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For entry-level to mid-sized SAP customers who are already comfortable with an iSCSI-based SAP landscape featuring Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server, the HP LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SAN family offers a total storage solution for virtualized or non-virtualized HP server platforms.
In addition to all-inclusive functionality, the high levels of performance, scalability, availability, and manageability delivered by each storage node make the LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SAN very attractive to enterprise-class SAP customers that do not have the budget for Fibre Channel SANs but still need to process a relatively large workload with a minimum of downtime.
In today's competitive environment, you need to accelerate business growth, while keeping costs under control. A primary contributor to escalating IT costs is the over-provisioning of storage space to solve growing SAP database and application capacity requirements. However, with a LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SAN, you can now resolve short-term issues associated with applications running out of space by over-allocating storage capacity; you simply switch on the Thin Provisioning flag on a per-volume basis as outlined in this paper.
The LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SAN can lower your total cost of ownership by simplifying database administration and storage provisioning without introducing complex configuration methodologies. Furthermore, this storage solution can help you achieve a significantly higher return on your investment by enhancing storage utilization, reducing planned SAP application maintenance downtime, and increasing the productivity of your SAP Basis administrators. This latter benefit is particularly beneficial for mid-sized SAP environments that may not have the option of separating the roles of SAP Basis, system, and storage administrators.
This white paper outlines the features and benefits of a LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SAN and provides sample configurations for environments with bare-metal and virtualized SAP servers. Performance testing designed to validate these storage solutions is also described.
Target audience: This paper is for SAP Basis administrators wishing to learn more about deploying iSCSI storage. However, in general, the reader does not require experience with SAP software.
This white paper describes testing performed in October 2009.
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