Do you think the golden age of TDMS will be starting with SAP HANA?

It’s my idea but wonder if there are others who believes like me.

You know TDMS (Test Data Migration Server) is a tool based on SAP DMIS component (SAP SLT is also based on it) and used for scenarios like:

• Copying subset of data of all company codes or selected company codes from Production System to QAS and DEV systems
• Scramble sensitive data like HCM data while copying to test environments.

For this TDMS is the solution provided by SAP.We implemented the TDMS for 8 projects in Turkey (10 sold) and in every customer, where we didn’t involved during sales/presales phases, we did have the same discussion. Somehow, sales guys sell the product as an alternative to System Copy and that is resulted with lots of discussions like:

• Why did it take so long (a week at least) to copy a system?
• Why did it affect production system?
• Why did it create temporary tables in production system?
• Why our BTC processes usage are high?

So, after 1-2 or 3 copies of system, customer mostly decides to copy the system with System Copy Tools as it is still a strong alternative to TDMS if you’re not obliged to copy the system with scramble or you’ve enough space on SAN.

So, when HANA 1st introduced for Business Suite, I started to believe that TDMS is going to be the most wanted tool.

Why?

For every SAP landscape, system is setup with 3-system landscape: DEV, QAS, PRD. For critical solutions, even PRD-HA and PRD-DR systems exists.

For normal AnyDB system, PRD system can be a high capacity server, but others can be a minimal. For example:

For an ERP System production system with cluster servers and each with 8 cores and 64GB RAM and total Disk space 2 TB requires at least

– 2 cores 16GB RAM and 500GB Disk for DEV System (if not copied from PRD)

– 4 cores 32GB RAM and 2TB Disk for QAS System

But, in HANA, this completely changes.

– For Systems copied or synchronously replicated from PRD system, you must have the same size of RAM. Otherwise you’ve to use Export/Import for system copies.

So, the same example ERP landscape (assume that RAM size for PRD is 1 TB) will be:

– 512GB RAM HANA Server for DEV System

– 1TB RAM HANA Server for QAS System

– 1TB RAM HANA Server for PRD System

– 1TB RAM HANA Server for PRD-HA System (synchronously replication)

– 1TB RAM HANA Server for PRD-DR System (synchronously replication)

Of course you can consolidate with putting DEV, QAS and PRD-HA on same machine with 2TB RAM for example.

But still you need huge amount of RAM on QAS. Bye bye old AnyDB times.

We know that SAP is working on something named Dynamic Data Tiering but still not sure if it will decrease the requirement of RAM on target systems like QAS System.

Conclusion

What I believe is if SAP invests on TDMS to work with SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA, customers will use it to lower their SAP HANA TCO by decreasing the capacity requirements on DEV and QAS systems.