Technical tables in SAP take up expensive space
Technical logging and content tables can take up unnecessary space in SAP test landscapes. Excluding these tables during copy is just one of the many innovative techniques used in the Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) suite.
The result is a solid reduction in space for most of our clients on their test systems, but it doesn’t solve the problem at the source, namely the production landscape.
Let’s take a look at a typical ERP or S/4 system landscape. Multiple full copies of the production SAP database will exist across your infrastructure, creating significant overhead in terms of space. Even with block-level deduplication in your SAN and backup systems, we can still conservatively estimate that the production database is replicated up to five times across the full environment for every 1GB used. This estimation holds true whether you host your system on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid.
EPI-USE Labs’ System Analysis reports provide a simple way to review data volumes in your SAP databases. In this example System Analysis report, we can see that the top four largest tables out of 10 on a typical ~1TB ERP system present a good opportunity for technical data reduction. These tables contain:
- application logs
- change documents
- DB table change logs and IDOCs.
Normally, you can archive or even remove these items from the system with no impact on business processes.
Taking the example further to understand data usage on the complete system, if the top four tables consume ~84GB, then using the 1:5 rule-of-thumb, the total usage across the system amounts to ~420GB.
Using DSM, we can safely assume that a 90{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} data reduction is possible, which translates in a system-wide reduction of ~375GB (or ~75GB per copy).
This potential reduction has a significant impact ‒ the cost savings could mean that actions like expensive SAN updates could be implemented sooner, and below budget.
More importantly, we used only one system type in our example. Imagine the impact when the same approach is applied to other common SAP systems like BW, PI, Gateway and Solution Manager.
Start on your robust test data management journey
EPI-USE Labs is offering a free readiness report to validate your SAP system size, footprint, supported objects and more, to help you rationalise and secure your SAP landscape.
What does the free Readiness Report provide?
- visual and interactive insight into your SAP systems
- data volumes, largest tables – highlighting potential space savings
- custom tables, active BADIs, business functions in use
- used objects supported for Data on Demand copying
- and much more.
This article is sponsored by EPI-USE Labs
