Blueprint

EMC Unified Storage for

SAP Design Validation
Enabled by EMC Celerra with Oracle

Copyright 2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

Published August, 2009

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information
is subject to change without notice. Benchmark results are highly dependent upon workload, specific
application requirements, and system design and implementation. Relative system performance will
vary as a result of these and other factors. Therefore, this workload should not be used as a substitute
for a specific customer application benchmark when critical capacity planning and/or product
evaluation decisions are contemplated.

All performance data contained in this report was obtained in a rigorously controlled environment.
Results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. EMC Corporation does not
warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance expressed in transactions per
minute.

No warranty of system performance or price/performance is expressed or implied in this document.
Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable
software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation
Trademarks on EMC.com.

The performance characteristics detailed in this document are intended to give indicative performance
information on a single building block. If deploying at larger scale, then further validation should be
carried out to ensure that the proposed environment performs as expected.

All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Part number: H6418

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Table of Contents

Overview...........................................................................................................................................4
Key components ...............................................................................................................................5
Physical architecture.........................................................................................................................6
Environment profile...........................................................................................................................7
Design and validation........................................................................................................................8
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................11

Overview

Purpose This blueprint provides an overview of an EMC network-attached storage (NAS)
configuration for SAP, utilizing the EMC

Celerra

unified storage platform and Oracle

10g with Linux over NFS.
The purpose of this blueprint is to validate the applicability of existing EMC Oracle
design and layout recommendations to SAP ERP installations.

Blueprint
definition
An EMC Global Solutions blueprint documents the interoperability, functionality, and
performance test results of a combination of EMC and third-party products chosen to
meet a specific customer requirement.

The business
challenge
Cost-effective NAS storage systems are especially attractive to midsize enterprises
running SAP. However, they still need to ensure that their SAP systems meet the
performance requirements of their end users.

SAP customers running SAP on NAS storage systems face several challenges:

Creating a storage system layout that enables them to meet the performance
requirements of their end users.
Ensuring that data protection operations don't affect production performance.
Ensuring that non-production system refresh from production doesn't affect
production performance.

These challenges amount to having a storage system that is optimally designed for
performance.

Blueprint
solution

This blueprint documents and validates a disk layout on a Celerra NS-480 with the
NFS protocol. The data layout design described is recommended for SAP ERP in an
Oracle database and Linux operating system environment.

To achieve the objective, this blueprint ensures:

The disk layout is acceptable to an SAP environment with 1,000 simulated users,
with typical SAP transactional loads; the layout achieved less than two seconds of
average dialog response time.
The impact on production performance is minimal when replicating with EMC
Celerra Replicator while the SD workload is simulated.

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Key components

Introduction This section briefly describes the key solution components. For details on all of the
components that make up the reference architecture, see the Hardware and
Software section in this document.

EMC Celerra
NS-480

The EMC Celerra NS-480 unified storage system brings advanced clustering
availability to multi-protocol environments. The Celerra NS-480 unified storage
system delivers a single-box block and file solution offering a centralized point of
management for distributed environments. This enables you to dynamically grow,
share, and cost-effectively manage multi-protocol file systems as well as provide
multi-protocol block access.

EMC Celerra
Replicator
EMC Celerra Replicator is an EMC Celerra Network Server software feature that
enables you to easily and quickly create replicas of production file systems.

VMware ESX
VMware ESX is the foundation for a dynamic, self-optimizing IT infrastructure.
VMware ESX is a robust, production-proven virtualization layer that abstracts
processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual
machines.
VMware ESX allows enterprises to dramatically reduce hardware and operating
costs by sharing resources across a virtual environment.

SAP ERP 6.0
SAP ERP 6.0 is a world-class, fully integrated solution that fulfills the core business
needs of midsize and large organizations across all industries and market sectors.
Together with SAP NetWeaver and a repository of enterprise services, SAP ERP 6.0
can serve as a solid business process platform that supports continued growth,
innovation, and operational excellence.


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Physical architecture

Architecture
diagram
The following illustration depicts the overall physical architecture of the blueprint.

