WHITE PAPER. CONTROL-M: Empowering the NetWeaver Solution

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER CONTROL-M: Empowering the NetWeaver Solution e

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTODUCTION...3 SAP NETWEAVER OVERVIEW... 3 COMPREHENSIVE TECHNOLOGY - INCREASING THE CHALLENGE... 4 CHALLENGES IN THE NETWEAVER DOMAIN - BUSINESS CASE... 4 CONTROL-M EMPOWERS THE NETWEAVER SOLUTION... 6 ENTERPRISE WIDE BATCH BUSINESS PROCESS... 6 MANAGING TRADITIONAL SAP COMPONENTS... 6 CONTROL-M: TRUE EVENT-BASED SCHEDULING... 7 MANAGING BUSINESS PROCESSES FROM A BUSINESS SERVICE VIEW

3 INTODUCTION Today, enterprise computing is undergoing a major shift. The value network has extended to include a broader set of participants, driving the need to integrate customers, suppliers, partners, and systems. Dynamic new market forces are compelling companies to take action and make faster decisions. At the same time, IT organizations are seeking to lower the total cost of ownership of the IT systems and to leverage existing investments while mastering heterogeneous system landscapes. These forces have shaped the requirements for new business solutions. Organizations require business processes that are more flexible and extensible than ever before, meaning solutions that fully integrate people, information, and business processes and have the lowest possible total cost of ownership. SAP fulfills all these needs with the Enterprise Services Architecture blueprint and the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. BMC Software s Business Service management vision and strategy offers complementary management solutions across the enterprise for this environment. The BMC Software solutions include enterprise scheduling management, identity management, database management, network administration, storage management, performance assurance and output management. BMC Software s SAP application management solutions are an extension to the System Management and Support Strategy of SAP. SAP Customers can regard the BMC Software Enterprise Scheduler as a logical step toward realizing even greater benefits from their SAP implementation, as well as a seeing faster return on their investment. SAP NETWEAVER OVERVIEW In 2002, SAP announced its new technology platform, SAP NetWeaver, focused on integrating business processes, people and information that helps organizations reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). SAP NetWeaver is based on an open architecture and simplifies integration between SAP applications, and external third party applications. This enhanced integration capability allows customers to leverage existing investments and to enable complete, continuous business processes that include both mysap and external applications. SAP NetWeaver easily integrates information and applications from virtually any source. It interoperates with and can be extended using the primary market technologies Microsoft.NET, Sun s J2EE, and IBM WebSphere. 3

4 COMPREHENSIVE TECHNOLOGY - INCREASING THE CHALLENGE As a comprehensive technology platform, SAP NetWeaver offers the technical foundation for all SAP solutions. In practice, the result will be that enterprise wide applications, designed and planned to carry out the business processes that organizations run, will all be developed, deployed and managed on this platform. A critical portion of these business processes are executing asynchronously, in a background (batch) manner and may be dependent on time, resource availability or business events. As on-line transactions initiate business processes, it is batch processing that completes business processes (including the inventory systems, shipping and delivery allocations, and data transfers from the branches to the data center). Thus, online and batch processing are becoming increasingly intertwined in IT business services. According to industry analysts, over 50 percent of all critical business processes are scheduled to run in batch rather than online. Given that most data is processed in batch, any delayed completion of critical batch business processes has direct implications on an organization s business performance and ability to function. In the past, within the traditional mysap world, SAP has recommended that asynchronous workloads will be managed by solutions developed specifically for this need - Enterprise Schedulers. With the introduction of NetWeaver, the same challenges are magnified. The following business scenario illustrates the seriousness of this situation by describing a typical day in a NetWeaver organization: CHALLENGES IN THE NETWEAVER DOMAIN - BUSINESS CASE A retailer needed to order 500 more units of their best-selling Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), the retailer approached the manufacturer with this request. The manufacturer s complex environment comprises several mysap application servers as well as other applications and platforms. The retailer entered the order into their system, and the order was sent to the manufacturer s SAP system. The manufacturer s SAP system checks the retailer s profile through a batch process in their Siebel CRM system. Since these are separate systems and different infrastructures, each of these will see only their own part of the process. The order continues to the manufacturer s inventory system through a batch process. This system is managed in an external os/390 environment. These are also separate systems and different infrastructures, where each will only see their own part of the process, and possibly stopping the order processing at this point. From this point, there are two possible scenarios that can occur: In the more complex scenario, the 500 PDA units are not available in the inventory. So, the manufacturer checks their SAP supply chain management system. This is a different server, leaving the batch connection open to failure. The SAP supply chain will verify with the factory production system when the order amount will be available. A variety of production applications will be connected, that span a variety of platforms and technologies, from legacy to Java applications utilizing Web Services technology. This cross-platform connection also is a point for a potential breakdown in the flow. When the inventory is verified, the manufacturer can send a response to the retailer that the order can be fulfilled in 14 days. In order for the transaction to take place, the order is sent to the manufacturer SAP Finance system for payment batch processing. Since this system needs to deal with 4

5 heavy batch workloads, and complicated job dependencies, the manufacturer may face missed deadlines at this point. In parallel, the order is processed in batch by the manufacturer SAP APO shipping optimization system. Since this system runs on a separate infrastructure, there is a higher risk of not tracking down and resolving problems if a failure occurs at this point in the process. To prepare for shipping the merchandise, the manufacturer prepares an invoice in a batch mass parallel process. This system needs to deal with dynamic batch workloads, depending on the amount of transactions processed. The manufacturer faces an unexpected failure in the IT environment during this processing, and needs to figure out the impact on his business and to find out the most efficient recovery method. The processing should be completed in the next 2 hours in order to meet the manufacturer s SLAs. After recovering and completing the processing, the manufacturer prepares the shipment and ships the product with the invoice. The retailer receives the shipment of the product with the invoice, all within the promised service period. The customer is very satisfied with the quality of the service. Operational data from financial system and from production system is extracted and stored in a SAP Business Warehouse system. SAP business warehouse infopackages are managed differently from regular SAP jobs. Business Case illustration - PDA Life Cycle in the IT View, from order to supply 5

