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ACHIEVING CONSISTENT AND RELIABLE PROCESSING IMPROVING AND PROTECTING CRITICAL WORKLOAD THROUGHPUT OPTIMIZING HARDWARE RESOURCES A COMPARISON OF SAP JOB SCHEDULING SOLUTIONS
Background
SAP background (batch) job processing plays a pivotal role within all SAP environments from the small single instance to the very largest multi-instance, multi-module implementations. It is, however, still vastly overlooked as a key area where huge gains can be made to your SAP processing throughput speeds and consistency, along with a significant reduction in human maintenance overheads and hardware resource utilization. SAP background processing is traditionally very resource intensive, in terms of both human management (to ensure that critical processes run in a timely and accurate manner) and in hardware utilization with a large percentage of your SAP processing power being used for background processes. Added to that, it is now an almost ubiquitous requirement to schedule, execute and manage background processes across many different SAP systems and non-SAP systems in a seamless and centralized manner, to provide end-to-end business process management. This has led to an unprecedented improvement in the number of options available to SAP customers designed to improve their background processing speeds and reliability, reduce their human and system overheads associated with background processing and to provide them with a common enterprise wide platform for background scheduling which can be visualized, executed and managed centrally.
This paper explores those options, describes the main differences between them and, most importantly, details the value and benefits that you can expect to derive from each option.
UC4 and BMC Control-M) and SAP Central Process Scheduling V8 (SAP CPS). SAP CPS V8 is a culmination of 5 years joint development by SAP and Redwood Software and is now a true extension of the core SAP system, especially considering that the latest version is fully embedded within Netweaver 7 and is very tightly integrated with Solution Manager. The first thing to note about SAP CPS is that it is effectively developed as an SAP product that is licensed, validated and supported directly by SAP.
SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood Event based dynamic scheduling and support for multiple SAP and non-SAP preconditions and events SAP Workload Management for scheduled and non-scheduled batch workloads Context driven process chains via variables and real-time SAP variant creation and replacement. Interception and Management of non-scheduled SAP workloads (user and system initiated) Visibility and management of all child (spawned) processes Hardware Load Balancing Tight Solution Manager Integration for centralized Job Scheduling Management and documentation Netweaver Deployed Special integration with IS-U and SAP FI Financial Closing Cockpit Advanced recovery and restart automation Integrated SAP UME Security Fast import/migration from other scheduling solutions
Third Party Scheduling Systems (IBM Tivoli, BMC Control-M, UC4 etc.) Parallel job processing chains (advanced, complex predecessor / successor relationships) Cross system, enterprise wide scheduling Centralized management, monitoring and alerting Graphical job/process chain views Basic event based triggering (typically only file events rather than SAP events) Some automated restart functionality
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SAP Job Scheduling and Workload Management is still vastly overlooked as a key area where huge gains can be made to improving business critical SAP processing speeds and consistency, reducing your maintenance overheads and optimizing your hardware
to define multiple job chains for each day of the week. As you can imagine, the change management maintenance overheads can be vastly reduced by building context based schedules. Furthermore, within an SAP environment it is extremely common to see the same ABAP being executed with different variants throughout a batch schedule. SAP CPS requires that you only need to define one job definition per ABAP and at execution time simply pass the name of the variant that you want to use with the ABAP. Add to that the capability if creating or replacing variants at job execution time and you can appreciate that there is some significant power within CPS. We have seen this functionality reduce the number of job definitions by over 60%, again significantly reducing the maintenance overheads and errors associated with batch scheduling.
analysis workshops and SAP CPS implementations weve seen upwards of 20% of the workloads hitting an SAP system to be unscheduled and unmanaged. That accounts for a lot of potential to reclaim valuable processing resources. You can apply rules to CPS to intercept such jobs based on a multitude of criteria to perhaps automatically hold these jobs to run at a more desirable time, or to run them on a different system, or to not allow them to run at all. Interception rules can even be applied to have CPS examine the variants being used and ensure that jobs are not submitted with wildcard variants which are well know to cause serious system degradation.
Similarly, SAP CPS can respond to many other types of SAP events and change priorities of workloads accordingly: for instance, if Solution Manager detects that online dialogue times are running SAP Workload Management below a required SLA, then CPS can detect this condition and automatically SAP CPS is not only responsible for job throttle certain workloads via its scheduling within SAP, it also acts as the queuing system to release more
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The huge additional value and uniqueness of SAP CPS's capabilities within an SAP environment, along with it's strategic future within the SAP landscape has led to many companies adopting a co-existence strategy whereby SAP CPS is being used to schedule and manage all SAP workloads whilst still continuing to use an incumbent third party scheduling system for scheduling outside SAP
SAP CPS Increasing the Value of the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence SAP Central Process Scheduling: Frequently Asked Questions
SAP Central Process Scheduling Advanced Automation and Monitoring SAP CPS Versions and Functionality Overview (PDF 192 KB)
IDC Report Increased Operational Efficiency with SAP CPS (PDF 212 KB)
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