When the core operations of an entire organisation will rely upon a single, complex application then it is essential that the supporting infrastructure be designed very carefully. Server downtime is whole company downtime Availability. ERP systems are among the most demanding IT applications being deployed today.
Data sets are large when the application is deployed, but can quickly grow to be huge.
The following overview is a SAP installation for one of our clients. However, the same issues arise when implementing PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Baan, Oracle or other ERP applications. A government department was preparing to put a SAP system into production and began evaluating storage solutions. Their key concerns were data integrity, system availability, performance and scalability. However, cost constraints forced the client to step away from a SAN and we offered them our storage solution in a straight SCSI form which still had all the reliability capability of the fibre solution,can share servers, but provides a more cost effective design.