Retiring SAP and Non-SAP Environments in a Cost-Effective Manner to Get Ready for SAP HANA

In an enterprise environment, information technology never stands still. It is always evolving. As next-generation systems and applications, such as SAP HANA in-memory database and appropriate business application SAP S/4HANA, become available, your enterprise will at some point need to transition to the new platforms to achieve higher-levels of IT efficiency and performance. This is really about capitalizing on new technology to keep the business competitive.

But what happens to your business-critical data when you migrate your SAP and non-SAP applications and data to new systems? How do you retire these legacy applications while maintaining access to the historical data in those systems and complying with your corporate data retention standards? And how do you avoid the substantial costs involved in maintaining legacy applications — including the cost of maintenance, support personnel and licenses — once you have moved the primary data and open transactions to newer applications?

These questions are explored and answered in a new “Legacy Application Retirement Guide” put together by subject matter experts from Dell EMC and Auritas, a firm that has developed a very successful approach to retiring legacy systems.

This paper explains how you can free up resources being used to maintain a legacy application by retaining historical data in a lower-cost alternate system or storage repository. The big picture: Data from the legacy application is extracted, transformed as required and then loaded into a low-cost system or repository, which includes capabilities for reporting on the data extracted from the source system.

Regardless of the specific technologies you choose, your legacy system retirement solution should include these must-have features:

  • Scalable architecture
  • Cost-effective architecture
  • The ability to extract and store data from a variety of systems
  • Enterprise-level security
  • Ease of use and flexible reporting
  • Data governance and retention compliance

So how do you get started? The paper offers an overview of a customizable, step-by-step process for accelerating legacy application retirement, along with a look at infrastructure deployment options using Dell EMC Ready Solutions for SAP, and the Dell EMC Isilon platform for dedicated network attached storage for large datasets. Following this structured approach, you can rapidly decommission your legacy applications and save on the costs of licenses and maintenance.

Ready for a deeper dive? To get the full story, read the Legacy Application Retirement Guide from Dell EMC and Auritas. It provides a comprehensive overview for retiring SAP and non-SAP environments.

And, you are invited to meet experts from SAP, Dell EMC and SAP customers at the next SAP TECH DAY in Munich (Germany) on January 24, 2018. Focus is on how to accelerate customer’s journey to new business platforms and applications, such as SAP HANA, S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo.

Note: In addition to JP Gotter, this blog post and linked guide was authored by Divyesh Vaidya – SAP Enterprise Solution Consultant – both with the Dell EMC Global SAP Center of Excellence.

About the Author: JP Gotter

JP Gotter has spent nearly 20 years focused on the SAP business, developing a deep knowledge of SAP products and technology. Based in Germany, he has been at Dell for over five years and currently heads the Global SAP Center of Excellence.