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