Sun Teams with SAP to Make Apps Easier to Manage

Published: May 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having virtualized, automated operating systems and middleware is a great improvement over the static software stack that businesses used a decade ago. But these two layers of software are only part of the problem that companies face. Applications need to be virtualized so they can be better managed, too. And that is what a new alliance between server maker Sun Microsystems and application software juggernaut SAP hopes to do.

This week, Sun rolled out the N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions, which is a funny way of saying that its N1 provisioning and management tools can now cope with SAP applications and their associated databases. "Big customers face two problems with large scale deployments," explains Jim Sangster, director of marketing for N1 and availability technologies. "Utilization of servers is a big issue after deployments are done and the cost of deployments is an issue before they deploy." By moving to a more virtualized environment with a higher level of automation, Sun thinks it can cut the cost of deploying SAP suites. Sangster says that the preliminary numbers it has seen with the N1-SAP tools that is has created as an extension to its N1 Service Provisioning System can yield a 40 to 60 percent reduction in the number of processors needed to support an SAP installation, and can yield from a reduction in administration costs of between 15 to 30 percent--and that is without doing a lot of automation, which is possible with the N1 tools.

The N1 SPS tools can provision Solaris, Linux, and Windows servers and their associated software, so this is not a Solaris-only proposition. But clearly Sun wants it to be, and that is why the N1 SPS extensions are available for free as a download and are being woven into the Solaris Enterprise System, which is Sun's brand name for its Solaris 10 operating system merged with its Java Enterprise System middleware stack. The N1 SPS extensions hook into SAP's own management tools, which are called the Adaptive Computing Controller, which is how N1 can take control of the SAP stack. N1 can provision new SAP application and database servers or the front-end that feed into them, as well as move instances around to different hardware on the network, if workloads dictate. And while Sun's software does a better job of managing the latest release of SAP's ERP suite, the N1 extensions can also be used to provision and manage earlier SAP releases.

Sangster says that in typical large-scale SAP deployments, customers deploy a clustered database tier on a Unix box, and the app tier is usually the same platform or perhaps another one. (Unix for the database and Windows or Linux on the other tiers is typical.) But Sun would love to see a complete Solaris stack running SAP, obviously. And it wants to make money on software licenses and support, too. Solaris Enterprise System costs $3,000 per server, and typically has a 35 percent discount; the N1 SPS portion, if that is all you want, costs from $1,400 to $1,800 per server, with the same discounts. Support contracts for these programs are in the range of 25 percent of the license fee per year.