Conclusion
Downtime
Depends on the extent of splitting and the degree of parallelization. When importing, the limiting factor is often the index structure.
Administrators and SAP maintainers in the x86 world under Windows and various Unix derivatives can nowadays choose from a wealth of software solutions for system support. In contrast, administrators in the System i world and SAP support staff in this environment are often left to their own devices. Nevertheless, the special system architecture and the peculiarities of the DB2 database integrated in the operating system, as well as the specific applications, also pose challenges for system tool developers.
Automation tool reduces time required to create test environments
In order to have up-to-date data and exactly the same software versions on an SAP test system for meaningful tests as are active on the production system, the production systems are regularly copied completely to the test system. However, many settings in the test system must be retained, because a test system should not act like a production system and, for example, send documents to customers and suppliers or trigger something in production.
By using the automation solution, errors that typically occur with manual process steps - just like additional costs due to repetition - can be avoided. To date, the IT team has created 88 SAP system copies. "If we had wanted to do this with SAP board resources, we would not have been able to pay for it as a medium-sized company," Rudi Scharf knows.
To shorten the list of activities and to simplify the complete process of a system copy or a system refresh and to save manual activities, you can use "Shortcut for SAP Systems". Several manual activities can be omitted because with "Shortcut for SAP Systems" the system-specific data can be saved before the copy and imported again afterwards - also automated. This reduces the error-proneness that is inevitably caused by manual activities and enormously reduces the time span until the system is available again.
Of these, TM-TMS covers two areas.
After the above requirements are met, the target SAP and database instances can be shut down to create the technical system copy for the upgrade.