ERP Hosting

The ERP Hosting use case is researching the practicalities and benefits of holistic SLA planning and management when offering hosted ERP solutions for SMEs. The perspectives of both the service provider and the consumer are being considered. The challenge is to construct a solid business offering and practical end-user interface that both abstracts and masters the technical complexity of hosted ERP systems.

Demo Video

Business Scenarios

This use case is built around three business scenarios.

SLA Driven Sizing and Planning is designed to validate that based on the customer requirements agreed through the established SLAs, the system will facilitate the design of a landscape that will be able to sustain these service levels. For example, planning an SAP landscape would involve identifying the number of dialog instances required as well as the infrastructure on which they should be hosted. The quantity and relative locations of databases and central SAP instances should also be decided.

SLA Driven Landscape Configuration demonstrates the automated deployment & configuration of the SAP landscape. The configuration parameters can be derived from the SLAs generated in the first scenario. The configuration parameters can be at both the SAP software stack and virtualized infrastructure level. At the software layer the number of dialog and update processes is set, whilst at the infrastructure level the configuration is of virtualized resource parameters such as CPU, memory and storage. Policies such as monitoring and management thresholds are also configured in this scenario.

SLA Driven Landscape Management examines the operation and management of the landscape at run time. Together with the previous scenarios, the end-to-end process of service planning, provisioning, and management can be evaluated. The primary overall objective is to provision services according to established SLAs. During the lifetime of the services (and the corresponding SLAs) the SLA Manager is responsible for the appropriate monitoring and management activities that ensure that the service is operating within the terms of the agreement. This scenario leverages the previous scenarios, focusing in particular on monitoring and change management.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.

Typical Hosting Setup

A typical hosting setup is explored, as provided by the hosting branch of SAP. It also takes into account hosting requirements and setups of other industrial players such as T-Systems. 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: they have no insight on how top-level SLAs translate to metrics or parameters at the various layers of the IT stack below. SLA@SOI is pursuing a systematic grounding of SLAs all the way from the business level down to the physical infrastructure.