Scenario of System Decommissioning

Many customers are currently in the planning and execution phase of transition to Intelligent Enterprise, are optimizing their current system landscape. This activity can bring about a situation where many of the current production systems become future legacy systems. This leaves an important question of how to manage the current production (future legacy) systems in a cost effective yet compliant manner. The strategic solution from SAP to handle the legacy system decommissioning is SAP ILM (Information Lifecycle Management).

This article is meant to provide an overview of system decommissioning using SAP ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) and SAP DMLT (Data Management and Landscape Transformation) tools and methodologies.

Main Requirements of a System Decommissioning solution

The activity of performing system decommissioning has mainly these three challenges, or requirements that a successful decommissioning solution needs to fulfill.

• Data volume and heterogeneous systems – A sizable company usually has many systems with different releases and quite a few of them are very large in terms of data sizes. Hence to provide an effective system decommissioning solution, handling data volumes in a cost-effective manner is an important requirement.
• Business categorization – As a natural consequence of a system which has been around for many years, there will be very few employees within the company who really understand what kind of applications and hence data exists in these systems and to which businesses in the company do they belong to. Hence asking a company to categorize what data is really needed from these systems is often an almost impossible task. So, a system decommissioning solution must be able to handle all business data in the legacy system without the need for a business user to classify or categorize data.
• Data Retention Compliance – In the age of increased importance of protecting personal data, it is critical that the data from the legacy systems are only retained for the required amount of time. After its end of purpose, as mentioned by the respective data retention regulations, data needs to be destroyed. Legacy systems often have data which is quite old and typically contain data which is potentially ready for destruction. Hence a system decommissioning solution needs to be able to handle data compliance including the ability to destroy data, and documents attached to the data.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management

SAP ILM is the official product from SAP which has the functionality for performing system decommissioning. The product offers the following main functionalities:

• Tools and techniques to perform archiving to move the data from the legacy system database ultimately to SAP archive files. The archive file format offers two important benefits – reduced size of data due to compression and is Read Only to fulfill audit requirements that the data should not be changeable.
• Metadata archiving – The product contains possibility to archive the metadata along with business data. This means that the data can be recovered and represented in the same way as it was stored in the legacy system. This is an important technical capability, given that the solution must cater to a variety of legacy system with very different releases.
• Retention Management – SAP ILM offers capability to apply data retention rules to the archive files generated from the data of the legacy system. This makes it possible to comply to requirements to destroy data which is not needed anymore.
• Storage system interfaces – SAP ILM has interfaces to store the archive files in different types of storage systems. One category of these storage systems is WORM based storage systems. A recent addition to the storage systems are SAP IQ, Hadoop and also a consulting approach which supports Microsoft Azure BLOB storage.

DMLT approach for system decommissioning with SAP ILM

DMLT stands for Data Management and Landscape Transformation – a service organization in SAP which takes care of customer’s data-related needs and offers holistic approaches in all data management domains like data quality, data integration, data migration, data protection, or data compliance

Given the product functionality of SAP ILM, the below diagram depicts a typical landscape of a DMLT system decommissioning project:

To better understand the process, and flow of the data, we start from left to right:

• Legacy system – Considering that the legacy system might be running on an old release and less powerful hardware, the approach makes sure that there is minimal activity running on the legacy system. The only requirement from an SAP legacy system might be the requirement to have an Add On installed to handle cluster tables. This Add On is quite flexible in terms for availability for older releases.

• SLT system – SLT system stands for SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server – a solution from SAP with data replication capabilities. This is one of the main systems as far as the project is concerned. The main concept is to replicate the data from legacy system into the SLT system and perform data archiving in this system. This enables the process to have flexibility in terms of hardware resources to match the expected timeline of a project. Even though data archiving technology is used, the tools used are very different compared to data archiving in live ERP system. The tools are designed for mass archiving scenario, and to include metadata as archive files.

• ILM Retention Warehouse System – When all the data is archived, including metadata in SLT system, the archives file metadata are transferred to the ILM Retention Warehouse (RW) system. The files (which contain data) itself are then stored (moved from file system in SLT) into the storage system. Multiple options are available for choosing the storage system. It can be a WORM based storage system, cloud-based systems like Hadoop, Microsoft Azure (consulting solution) or SAP IQ.

In order to retrieve the data and perform reporting, there are two main tools – local reporting and accelerated reporting. Local reporting is a tool which has simple ad-hoc table-based access to access individual tables or even views from the legacy system. Accelerated reporting enables creation of dynamic database tables in ILM RW system and staging data from relevant archive files into these database tables. The generated table definition resembles the exact data format of the respective database table in the legacy system.

Tools for SAP ILM from DMLT

DMLT Extraction cockpit – DMLT Extraction cockpit (a DMLT consulting solution) is a tool which runs on the SLT system, which helps to automate the activities of data replication from legacy system and performing data archiving. The cockpit is built on top of ILM product features. It is designed for mass parallelization, has best practice content from multiple projects incorporated and most significantly automates a large part of the extraction and archiving process. This is a very recent solution which has already proved to reduce the effort by more than 50% and the duration by 70 to 80%. Technically, the tool – categorizes data automatically, generates archive object definitions, generates ILM objects and retention rules, schedules archiving in parallel, and performs data reconciliations. Below is a screenshot of the tool:

DMLT ILM Reporting Best Practice package (a DMLT consulting solution) provides a reporting package in the SAP ILM Retention Warehouse system, built using the Accelerated Reporting functionality of the product. The package contains – a framework to build reports, a launcher which brings together all reports and the reporting content itself. The reports reflect original ERP transactions in SAP, which users are very comfortable with. The reports work across data from multiple legacy systems, offers capabilities to download data into MS Excel, and very importantly access attachments related to the business documents. Here is a sample screenshot of the selection screen of one such report:

Summary

System decommissioning with SAP ILM as a solution has capabilities and functionality to address decommissioning of an entire system. DMLT has further enhanced the product functionality with tools and best practice content, consolidated from multiple successful projects. Thereby adding important functionality and reducing the cost of a project.

This makes system decommissioning an attractive proposition for customers to reduce costs, mitigate risk of running obsolete software/hardware and helps to fulfill data compliance requirements.

More Information

If you need more information about the tools and processes above, please send an email to: mailto:sap_dmlt_gce@sap.com

Here are some links to get more information:

Information on DMLT services – https://support.sap.com/en/offerings-programs/support-services/data-management-landscape-transformation.html

Information on SAP ILM services of DMLT – https://support.sap.com/en/offerings-programs/support-services/data-management-landscape-transformation/information-management-governance.html

Data Volume Management – https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/TechOps/Data+Volume+Management