Our SnapOps suite is a set of tools to solve slow and painful tasks in SAP.
These different individual tools allow our customers to take advantage of faster system copies, scrambling sensitive test data, and faster data archiving. The SnapOps tools are implemented in one simple transport and normally take one day to install and to get up and running.
Check out why our customers can’t do without them!
1. Speeding up System Copies
Most of our System CopyGT customers came to us pulling their hair because it took them so long to run SAP system copies. This common problem slows down SAP development because accurate testing of production-like data takes far too long, ultimately meaning the business has to wait too long for crucial development work.
System CopyGT, our BDLS accelerator (BDLS is a super-tedious process when copying systems) has some great tuning options to help customers deal with large database tables. The tool allows users to quickly determine the tables that are causing the slowest response and how many records actually end up being updated for each part of the run.
System CopyGT lets you change commit sizes for those individual tables or exclude the table from part of the run if it actually has no updates required. It is also able to increase and decrease the number of processors to ensure our clients get their copied system back and operational as fast as possible.
The result – faster testing, faster development and better business value.
Read more about how this helped SABMiller.
2. Reducing system size and storage costs
The old method of dealing with increasing SAP system size was that you planned roughly how much your system would grow by over the life of your hardware and then bought new hardware to suit new growth patterns when you got there.
Today, HANA and cloud options allow you to store more, but it also means you pay for every bit of data storage even if you never reference that data, which seems rather unnecessary and costly.
Quite a few of our customers were transitioning to HANA and realized they would save a substantial amount by archiving data they didn’t use. The only problem was – their existing archiving capability took so long the whole exercise seemed pointless, and it also slowed down the systems during business hours.
By using ArchiveGT, our accelerator for SAP standard Archiving, our customers could suddenly archive up to 10 times faster, enabling one of our clients to archive over 1 billion rows of data even with small archiving windows, helping them to reduce their system size from 24 TB to 11 TB before transitioning to HANA. Now that is one big saving in storage costs!
Read more about ArchiveGT or watch this video to see how BP gains control of their SAP archiving.
3. Keeping testing on track
One of our customers raised an urgent support ticket, they had an error and needed it solving quickly as completing this task was key to opening up a test environment.
Luckily because System CopyGT runs in our Diffuser framework, it is broken down into small chunks, allowing us to use the functionality in the tool to simply reprocess the small chunk in error.
Instead of taking several hours to rerun the whole thing for the customer, it only took a couple of minutes. This meant the testing team was not kept waiting to start their regression test.
4. Control over your processing power
Usually archiving is something that chews up processing power in your production system and then ends up over-running into the working day when the business needs the processing power to operate critical programs.
The controls in ArchiveGT powered by Diffuser, allows you to increase or decrease the number of processors a program uses while it is operating and even pause and restart a program.
This is the most-loved feature because during this manual operation you can even create what we call an activity period which could, for example, reduce the number of processors used by an archiving job from 20 to 2 on Monday at 07:00 to 19:00 or whatever you want to set up, giving you all the control you want. And that means, no more slow SAP systems during business hours!
5. Protecting sensitive data when testing and keeping auditors happy
When trying to protect the data in your test or training environments, you will find that the production system is constantly changing and auditors will continue to pick up on new fields that need protection as you start to use new functionality in your system or the rules on data protection change.
Our ScrambleGT customers typically have a lot of sensitive data such as HR payroll, credit card details, home address, bank details, which understandably needs to stay safe and protected even when the testing team carry out their work and have access to all of this information. This is why our customers love ScrambleGT, our tool which allows the rapid anonymisation of data and which is flexible enough to allow the simple addition of fields with just a couple of drop-down selections, helping our customers to quickly react to an auditor request, something our clients know a thing or two about.
Contact us to find out how we can help to speed up your SAP systems to make your life easier!
