SAP customers will have the option of a new ‘Refresh as a Service’ (RAAS) offering, thanks to a new alliance between EPI-USE Labs, which specialises in SAP landscape optimisation, and Revelation Software Concepts (RSC), creator of the Rev-Trac SAP change control automation platform.
The new offering, being rolled out in the APAC region, will take a two-pronged approach to system copies, supporting an “automated and seamless” SAP landscape refresh, according to the two companies.
Any WIP (work in progress) SAP transports that are present in the target refresh system need to be reapplied following a refresh, but identifying these transports pre- and post-refresh is difficult, taking users a considerable amount of time to investigate, identify and then reapply the missing transports.
“We see this issue more and more among our customers,” said Daniel Parker, EPI-USE Labs professional services manager, APJ. “By combining forces with RSC to offer a powerful datacopy and transport compare solutions and delivering it as a RAAS, SAP test teams finally have a method by which they can leverage the best of both technologies with a pricing approach that hasn’t previously been available.”
EPI-USE Labs Data Sync Manager will be used for the automated copy and scramble of data to non-production systems, and RSC’s Rev-Trac will be used to identify transport re-import requirements across non-production systems. EPI-USE Labs’ consultants will be able to quickly identify the SAP transports that may need to be reimported, perform the import of the transports and leave the customer with a fully synchronised system post-service.
The SAP-certified DSM product suite facilitates the rapid creation of new non-production systems, reduces the data footprint when refreshing existing existing test clients or creating new ones, and copies selected data on demand, with integrated scrambling of data for security.
“With DevOps, you want to create your operating procedures (SOP) around a refresh, and part of that process is having predictable outage windows,” said Rick Porter, vice president, business development, RSC. “Together, EPI-USE Labs and RSC effectively convert a tedious manual mechanism into a very simple, consistent and automated methodology for returning the refreshed system to the state it was in prior to the refresh within a predictable window.”
