Read the case given below and answer the questions given at the end.
CASE STUDY-1
SQL Server 2008 Runs SAP ERP Database to Support Microsoft Worldwide Situation
Microsoft has relied on SAP ERP software to run its financial operations since 1996 when it first deployed the solution on Microsoft® SQL Server® 6.5. Since then Microsoft's SAP ERP deployment, which now has a 6.5-terabyte backend database, has grown to join the top 5 percent of the largest SAP ERP deployments worldwide.With 92,000 employees, operations in 89 countries, and 2007 revenues exceeding U.S.$51 billion, Microsoft has plenty of financial and operational data to track. The company's SAP ERP system handles Microsoft's treasury, worldwide sales, worldwide finance, worldwide human resources, worldwide operations, material management, U.S. payroll, and other mission-critical functions.The company was happy with how its SAP ERP deployment was running on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. SQL Server 2005 had provided excellent performance and rock-solid stability for the company's worldwide SAP-based operations.
SAP ERP performance at Microsoft includes:
• Over 1,300,000 dialog steps per business day
• 19 million transactions per month
• An average user response time of less than 0.7 seconds
As the SAP team members looked at the beta edition of SQL Server 2008 they saw features that they wanted to benefit from immediately, including database and backup compression technology and improvements in SQL Server Database Mirroring technologies.But with so many of the company's mission-critical worldwide systems directly or indirectly dependent upon SAP ERP, the upgrade would need to be seamless, and performance and stability would need to be at least as good as the group had enjoyed with SQL Server 2005. In short, SQL Server 2008 needed to be enterprise grade— even in beta release."SAP ERP serves as the financial backbone of Microsoft," says Hans Reutter, Principal OE System Manager at Microsoft. "This means that we don't upgrade our database and other infrastructure without having complete confidence that it is enterprise ready."In February 2008, Microsoft upgraded its SAP ERP environment to the beta edition of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise running on the Wndows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The SAP deployment has a three-tier architecture that includes:
• Presentation Tier. The presentation tier includes a fat client, the SAP graphical user interface, which is used bysome 2,000 heavy users of the SAP environment. The rest of Microsoft's worldwide employees access SAP through a Web browser, with access handled by 4 load-balanced servers running the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and Internet Information Services (IIS).
• Application Tier. The application tier includes 12 load-balanced SAP application servers running Windows Server2003 Enterprise Edition.
• Database Tier. The 6.5-terabyte SAP ERP database is hosted on the beta edition of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise,running on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The database grows by about 200 GB a month. The full database ishosted on a single HP DL585-G5 server with 4-socket quad-core processors and 68 GB of RAM. It is connected using fiber optics to an EMC CX3-80 SAN disk storage array. To help ensure high availability, the database is setup with SQL Server 2008 synchronous database mirroring with automatic failover enabled. The second database server and storage is an exact copy of the primary server and storage to allow a failover without any performance impact.
The SAP deployment takes advantage of features new for SQL Server 2008, including:
• Data Compression.
• Backup Compression.
• Enhanced Auditing.
• Resource Governor.
• Enhanced Database Mirroring.
• Enhanced Autogrowth and Lock Management.
Benefits
Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise gave Microsoft the data compression it needed to support better resource utilization and to reduce the size of backup storage required for its 6.5-terabyte SAP ERP database. The Microsoft SAP group plans to use the enhanced auditing feature of SQL Server 2008 to capture access information required for compliance reasons, while enjoying improved high availability with Database Mirroring, and reduced downtime needs with Online Indexing.Resource Governor will enable the team to define the amounts of resources that individual workloads are allowed to use during execution. "We could use Resource Governor to regulate resources available for backups," says Bregler. "We may want to restrict backups to 10 percent of resources. Or if we wanted to increase the rate of backups, we could increase available resources. Resource Governor is a powerful tool for ensuring that key workloads always have the resources required to get the job done."
Results
Microsoft gained the data compression, backup compression, integrity of change tracking, and other benefits it sought by upgrading its 6.5-terabyte SAP ERP database to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise running on Wndows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The combination of Database Mirroring and Online Indexing has reduced the need for scheduled downtime, helping the group to enjoy 99.99 percent uptime for its platform.
SQL Server 2008 Runs SAP ERP Database to Support Microsoft Worldwide
Questions:
(a) Why Microsoft decided to move on SQL server 2008?
(b) Briefly explain any new feature of SQL server 2008 used in SAP deployment
