Helping Customers Determine Their Hardware Requirements
It is an iterative process to translate business requirements into hardware requirements, and is usually performed early in the project.
Sizing means determining the hardware requirements of an SAP System such as network bandwidth, physical memory, CPU power in SAPS, and I/O capacity. The size of the hardware and database is influenced by both business aspects and technological aspects. This means that the number of users using the various application components and the data load they put on the network must be taken into account.
SAPS
SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) is a hardware-independent unit of measurement that describes the performance of a system configuration in the SAP environment. It is derived from the Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark, where 100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business-processed order line items per hour.
In technical terms, this throughput is achieved by processing 6,000 dialog steps (screen changes), 2,000 postings per hour in the SD Benchmark, or 2,400 SAP transactions.
In the SD benchmark, fully business-processed means the entire business process of an order line item: creating the order, creating a delivery note for the order, displaying the order, changing the delivery, posting a goods issue, listing orders, and creating an invoice
There are two different widely independent performance KPIs for systems – throughput and server response time for single processes.
User-based sizing: We defined three types of active users who work with the system to a different degree. Merely counting the users can be done quite easily. The disadvantage is that this estimation is quite rough as it says very little about the actual throughput these users produce.
Throughput-based sizing: This model is quite thorough because it relies on actual or on actually expected throughput. However, this model relies on a number of assumptions in business terms (e.g. number of order line items per year) that need to be cross-checked against the individual installation.
Customer Performance Test: The according tests are done in a customer system with customer data. The disadvantage is that conducting these tests requires considerable time and money.
- Greenfield Sizing
- Productive Sizing
- Expert Sizing
- Sizing methods and tools
- Principles of scalability
- User-based and throughput-based sizing
- Quick Sizer
- Expert sizing and creation of sizing guidance