Questions and Answers
Modern SAP Imaging and Data Archiving With SolutionXchg:
Questions and Answers
Companies regularly contact Solution Exchange to ask about upgrading their archival systems. Many are getting ready for SAP S/4Hana, and because SAP Hana’s price structure is based on the size of the in-memory database, implementing an archiving solution that can help reduce your database size – thanks to relocating documents from the SAP database to an external archive – can be a major cost reduction.
As a help to companies that want to take the next step, Solution Exchange’s Managing Partner Jochen Hager answers some typical questions about modern data archival.
Why should I upgrade my archival system?
Many companies purchased expensive Enterprise Content Management systems during the ECM hype in the 90’s. The majority of these systems proved to be oversized and overly complicated in supporting the business user community. They require premium service costs for configuration changes or upgrades, and they demand high annual maintenance payments.
How do I know it’s time to upgrade?
At the end of the day it comes down to three major pain points with current solutions: high annual maintenance cost, excessive infrastructure complexity, and requirements for extensive administrative know-how.
For many companies, an external event will be the actual trigger. This could be a merger, divesture, outsourcing initiative, or even a move to consolidate an internal IT architecture, either on-premise or in the cloud. This is fairly typical, because, as with all IT initiatives, the business case drives change. An external event creates a business case that gets management’s attention.
Why should I use KGS ContentServer4Storage?
The KGS ContentServer4Storage is an extremely modern product, highly efficient and very cost effective choice for all archiving needs of SAP customers. It employs an
intelligent and agile architecture; it eliminates the need for an internal database; and it’s very flexible in supporting a variety of storage products, including the KGS Store with its highly efficient file storage mechanism.
Also, rather than taking a one-product-for-all-needs approach, KGS has chosen to build highly specialized products for just one purpose: SAP Document and Data Archiving. Therefore, KGS Solutions are some of the best in the market in terms of speed, features and manageability
For instance, the KGS Migration4ArchiveLink tool is fully transaction-oriented and database-controlled. The tool can be stopped cold and will be able to restart at the exact position without losing a single document.
Even better, it creates a full transcript of the migration process, logging the movements of every single document in the archive with the date and time it was migrated and the final status of the migration. Error checking allows dealing with any discrepancies during the process.
How should I go about upgrading?
Start with a simple prototype. This will help confirm the capabilities of the solution and verify migration speed and time, which make up the greatest cost factor. Time translates into work hours and that’s where the majority of the cost is. Savings in maintenance payments and reduced hardware cost alone makes the project pay for itself typically by the second year, while being cost neutral in the first year.
It’s best to put in the up-front effort required for proper planning and testing of use cases ahead of time. Once the relevant use cases are documented and supported by testing scripts, the switch will be practically automatic.
With the KGS Migration4ArchiveLink, the task of moving the documents becomes quite easy. An intuitive user interface allows you to upload batches of document IDs for processing.
The processing itself can be sped up and slowed down by increasing or decreasing the number of parallel work processes on the server. As a measuring stick: In a recent project, Solution Exchange was able to migrate 21 million documents (4TB) in eight weeks active migration time. User downtime was a matter of a few minutes, since the migration is totally transparent to them.
Why should I choose Solution Exchange?
Solution Exchange and KGS can deliver a turnkey implementation that takes place seamlessly in the background with absolutely no end user impact. Cut-over
time will be less than 15 minutes and does not have to be scheduled for an SAP maintenance window. Solution Exchange will do the work so you can focus on your business.
In a recent example, Solution Exchange worked with a major chemical manufacturer to design and implement a solution to sunset their existing and very expensive OpenText Documentum-based SAP imaging and archiving solution with KGS ContentServer4Storage.
The design significantly simplified the client’s architecture and reduced the number of servers required to handle SAP archiving requests from eight or more down to just two. Also, the upgrade helped them further modernize their environment by moving to a cloud-based file storage system hosted on Microsoft Azure. The project is currently in its production pilot and is on schedule for full implementation by the end of Q4.
Finally, Solution Exchange has deep expertise and experience with SAP products, and has helped numerous customers in the US and Europe.