAP processing power. If Hella’s business changes, its SAP systems quickly adapt to the new requirements.

More information

FlexFrame is now available in Australia. If you would like to find out how FlexFrame could reduce the total cost of ownership of your SAP environment, contact James Jefferd on (02) 9113 9335, or email james.jefferd@au.fujitsu.com.

What is FlexFrame?