D.B3a ERP Hosting – M17
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents an architectural shift for building business applications based on loosely-coupled services. In a multi-layered SOA environment the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered can be formally specified by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, typical SLAs are just specified at the top-level and do not allow service providers to manage their IT stack accordingly as they have no insight on how top-level SLAs translate to metrics or parameters at the various layers of the IT stack. The concept of the project SLA@SOI is a systematic grounding of SLAs from the business level down to the physical infrastructure.
The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) hosting use case is presented by SAP. ERP systems are heavily used in enterprises and public organizations for managing their business processes in an efficient, effective and transparent way. ERP systems belong to the most complex existing software systems as they cover huge functionalities that can be flexibly combined in a variety of scenarios. Furthermore, they must support very large, complex and possibly distributed business processes, both within (possibly global) organizations but also between different organizations. Traditional ERP systems tend to be very large, rather monolithic and hard to set up and manage. For overcoming these drawbacks, the paradigm of service-orientation has been successfully applied by SAP for building a new ERP solution that allows for simple and flexible composition and configuration of business functionality for creating customer-specific solutions in a highly efficient way. Another recent trend in this area is the on-demand delivery of software-based solutions which is particularly relevant for small and mediumsized customers who cannot afford for lengthy time and cost consuming solution implementation projects. Both of these aspects, the service-oriented architecture and the on-demand delivery model, give a strong motivation for investigating a rigid approach to multi-layered SLAs and SLA management for future SAP solutions.
This document presents a detailed specification of the ERP hosting use case from SAP. Our goal is to demonstrate holistic SLA planning and management capabilities in typical SAP landscapes. To achieve this goal an overall service manager architecture is defined, including core SLA-related features, and an initial system landscape of the demonstrator is described. Based on these three main scenarios are elaborated: firstly in the negotiation and planning phase, it is shown how the customers interact with SAP service providers to establish business SLAs. Based on business SLAs, SAP system sizing and planning can be optimized accordingly and such SLA requirements can be translated into landscape configuration parameters in application and infrastructure layers. Secondly, SAP systems are provisioned and deployed according to optimized parameters. Thirdly, at operation phase the SLAs at different layers are monitored, and proper change management procedures are triggered based on alerting or predictive monitoring. Through these three scenarios a full life cycle of service management with SLA capabilities are demonstrated for hosted SAP solutions.
