SAP TechEd Day 3

Today I attended the following sessions in whole or part:

• BW201 - Guidelines for Managing SAP Business Information Warehouse 3.5
• NW203 - Integrating Third-Party Applications Using SAP NetWeaver
• XI201 - SAP Exchange Infrastructure and SAP Business Intelligence Integration
• CI203 - Adaptive Computing
• CI204 - Enterprise Grid Technology and Applications

BW201 - Guidelines for Managing SAP Business Information Warehouse 3.5 - The key thing I learned here was about 'Process Chains' which are very analogous to SQL Server DTS workflows.  The talk focused on use of process chains to manage BW operational activities from data loading to transformation and report pre-processing or aggregation.  The talk mentioned compression of data - need to investigate that for reducing the size of our BW database.  Process Chains have a graphical modeller like DTS does and pre-canned 'widgets' for performing operations.  The workflow does not appear to have the richness of DTS in SQL 2000.  The rest of the talk focused on performance and monitoring analysis of BW using standard SAP transactions/tools.

NW203 - Integrating Third-Party Applications Using SAP NetWeaver - Brief discussion of leveraging distributed repositories in knowledge management scenarios (see my previous post from Day 2 under NW205) - SAP provides repository 'connectors' to allow SAP KM solutions to surface content from various repositories (File System, Web Server (http/s), WebDAV, etc.).  Per NW205 apparently MS has committed as part of the interop deal to create a repository manager to allow SAP KM to connect to Sharepoint repositories.

They discussed and demoed the Web Services support built into the SAP Web Application server. Using SE37 the function must be 'RFC Enabled'.  Then select the menu 'Utilities -> More Utilities -> Create Web Service'.  Name the virtual interface, select the function module as the endpoint.  The web service must still be enabled in some way through transaction SICF I believe.  You can test the web service using tcode WSADMIN.  I checked one of our test systems and apparently this stuff is not installed because the menus and WSADMIN tcode are not available.

XI201 - SAP Exchange Infrastructure and SAP Business Intelligence Integration - I didn't stay for the whole thing, but this talk described how to post delta business content into BW through XI from any external system/web service.

CI203 - Adaptive Computing - This talk discussed adaptive computing as a virtualization layer between SAP application servers and vendor hardware.  They have a sample system set up with blade servers and a NAS device where the servers do not have any local configuration - all OS and configuration data is stored on the NAS storage.  SAP automatically configures a server by starting the SAP services through a centralized controller.  The machine is not auto-provisioned in terms of installing software, but simply connected to the appropriate configuration on the storage tier in some way.  The service can then be moved from one server to another automatically.  The SAP service is stopped/restarted however, so it is not a high availability solution. Microsoft is a part of their 'Adaptive Computing Council'. 

CI204 - Enterprise Grid Technology and Applications - This talk demoed auto-provisioning of distributed computing resources to handle specific computing intensive applications.  They demoed APO Optimizer processes being auto-provisioned (installed) and run on a pool of 4 way servers.  They also showed Internet Pricing Configurator (IPC) handling increasing user load - when a preset threshold was passed the grid added more processes to servers in the pool to handle the load.  As the load reduced the processes where stopped and removed from the servers.  They discussed grid computing as a way to either reduce TCO by having less servers (share server resources among departments and have less of them, for example), or to increase performance by pooling existing resources to accomodate higher loads.  There were Windows servers in the 'grid'.  The applications they are delivering are focused, stateless, computing intesive applications that can be easily started/stopped on the servers.  SAP Application servers would not work well in this scenario due to their stateful nature.  They stated that more applications are being enhanced to support grid computing, but would not say which ones specifically.