In this blueprint, the environment consists of three physical servers and an EMC
Celerra storage array. An SAP ERP Central system is installed on one of the
physical servers, which is connected to an EMC Celerra storage array with the NFS
protocol, via Gigabit Ethernet LAN.

The remaining two physical servers are utilized as VMware ESX servers, and three
virtual machines are configured on top of each ESX server. For each virtual machine
an SAP Dialog Instance (DI) is installed for load-balancing purposes. Also, additional
EMC Celerra volumes are allocated as the replication volumes.




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Environment profile

Hardware
resources
The hardware used in the blueprint is listed below.

Equipment Quantity Configuration
Storage array 1
EMC Celerra NS-480 30 x 300 GB drives,
15 x 1 TB drives
SAP servers
3
(1) DB/CI server 4 CPUs, 16 GB RAM
(2) ESX server hosting 6 DI VMs 2 CPUs, 16 GB
RAM


Software
resources
The software used in the blueprint is listed below.

Software Version Comment
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 (x86_64) Central system and DI instance servers
SAP Application ERP 6.0 SR2 ABAP Stack only
Oracle Database 10.2.0.2
VMware ESX Server 3.5 U3 Enterprise Edition

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Design and validation

Introduction


This blueprint validates the design of the disk layout, introduced by EMC's Oracle
experts, is applicable in an SAP ERP environment. To validate that performance
meets SAP requirements, SAP users were simulated to concurrently produce typical
SAP transaction loads. System response times are measured to ensure thresholds
are not exceeded.


Disk layout

Storage configuration

Configuration steps consist of:
RAID configuration
EMC Celerra volumes and storage pool configurations
File systems creation

RAID configuration

The following illustration depicts the RAID configuration of the blueprint, as shown
below:



In this blueprint, 9 RAID groups (such as RG0, RG8, and RG9) are created with
physical disks. Within the RAID group, EMC Celerra volumes are created and
managed.

The following section discusses further details as to how EMC Celerra volumes and
their corresponding file systems are configured.
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EMC Celerra volumes configuration

EMC Celerra disk volumes are created and assigned to a user-defined storage pool.
The storage pool is assembled with one or more RAID group; this allows the user to
control exactly which RAID groups are used for a given volume.

Table 1 contains a list of the storage pools and RAID groups used in this blueprint.

File system configuration

The file systems shown in Table 1 are created and exported on the EMC Celerra,
and mounted on the SAP server.

Table 1 File system layout
File system Content Storage pool RAID groups
/ Oracle_data_EN1 Datafiles data1_pool* RGO 10, 11, 12, 13
/LogA_EN1 Redo log files
(OriglogA, MirrlogB)
LogA_EN1_pool RG8
/LogB_EN1 Online redo log files
(OriglogB, MirrlogA)
LogB_EN1_pool RG9
/SAP_EN1 SAP binaries, transport
files
data1_pool* RGO 10, 11, 12, 13
/ Oracle_EN1 Oracle home, binaries data1_pool* RGO 10, 11, 12, 13
/ARCH_EN1 Archive logs ARCH_pool RG14
*Note: This storage pool contains a volume that stripes across multiple RAID
Groups. File systems for SAPDATA, SAP/Oracle binaries, and SAP transports are
then carved out of the storage pool.


Performance To ensure that the disk layout is acceptable to the SAP environment, one of the
typical SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) business processes, known as Sales Order
Processing, was validated with 1,000 simulated users. The result was an average
dialog response time of less than two seconds.

In addition, local replication within the EMC Celerra was performed during the
transactional loads to ensure that there is no significant impact to dialog response
time during the replication process.


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Conclusion

Summary Infrastructure design and data placement are significant factors of performance in
SAP ERP systems. This blueprint provides an optimal disk layout of EMC Celerra for
SAP ERP systems. This recommendation reduces risk to critical SAP operations
resulting from potential storage-related performance issues.


Benefits
The SAP NAS blueprint provides the following benefits:

Provides a validated EMC Celerra storage layout to deliver optimal performance to
an SAP ERP environment.
Validates operation of file system replication for backup purposes, or to create non-
production environments during normal business hours; with minimal impact to the
SAP production system.


Next steps To learn more about this and other solutions contact an EMC representative or visit
www.EMC.com/solutions/SAP.