Near-Zero Downtime Maintenance for SAP Business Suite Systems

Improvements of downtime minimization capabilities for Software Update manager (SUM)

The downtime minimization feature nZDM for SUM is general available since some months.
After a very successful period of controlled projects on customer site all over the world this feature is now included in the Software Update Manager 1.0 (SUM). Until it was shipped with SP7 it has been used on customer side in more than 150 executions, 40 productively. It is a main improvement to reduce the business downtime significantly.

In the next step customer transports are integrated in the downtime minimized SUM procedure and the existing nZDM for SUM has been improved with  SUM 1.0 SP8 delivery as well. Since November SP09 is available on the SMP.

What do you have to invest?

There are no separate license fees for using the downtime minimization capabilities of SUM. SUM is part of the SL Toolset and the newest version can be downloaded from the SAP Service Market Place.
This document describes the new available feature and the benefits you can expect regarding downtime optimization of SUM and will be regularly updated to keep you up to date.

Benefits of nZDM for SUM

In SUM you have the option to use one of the following pre-configurations:

• “Single System” =  no use of shadow instance (update) or shadow instance runs exclusively (upgrade)
• “Standard” = similar to EHPi or SAPup
• “Advanced” = intention to minimize the downtime

In SAP’s Software Update Manager (SUM) the advanced pre-configuration is used for extensive downtime optimization. Using the shadow instance for the main import (nZDM for SUM) is an introduced option in the “advanced” pre-configuration mode.

Considering all downtime minimization capabilities which are offered in the advanced pre-configuration mode of SUM you can select:

intensive use of parallelization for Batch processing, DDL processes and R3TRANS

• SGEN in the shadow
• customer transports (on request)

With this feature, you can move the customer transports to the SUM procedure. The business downtime is reduced with help of moving customer transports to the uptime phase. This feature is currently shipped on request. For further details please read SCN Blog: customer transports in SUM

• nZDM for SUM

nZDM for SUM can be used for applying Support Packages, applying Enhancement Packages or upgrading an ABAP-based SAP Business Suite or SAP NetWeaver System.

Which improvement can be expected when nZDM is used in SUM? 

The downtime minimization benefit is depending on the level of update. An update of ECC 6.0 EHP1 to EHP7 is much more benefitial than an SPS implementation of SP9 to SPS10. Therefore the main focus of customer activities is on EHP implementations or upgrades.

Based on the already made experiences on customer side nZDM for SUM enables a minimum downtime of around 2:30h – 3:00h when implmenting an EHP or run an upgrade.
The overall technical downtime (= minimum downtime + post-processing) is reduced significantly although the post-processing phase is extended due to the nZDM feature to around 0:45h – 1:00h
So in total we have an overall technical downtime of 3:15h – 4:00h

Just compare it with your key figures of your last EHP update.

Please find below 4 examples from real customer projects and a comparison between the overall technical downtime with SUM without nZDM or EHPi and SUM with nZDM:

Thanks to high customer interest and close cooperation we got a very good overview about working in different system environments and sizes.
Based on our experiences the technical downtime reduction seems to be stable and independent from database or data size as nZDM for SUM was tested by big customers as well.

The following measure shows an internal comparison between SUM for SAP ERP 6.0 with and without nZDM for SUM.
Also in this example the technical downtime is reduced > 55%!

The end-user realizes the wow-effect for sure when the downtime is reduced significantly!

Additionally you see that the overall project time is increased to app. 20-30%. This additional time is used during the phases running in uptime. This has to be considered in the update project planning.

With SP8 of SUM the copy mechanism is changed. The new introduced Fast Data Copy reduces the time for copying in the pre-processing enormously. This means the pre-processing is reduced with the newest SP of SUM 1.0. You don't have to activate it, the fast data copy is used automatically for most of the tables.

Functionality

How does nZDM for SUM work?

The nZDM capability of SUM uses the main import instance for the main import.

Quick facts of nZDM for SUM:

• Introduction of "Record & Replay" technique for business transactions based on database trigger technology
• Minimizes manual effort: all steps run automatically in background
• Minimal additional hardware requirements due to shadow-technique, only additional DB space needed (80 – 350 GB)
• Is available for all ABAP-based Business Suite products

Record & Replay means that database changes during uptime of the maintenance process create triggers, which records the changes. The recordings are only needed for tables which are used for the update / upgrade in the shadow. With help of the recording the shadow tables will be updated after the upgrade/update phases in the uptime. The majority of the recording updates are run in the uptime. Only the delta (last 10%) has to run just before the switch in the downtime.

 
As of now nZDM can be used for the following databases:

• DB2 LUW
• Oracle
• MS SQL
• DB2 for z/OS
• Max DB

SUM allows using the nZDM capabilities for the following standard software maintenance activities:

• Apply a Support Package on any ABAP-System with a target release based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2, SP8 or higher
• Install an Enhancement Package on top of any ABAP-System with a target release based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2, SP8 or higher
• Upgrade your system to any ABAP-System with a target release based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 3 or higher

For further operational details please see note 1678564