SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator on Oracle's Sun Systems

Key business intelligence systems like SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse enable companies to search for new opportunities from within their ever-increasing amounts of data. However, response times are slowed due to the growing number of SAP NetWeaver BW users, the sheer volume of data, increasingly sophisticated reporting tools, and the need to execute more ad-hoc queries.

To help organizations overcome these issues, SAP and Intel co-developed an appliance-like solution to accelerate NetWeaver BW queries. Oracle and SAP worked together to create an Oracle and Intel solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator using Oracle’s Sun Blade 6000 system, Sun Blade 6270 M2 server modules with 16 GB or 32 GB of memory running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, a Sun StorageTek 6140 array with an Oracle Cluster File System, and Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet switches. The solution is integrated, tested, and ready to deploy to existing SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component environments.

Completely transparent to users, SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator on Sun technology delivers as much as 80 percent faster load times and a 10-100x increase in query performance. Because it is based on industry-standard hardware and open-source software and technology, it is easier to implement into current environments without changing the infrastructure.

• Pre-tested, tuned, and certified by SAP
• Optimized for performance, scalability, and reliability
• Open standards-based solution integrates easily
• SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator license fee based upon 16 GB increments of memory
• Fast go-live, reduced administration

• Minimizes or eliminates the cost of aggregates
• On-the-fly aggregation eliminates the need for query tuning
• 10-100x increased ad-hoc query performance
• Users can browse data without IT tuning
• Better, timelier insights and decisions can result in productivity gains
• Cost-effective — best price performance
• Expandable in granular units
• Field replacement options in a single blade (i.e., disk)
• World-class efficiency due to high quality power supply and fans in blade chassis for today's eco-computing environment

• The accelerator is divided into partitions, one per CPU, to spread the work across the blade system.
• At load time, the BI server copies data to the accelerator, where it is stored in partition files in the accelerator’s shared file system.
• At query time, the software caches the information cube data and indexes each partition into the memory of every blade, creating a powerful in-memory database.
• If new queries involve the cubes that are indexed, SAP sends the request to the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator to process.
• Querying and loading are executed concurrently, but independently, enabling queries to complete in a fraction of the time it would take on a single system.
• Each step executes independently, working on a separate piece of the data that is pre-loaded into memory.
• These multistep, parallel processes enable queries to complete in a fraction of the time it would take to complete on a single system.