Precise and EMC
Providing solutions for SAP Environments -
Jim Franklin, EMC Director of SAP Technology Alliance

As an SAP customer, you invest heavily in maintaining the SAP landscape, controlling database growth and optimizing the performance of this complex system.  However, your internal customers are asking for more; more collaboration, more user empowerment, compliance, business intelligence and competitive advantage.  This would be difficult enough, but you must do all of this while driving operational costs out of the budget and limiting capital investment.  You are being asked to reduce power and cooling costs, consolidate the infrastructure underneath the SAP landscape and manage it more like a business service.  As a matter of fact, the expectation is the SAP landscape becomes a business service: available, accessible, and with well-defined service options, yet also efficient, with reduced operational and capital costs, and improved asset utilization.  The SAP applications are, in many cases, the heart of the business operations, maintaining financial applications, year-end reporting, creating intellectual property or manufacturing workflows.  It must always be highly available and maintained.  Application outages are not acceptable and maintenance windows are often too short to keep pace with SAP's enhancement pack requirements.  We will investigate technologies and approaches available today that should help you meet these rigid goals, keep the application running and limit or reduce expenses.  

The ability to intelligently tier your SAP infrastructure and tune it to better meet service levels at the various business cycles would help you realize tangible progress against executing against managing your IT operations as a business service.  EMC, with its partner Precise, presents a powerful correlation from the SAP end user login and SAP transaction code (Tcode) all the way to the EMC storage at the LUN level, and this market leading SAP performance troubleshooting and root cause analysis benefits our customers greatly.
 
EMC and Precise recently launched the Precise Performance Assessment for SAP on EMC. This Assessment is designed to give SAP customers a better understanding of the performance and I/O profile of their Production environment in order to set storage tiering policies as well as explore upgrades to the lastest EMC storage technology such as the V-Max.

With tools like this, we are bringing you the building blocks to a vibrant business service level and allow you to:

• Accelerated & lower risk in deployment and management of SAP landscapes
• Optimized Production uptime & performance in support of 24/7 SAP environments
• Scalable infrastructure for future growth & expansion of the SAP landscape with reduced cost & higher ROI.

>> Precise Delivers Business Transaction Intelligence to EMC FAST Customers
>> Learn more about our partnership with EMC

Precise and EMC Automate TPM
Letter from Suku Krishnaraj, VP Product Management

Today, IT is facing intense pressure to cut costs while increasing output.  As infrastructure complexity grows, managing change and meeting or exceeding business SLAs (service level agreements) is becoming increasingly difficult.

To ensure QoS (Quality of Service) for customers and partners, Application Performance Management (APM) becomes critical.  Traditional APM solutions often require manual, error-prone effort by technical experts to troubleshoot problems.

These manual efforts may have been be sufficient for tens of application servers handling 1000s of transactions, but how many personnel will be needed to support 1000s of servers, handling millions of transactions?  Even if budget existed to hire the personnel necessary, throwing people at the problem doesn't scale well.  Businesses must find a better way.

We believe that the only hope is automation.

Precise already provides the best automated performance management platform on the market, solving the APM challenge for all stakeholders: Executives, Application owners, and IT experts.  Our latest release, Precise 8.8, expands our capabilities with an Executive dashboard which clearly shows business availability and performance by business, application, and transaction.  The performance is reported using business-friendly metrics such as Availability, SLA compliance, and Dollar impact by Users and Location.

Many of you have indicated a desire to migrate infrastructure to private, or public, clouds to help reduce costs.  We understand where you are headed, and through continued innovation we are positioning ourselves to help you get there, safely.  Precise's early decision to manage applications from a transaction perspective provides stretched IT teams the solution they need to eliminate the risk of application failures in physical, virtual or cloud-based infrastructures.

>> Learn about Precise for Storage Tiering
>> Read the press release

Share your Precise story!

Customer success is our inspiration.  Last quarter we ran a promotion in which we asked customers to tell us about their experience using Precise and in return we sent them a FLIP video camera.  The response was overwhelming and the videos that were submitted were both compelling and creative. 

The videos were shown at our world wide sales conference and proved to be inspirational for our sales team.  But the rules of the contest made it clear that Precise would not show these stories publically.  We think that many of your stories warrant an opportunity to be heard by your peers, other customers and companies who are evaluating Precise. 

If you or your company would like to tell your Precise Story publically, we want to make you aware of our customer reference program. 

...

Tips and Tricks
Analyzing Slow Running Process Chains for BW

SAP BW is a popular data warehouse, and reporting and analysis foundation.  Data, from a multitude of sources  is collected during short batch windows.   Performance bottlenecks within even a single data load job, if not detected and resolved quickly, can severely impact the availability of relevant data for reporting.

The objective of this document is to provide information on how to quickly pinpoint (and eventually resolve) common performance bottlenecks within SAP BW ETL (extraction, transformation and load) processes.

The information within this document is based upon Precise version 8.7.

>> Read more

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