SAP on IBM i – Update week 18 2014: nZDM option for i

Welcome back to our blog series from the development team. Here is something you might have waited for.

nZDM for Business Suite on IBM i …

Starting with SL Toolset 1.0 SP10 our platform supports the near Zero Downtime Maintenance option for SAP Business Suite. Basic idea of the option is to import content for application tables that comes from SAP already into the shadow system.

As big pieces of this workload used to be handled in downtime phase TABIM_UPG, we expect significant reduction of phase TABIM_UPG. In our lab tests we confirmed this, and not being surprised, we also observed increased overall runtimes.

… already used in the field

Two early adopting customers already gave us their feedback and were more than happy about the outcome: The process ran smooth and in fact, they found their overall runtime even similar to that of reference upgrades w/o nZDM. Minimum downtime was reduced by roughly 50% and, as expected, TABIM_UPG was reduced from 5-7h to roughly 2h.

So, if you want to give nZDM a try in your own environment, go into the details of the Further reading sections. Activation is as easy as chosing Advanced mode in the dialogs of module Configuration and click the check box for nZDM. And don’t forget to share your experience with us so we can improve further 😉

Further reading

• Blog Near-Zero Downtime Maintenance for SAP Business Suite Systems by Martin Herrmann provides some more details of the process and numbers on other platforms
• Settings to activate downtime minimization capabilities in SUM, also by Martin, includes a video showing the necessary dialog steps for activation
• And finally, here is a set of SAP Notes you should see:
  • 1678565 – Prerequisites, Terms and Conditions for nZDM/SUM
  • 1678564 – Executing and Monitoring nZDM/SUM
  • 1809339 – IBM i: Support by nZDM/SUM for IBM i; this note is collecting all the necessary OS and SAP patches you need in particular for IBM i