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In roughly the last two years of Linux migrations with REALTECH, the percentage of UNIX as migration source has risen to 68.2%, or expressed differently, more than two out of three SAP migrations to Linux come from UNIX. The percentage of discontinued UNIX flavors (Tru64, Reliant) has dropped to roughly 5%. The UNIX flavors now suffering the greatest losses are HP-UX (40.9%) and AIX (18.2%). The average Linux migration customer gets bigger in size, revenue, and number of employees, and comes from industries with increasingly more business-critical applications. A significant portion of REALTECH’s Linux migration customers has even run mainframe systems for several years. In the database sector, ORACLE has recovered from its previous loss in market share in migrations to Linux and is gaining market share on Linux at roughly the same pace as MaxDB (+13.6%). The average size of databases migrated to Linux increases significantly every year, and in absolute size the TB limit has been crossed long since. The absolute number of migrations to Linux has almost doubled from the first statistical evaluation period (2001 – 09/2005) to the second one (10/2005 – 03/2008). There is no doubt that the movement towards Linux in SAP data centers is gaining momentum strongly and fast.
Cost is frequently named as the major motivation for migrating to Linux, and frequently the cost argument is connected with the motivation of attaining vendor independence. As a result, Linux on Power or Itanium does not play a very significant role in the SAP migration market. Stability and readiness for business-critical applications are assumed to be indispensable prerequisites, and hardly questioned any more. The list of REALTECH’s Linux customers includes the high-tech defense industry, airlines, energy providers, automotive suppliers, and chemical companies, as well as narrow margin businesses such as hosting providers. The largest SAP production database running on Linux and known to REALTECH exceeds 10 TB in size in a high-availability configuration. Linux has reached the final level of criticality in SAP data centers.
REALTECH presents a model to calculate and compare SAP-related server cost in this whitepaper for you to be able to examine the cost implications of a SAP deployment on Linux versus UNIX. To appreciate the current development in the server market, an understanding of the development of CPU performance over the last couple of years is necessary. Multi-core and multi-threading technologies have multiplied CPU-power in such a way that frequently a standard two- or four-CPU server will easily outrun much larger systems of the same OS only one or two years older. Deployments that previously required 8- or 16-way servers may be implemented on 2- or 4-way servers now, or deployments which required a considerable number of application servers before can now be consolidated on fewer servers.
The rise of x64-based servers into the midrange section of server performance is a problem for UNIX: Four- and eight-way x64 server systems now easily reach into benchmark regions previously reserved for eight-way systems and higher, usually running UNIX. In undiscounted EURO/SAPS, the x64 processor architecture with Linux provides the best four results overall, and six out of the best eight; and the best price/performance ratio does not come in the order of lowest server performance. Thus, it’s not simply the smallest servers offering the cheapest solution.
Mainly the x64 cost advantage triggers migrations to the Linux platform, and this corresponds well with our observation that Linux on Power or Itanium plays an almost negligible role as SAP platform migration target. It is true that Microsoft Windows would likely deliver the same advantage in associated direct costs. The reason why UNIX customers are going to Linux on x64 is the greater affinity between Linux and the current operating system. Even large discounts for servers based on traditional UNIX architectures will not make them competitive with comparable x64 offerings.
Migration costs are customer-specific and largely depend on the size of enterprise, the size of the SAP systems to be migrated, and especially availability and downtime requirements. Those customers REALTECH evaluated so far have achieved a return on investment (RoI) in migrating from UNIX to Linux between 9 months and 2 1/2 years. In this analysis, we will present an example of a customer who realized high platform-related cost savings in a business-critical SAP landscape with high-availability requirements by moving to Linux.
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