Deployment Flexibility

Companies that run their SAP software on the Oracle Database have the advantage of greater flexibility, scalability, security, and manageability through these features and optional products.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a volume manager and a file system for Oracle database files (single instance as well as Real Application Clusters implementations). Oracle ASM is Oracle's recommended storage management solution that provides an alternative to conventional volume managers, file systems, and raw devices. Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (ACFS) is a new multi-platform, scalable file system and storage management design that extends Oracle ASM technology to support all of your application data (files other than database files). Oracle ASM Dynamic Volume Manager (ADVM) provides volume management services and a standard disk device driver interface.

• White Paper: SAP on Oracle Automatic Storage Management 11 g R2. Configuration Guidelines for UNIX/LINUX (PDF)
• White Paper: Moving your SAP database to Oracle 11 g R2 ASM. A Best Practices Guide (PDF)

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry-leading performance, scalability, security, and reliability on a choice of clustered or single servers running Windows, Linux, and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications.

With a wide range of options to extend the #1 database for SAP applications, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition can help grow your business and meet your users' performance, security, and availability service-level expectations.

• White Paper: Oracle – The Database of Choice for Deploying SAP Solutions (PDF)
• White Paper: Oracle Database 11 g Release 2 Functionality Certified by SAP (PDF)

With Oracle's Cache Fusion cluster database architecture, a new shared-cache architecture that overcomes the limitations of traditional shared-nothing and shared-disk approaches to provide highly scalable and available database systems, RAC provides SAP users with uninterrupted server access regardless of hardware and/or software failures.

• Configuration of SAP NetWeaver for Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2: A Best Practices Guide

Oracle Real Application Testing combines a workload capture and replay feature with an SQL performance analyzer to help you test changes against real-life workloads, and then helps you fine-tune the changes before putting them into production.

• White Paper: Real Application Testing Certified for SAP (PDF)

Server virtualization is the process of abstracting computing resources so that multiple operating systems and application images can share a single physical server, bringing significant cost-of-ownership and manageability benefits. In SAP environments, Oracle supports or plans to support the virtualization technologies that are an integral part of hardware architectures or operating systems. In addition, VMware can be used for single-instance as well as RAC implementations. SAP is in the certification process for Oracle VM.

For details see SAP Notes 870652 (Oracle Solaris Zones), 1173954 (VMware), 1329848 (Hyper-V), 1351051 (Integrity VM), 1426182 (Xen and KVM).

Explore other features of Oracle Database to find out why it is the database of choice for the majority of SAP customers.

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