Moving from SM36/37 to an external job scheduler

Recently I'm pre-occupied by using external job schedulers to control SAP batch jobs in a IT landscape with multiple SAP systems.

My current thoughts turn to security between business functions and to a new way of managing jobs.

First Security - by introducing a central point of control you also introduce a new aspect to Security. If all your jobs are controlled from a central system then you need to be able to group and secure them so that you comply with industry rules for segregation of roles. In many tools this is possible but it can get complicated - keeping an eye on how to architect this for best fine-control and trying to keep as much logical simplicity implicit in the design is a real thinker...... Have you come across the same?

Secondly job management.... with integration with SAP Solution Manager you can start using "Job Documentation" in SolMan - this is a great way to control job management, but now you have the possibility of jobs starting in QA and being controlled in promotion through to Production. This is a massive paradigm shift from the old ways, where unless you built a method for control externally, essentially many people just manage jobs independantly in every system. Is this new overhead entirely worthwhile? Is the cost of administration worth the reduced cost in identifiying the nature of a job? In the end it probably is in most medium to large businesses, but it's something that's hard to quantify.


Expect more ruminations in this areas.....

eMail management pain - attachments solutions

In my life as an IT and technology lover there is surely one problem that dogs me through my professional life. EMAIL! It's bad enough getting 3 billion of the little sods a day, but then you want to send or receive one that's over a megabyte or two -- oooohh no - way too big. In this age of terabyte hard drives in personal home computers and gigabtyes of storage on handheld devices, still a megabyte or two is enough to make some email systems implode violently. I had considered that there should be auto-zip functionality out there built into email programs, but recently "The Cloud" has begun to provide the solution. Instead of an attachment being replicated to numerous recipients and forwarded on to others etc. - until it exists in thousands of places; now "The Cloud" is where your attachments reside and people just link to them - downloading their own copy only if they want to. Microsoft Hotmail has the Sky Drive and I've just seen a YouTube clip of "Box" for Outlook. Surely there are more of these solutions on the way. I'm here to say - hoorah! If you haven't started using such a solution please do. We can only hope that someone somewhere hosts a few servers for the awful FW emails that replicate images millions of times around the world - instead we can all link to centrally held data (and then if the server gets lost.... well wouldn't that be a shame!)

See this link for Box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdyFzNQXMfc&feature=related
See here for SkyDrive: https://skydrive.live.com/

HP Cloud Services News

Hewlett-Packard announce new Cloud Services - a noteworthy story in this interesting space. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041012-hp-cloud-258109.html?page=1

SAP HANA for BW - Progress

Interesting article on the progress of SAP HANA as a platform for SAP BW.
This technology always looked certain to catch fire and become a massive new area for the industry and so far these expectations are on track.
https://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/04/11/bw-powered-by-sap-hana-is-now-generally-available

Late TechEd 2011 notes

The TechEd conference in Madrid in 2011 generated a lot of internal interest at my company in the latest technologies. It seems there is quite a wave of new technologies in the SAP area all at once currently and this makes it an interesting area.
I've been mainly reading about HANA/in-memory/columnar dbs, Solid State Disks (SSDs) and central process scheduling tools; so I wanted to see if the TechEd summary slides I've received were focused on the same things. Here are the general public-domain highlights:

The general highlights first were very interesting. They talked about the expansion of tools in the environment out from the "core" traditional systems; being referred to in this instance as the core "analytic" and "system of record" systems. i.e. BW/ERP. The main expansion areas discussed were out into the Cloud, onto in-memory databases (e.g. HANA) and onto mobile devices (i.e. mobility). For more on general details see SAP ref TEC100.
After this general audience prep the TechEd summary split into more specific areas and these are the main bullet points.

*NetWeaver Update
> SAP JVM 4 will now be standard JDK - replacing vendor JDKs (see SAP notes 1495160 and 1230512)
> Netweaver 2004 and 7.0 will be longer supported than originally planned (until12/2017)
> Downward Compatible Kernels (DCKs) - Enhanced backward compatibility. See SAP Notes 1553300 and 1553301 for all details
> Dual stack / stack splitting - In general you should no longer install dual stacks. SAP have also released a tool for splitting stacks (see TEC110 & ALM230). Note also as of NW7.3 PI is available as a Java single stack for some scenarios.
> Databases. Oracle 11g Rel 2 certified. Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server Engine - the Sybase RDBMS) now available on all major platforms from Nov '11. How many people will we see shift to ASE?


*Software Logistics Toolset (SLT)
> New "container" for software delivery tools. Consists of tools like Software Update Manager (SUM), Dual stack split tool, SUM for SAP HANA, etc.
> SUM - expanding on SUM - this is the evolution from SAP EHPi and upgrade tools. It will replace SAPup, Jup and SAPehpinst.


