Itanium-Related Solutions to These Issues

Due to the limitations in scalability under Windows, SAP customers are doing workarounds, customizing and changing configurations to meet business needs. The problems with relying on workarounds include the following:

• The high cost of custom development.

• Increased maintenance and administrative cost.

• Difficulty doing root cause analysis.

• Potential downtime and lost revenue, particularly with mission-critical applications.

One attempt to follow through on this model involved one of the largest nursery supply chains in the United States. Given its fast rate of acquiring smaller companies, the company specifically stated that fast scalability was its main priority. However, its choice of Windows for its servers ended up costing the company. When it began to hit performance snags, it was going to take at least two months to come up with solutions, while the business transactions were simply not being expedited in an efficient manner—if at all.

Another way to put it is to look at the problems addressed in the development of separate instances of SAP under an all-in-one-box Itanium server running SAP. They include the following:

• Resolving the difficulty keeping transports and data in sync.

• Breaking the lack of information integration.

• Reducing complex and costly administration.

• Reducing complex and costly patch and upgrade management.

• Eliminating difficulty making changes to meet new business requirements.