Today's businesses are in need of a host of requirements including a mainframe, a three-tier client/service approach, an enterprise service architecture using an adaptive computing infrastructure, standard software, integrated processes, and adaptable business. The enterprise services architecture is best of suite and consists of composite business scenarios, components and composites and an enterprise services platform. There is a move from the three-tier client/server architecture to the entreprise services architecture, according to the speakers.

A critical issue is the scalability. The system behaviour has to be predicted. A small system serves one user and consists of one server. On the other hand, in a scaled system, there are thousands of users, Terabytes of data, high throughput, large objects, 7x24h operation, high concurrency, globally connected users, and there are many servers.

The speakers gave some examples based on the SAP benchmark, and how the load is distributed on the multi-tier environment, showing 10-20% for presentation, 5-10% for the Internet, 60-70% for application and integration, 10-20% for the database. Scalability can be implemented vertically - from one-tier to multi-tier - or horizontally layer by layer from the presentation to the database layer.

SAP developed the NetWeaver capability to perform adaptive computing. The speakers stated that the SAP NetWeaver provides a way to virtualize application services, and provides a single central point of control for flexible compute resource assignment for existing and new code to run on dedicated or changing hardware. A computing infrastructure is called adaptive, if it allows the dynamic assignment of hardware resources to serve specific application services. In this way, SAP NetWeaver enables an 'Adaptive Computing Infrastructure' and thus ensures that business solutions based on SAP NetWeaver run at peak cost efficiency, as the speakers explained to the audience.

The characteristics of the building blocks are for the computing building block: HW+OS provisioning, easy add and remove computing, resources with low administration efforts, single point of OS maintenance, netboot@SAP (shared OS), netboot, OS deployment or equivalent technology. For the application services the features are SAP instances managed and assigned to a dedicated computing resource (e.g. databases, application server), and installation-free provisioning (e.g. application server).

Related to the storage building block there is no local disk space required to run SAP applications, application relevant data are stored on a storage system within a network, redundancy on level storage is required (Raid, access paths).

For the control building block an Adaptive Computing Controller provides a single point of control to operate, observe and manage an adaptive business solution, delivered with SAP Solution Manager 3.1 SP12, WebAS 6.40 (J2EE ), based on SLD (CIM based).

According to the speakers, adaptive computing is a proven concept. The first customers like Hella and T-Systems report TCO savings of around 25%. By increasing flexibility and decreasing TCO, ROI is much more visible. Additionally there is a high flexibility to run new projects and to assign and utilize hardware resources. The set-up and integration of new components into the common infrastructure is easy. It enables a straight forward way for innovation and growth.

http://service.sap.com/adaptive