I would like to share with the SAP Network Community some of the activities we have been doing and plan to do on the site during 2006 in the area of performance and availability improvements. This will give you a better understanding of what we have been working on and the expected changes to look forward to during the rest of the year. So far during 2006 we have implemented the following availability and performance improvements to the site: 1. Adding of front end servers (Portal, Discussion Groups, etc...) to our landscape to cope with increase of SDN Traffic. 2. New file Server Cluster. 3. Distribution of SDN's various Data Bases across different Data Base Servers. 3. Implementation of additional caching mechanisms at differnt levels (content,navigation, permissions, etc...) 4. Additional Indexes and SQL Statements optimizations to Data Bases. 5. Implementation of Netli technology (www.netli.com) which allows us to provide better performance for users which are located in remote locations (compared to our servers which are in Germany). For example: performance of the site in regions such as Asia Pacific has been improved significantly. With the above changes the availability of the site has increased from 98% (average during 2005) to 99.2% (current average during 2006). What's next? During November we plan to upgrade SDN to NW04 in which we expect to further improve our availability and performance with the following changes: 1. Implementation of SSL accelerator. This will allow us to better distribute the load between the various servers. 2. Support for Online Backup. There will be no more need to bring down SDN during the weekend for an offline backup. 3. Overall new landscape with additional and more powerful servers. 4. New Portal version (Upgrade from EP 6.0 to NW04) 5. New Discussion Groups Version (Upgrade from Jive 3.x to 4.x) 6. Refactoring and optimization of outdated code. 7. Backend search improvements We are trying to test as much as possible on our staging environment before the go live however it is a very big change and there might be a short period of disruption and stabilization time required for which I apologize upfront for any inconvenience this may cause. I hope you found this short blog useful and that it gave you some insight in to the various activities we are doing to further improve the site. Happy Surfing! Ran Cliff Senior Director, SAP Network Platform.