*Business Continuity
> Quite a few notes were covered around Near Zero Downtime (NZDT). This is a key area for many business these days as critical central management systems affect numerous other SAP installations while they are down. See TEC 204, TEC222, ALM220, ALM234. This is a SAP consulting service (NZDT) but also a guided method for PI and Portal apparently (search for nZDM)
> Rolling Kernel Switches (RKS) - This introduces the possibility of running a SAP system, TEMPORARILY, on different, but compatible, kernel patches. As this is for only a limited time I'm not 100% clear on the benefits but I'll be keeping an eye out for use cases! This procedure is available as of kernel 7.20 using DCK.


*HANA
HANA - such a popular area but only in it's infancy. Details are very PR-style often and for use technical specialists there has been minimal material available on the technolody behind this in-memory db, which is used for high-performance computing of analytical data (millions and millions of rows in seconds). The main points were minimal - BW on SAP HANA has been available since November '11. Otherwise you really need a SAP course, or the related material - see TEC110, EIM202, EIM105, TEC104, ALM278


*Cloud (LVM, VAF)
Another area of real industry interest. My understanding has been boiling down and my personal summary now would really be - it's a way of provisioning hardward resources much more quickly and dynamicallly from a public of private cloud of resources, which are optimised for scalable and fast delivery. I.e. you can have the new server/CPU/disk/etc that you need in 12 hours, rather than 12 weeks; for example.
The TechEd notes were really just some bullet points on tools used for Cloud setups with SAP - here are the highlights to make note of and read further on:
> Virtualisation and Cloud Management Program (VCM)
> Landscape Virtualisation Management s/w (LVM) (Note Adaptive Computing Controller feasutes now migrated into LVM)
> Virtual Appliances Factory (VAF) - pre-installed/ready-to-consume solutions
> Cloud Management Capabilites - see Project Titanium & Xenon. This is about managing virtual apps in VAF and Providing access to/from clouds.
Also see TEC120, TEC220, TEC221, TEC261, TEC218 (Bosch),TEC221 (IBM)


*Mobility (SUP / Gateway)
An area everyone loves. More and more senior management have tablets and almost everyone has smart phones. Software UIs need to run on all devices, not just desktops and laptops. See for example how Windows 8 sounds like one of the first OS' that will run across all these devices (in theory).
SAP's key mentions
> Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) - the platform acquired with Sybase for developing mobile apps - see MOB130
> NetWeaver Gateway - The layer that is transforming ABAP Dynpro screens into Gateway services (e.g. for Mobile Devices, Voice, Consumer Devices, Enterprise Applications such as MS Office, browser based applications, etc.)
see also MOB130, CD164, CD123 (Note that for NW Gateway backend systems must be based on NW 7.00 SP18 as a minimum)


*Solution Manager
SolMan has been gaining traction and a little more respect over the last 5 years. 7.1 is, I'm told, a reasonable improvement again and services like CHaRM (Change and Request Management) are improved. There were no real headline updates but here are some bullets
> A local SLD is not required
> Full Synchronization between central SLD and new LMDB as of SLD Version
NW 7.1 SP12
NW 7.11 SP7
NW 7.2 SP5
NW 7.3 SP3

Endianness

Endianness. It's a topic I come back to again and again as people hear about it and ask questions with concern (due to the mysterious nature of this issue) when they are looking at hetergeneous environments for their SAP systems.
At first I really thought it was purely OS related - i.e. how the OS kernel reads bytes - either
Big Endian (biggest byte in a "word" read first)
Little Endian (smallest byte in a "word" read first)
(there is middle endian too but lets not even go there - you need more in-depth reading for that)

However the direct relation to OS seems wrong to me on a second read. It seems it is actually related how how the hardware architecture is setup to store data. To quote Wikipedia (which I'm hoping is right) "Endianness is a difference in data representation at the hardware level and may or may not be transparent at higher levels, depending on factors such as the type of high level language used."

So when is this an issue? Well in context if you moved some of your SAP application servers from a Big Endian platform to a little endian platform (but left the CI on a different type). Then you could potentially have interface issues at the OS level. Especially it seems if you have files classed as "Text files" which have integers or floating point numbers in them. This type of data should ONLY be held in binary files (see SAP note 65050 "Data types and file formats in files (DATASET)"). Continuing off on a slight tangent - what exactly is a binary file? Actually this is something we in the IT industy inherently believe we know, but can we accurately define it? If you can that will help you to understand endianness. I'm part of the way there - here are some notes

"Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text"

"binary files that contain only textual data—without, for example, any formatting information—are called plain text files"

"Unlike Text files, there is no special character present in the binary mode files to mark End-of-file. The binary mode files keep track of the end-of-file from number of characters present in the dictionary entry of the file."

"Binary files typically contain bytes that are intended to be interpreted as something other than text characters."

"Some binary files contain headers, blocks of metadata used by a computer program to interpret the data in the file. For example, a GIF file can contain multiple images, and headers are used to identify and describe each block of image data. If a binary file does not contain any headers, it may be called a flat binary file. But the presence of headers are also common in plain text files, like email and html files."

Thanks to Wikipedia as always for being a brilliant resource for brushing up quickly on this stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_file.

I find having read up a bit I feel I have almost got a grasp on exactly what constitutes a "binary file" and that is a step to understanding Endianness and it's implications on hetergeneous environments...