Two worlds, one copy tool

At the Peri Group, headquartered in Weissenhorn near Ulm, there have always been two drivers or reasons for creating SAP system copies: on the one hand, a more technical one. On the one hand, there is a more technical reason, namely to have an SAP system copy that is as up-to-date as possible or as close to production as possible, just in case, before updates are installed.

On the other hand, a more business-like one. And that is to use an SAP system copy for the purpose of ensuring that a dedicated test or QA system always has the most up-to-date data possible.

SAP use at the world's largest manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding dates back to 1999. The first international rollouts took place just one year later. And in the meantime, the majority of Peri branches around the globe are working with SAP.

The SAP ERP ECC 6.0 core applications (on IBM Power AIX systems with the DB2 database) cover practically all business areas, except for Sales and Distribution, for which an ERP in-house development (Peri Sales and Distribution, PSD) is used.

In addition, Peri uses SAP NetWeaver BW, together with the SAP in-memory database SAP Hana (BW on Hana) on Hitachi (HDS) Hana hardware (including storage systems) since 2014.

The Hana in-memory hardware is designed for 2 TB RAM. Around 800 ERP and approximately 3,500 BW on Hana users work with the SAP system environment at Peri every day.

Over 70 system copies have been created so far

After exploring the market, Peri's corporate IT decided on the BlueSystemCopy automation tool from Empirius at the beginning of 2010. "To date, we have performed more than 70 SAP system copies with the automation solution.

Both SAP system copies of various ERP ECC 6.0 components, such as HCM/HR, FI, CO, PP, MM and others more, as well as from the BW system; initially from the BW system based on DB2, and from 2014 from the BW on Hana system," explains Dominik Brosa, Team Lead SAP Competence Center at Peri Group IT.

In the process, every SAP copy created with BlueSystemCopy runs highly automated. But not only that. This process is standardized and includes a consistently high quality.

Individualized templates have also been created and are used in BlueSystemCopy. This takes into account the special use of the respective system.

Basically, with the tool and the usable intuitive interface (GUI), it is possible to perform simulations before the actual SAP system copy.

For example, to check whether all settings have actually been made or taken into account. Whereby the preliminary result is shown in detail.

Peri considers the fact that "we can use the same range of functions and convenience for BW-on-Hana system copies as for system copying in the ERP ECC 6.0 world with DB2" to be a plus.

Incidentally, the automation solution from Empirius can be used in the ERP ECC 6.0 world in conjunction with all common databases. As in the case of Peri with DB2, but equally also together with Oracle-DB, MaxDB, Microsoft SQL or SAP ASE.

Time and cost savings

The time reduction and thus also the cost savings from the automation tool used are considerable. SAP CC Manager Brosa comments:

"For example, we are now able to make a normal system copy in less than a day. We used to need around five days to do this manually. This was mainly due to the many preparatory and finishing tasks that had to be carried out manually.

Peri uses three methods to provide the data from the central SAP productive system: Firstly, the Back-INT interface from the productive Hana system is used, and secondly, Redirected Restore and Flash Copy Manager (IBM storage tool).

The difference between the latter two is that Redirected Restore takes hours to prepare the data, while Flash Copy Manager takes seconds.