6 Realizing the Challenges - The PDA Life Cycle business case illustrates many of the challenges organizations face while operating in an enterprise-wide NetWeaver production environment: Integrating business processes that span multi-platforms, applications, and technologies. Defining and managing of business processes which are dependent on a variety of factors such as: time, process, business events and resource availability. Assuring High Availability, minimizing downtime - fast error detection, correction cycle Understanding the business impact of enterprise business processes, and managing them accordingly. CONTROL-M EMPOWERS THE NETWEAVER SOLUTION As a software partner of SAP since 1996, BMC Software is fully committed to providing the best and most innovative management solutions for SAP customers. With the Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA), SAP delivers an integration platform for applications and processes enterprise-wide. CONTROL-M provides the underlying integration solution that manages the batch and asynchronous aspect of these enterprise- wide business processes. With CONTROL-M, asynchronous and batch business processes in the NetWeaver sphere can be intertwined with business processes from external environments to create enterprise-wide business processes, all easily-managed from one central point, and viewed from the NetWeaver Portal. CONTROL-M offers a set of solutions specifically tailored for the NetWeaver environment, optimizing the capabilities of the platform and offering true management for the execution of underlying processes, while leveraging the strength and flexibility inherent within the CONTROL-M Enterprise Scheduling solution. ENTERPRISE WIDE BATCH BUSINESS PROCESS CONTROL-M provides end-to-end management capabilities for complex enterprise-wide business processes. It manages the entire life cycle (definition, monitoring, management) of processes running in the NetWeaver environment: Java processes (classes or EJBs) or Web Services in the NetWeaver WAS, traditional SAP R/3, mysap Processes and integrates them with other batch processes running on any other enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, legacy application, messaging bus, Web service or file transfer of critical information. CONTROL-M provides a unified interface to manage and monitor the execution of these critical business processes, ensuring their on-time completion and business service continuity all from one unified graphical control point. MANAGING TRADITIONAL SAP COMPONENTS CONTROL-M offers the highest level of bi-directional integration with SAP by relating to internal SAP mechanisms and data. This allows users to define, schedule, monitor and control SAP jobs, including ABAP/4 programs, external programs and batch input processing. When defining SAP jobs, users can select elements such as job names, ABAP program names and variants from lists, populated automatically based on information taken directly from SAP, thus minimizing human errors and increasing productivity. The CONTROL-M SAP solution was also designed to eliminate uncontrolled workloads that can potentially bring the business to a standstill and not meeting business goals. CONTROL-M s interception mechanism can be configured to intercept user-defined jobs within SAP, and then activate these jobs according to CONTROL-M parameters. These jobs will be activated during a predefined batch window, rather than in a random manner. The CONTROL-M solution for SAP also provides a solution for massparallel jobs (also known as spawned jobs ), which are dynamically created by SAP. CONTROL-M detects the spawned jobs, and automatically associates them with the parent job, 6

7 ensuring successful on-time completion of the entire process. In addition CONTROL-M offers unique a solution for other SAP components and processes such as SAP business information warehouse (BW) - Info Packages and Process Chains management - and for data archiving processes. CONTROL-M: TRUE EVENT-BASED SCHEDULING Traditional schedulers define jobs that are typically time-based. Time-driven batch processes were very effective when companies operated in a static environment. However Changes in these statically defined time based batch loads typically had to be executed manually. Since the combination of longer trading hours, globalization and time zones are constantly shrinking the batch windows while at the same time business requirements are growing, so time-driven processing would be burdened with too many manual changes, especially as requirements change over time. Only the automation of background processing in the NetWeaver environment can ensure that the right service is available at the right time. This means that a modern scheduling system must be able to trigger jobs based on more dynamic conditions: filecreation, arrival or B2B transaction, completion (successful or failure) of another job, infrastructure events (resource availability / load), or business events like the raising of purchase orders or the receipt of an invoice. These events can occur throughout the day and are unpredictable. CONTROL-M offers a scheduler which is a real event driven solution. Through its variety of solutions and interfaces, any business event or application in the NetWeaver domain in particular and throughout the enterprise in general can dynamically modify the scheduling environment: by raising a condition, triggering a job or querying the statuses of other jobs executing in the system. CONTROL-M offers a connectivity solution for traditional technologies, as well as the most innovative technologies e.g.: command line, file-based, SNMP, Java, Web Services, messaging and.net. The result is an Enterprise Scheduler which can invoke and be invoked by any application in the enterprise, achieving true flexibility and agility, meeting the ever changing requirements of today s business environments. MANAGING BUSINESS PROCESSES FROM A BUSINESS SERVICE VIEW BMC Software helps bridge the gaps between IT and business through Business Service Management (BSM) solutions that show how IT processes affect the business and, conversely, how changes in business affect IT. Batch-related failures or external events, such as hardware and network problems, may cause delays in batch processing that affect the completion time and accuracy of business processes. Such delays and their potential effect on the business must be detected and analyzed before business is adversely impacted. To address this problem, IT organizations require a BSM solution capable of providing predictive service assurance. Such a solution must provide a clear picture of the status of batch business services, proactively detect potential delays and errors in the batch business process, and allow corrective actions to take place before the business service is affected. CONTROL-M neatly fits into the overall BSM strategy, offering the perfect BSM solution for asynchronous business processes executed in the NetWeaver environment and processes executed outside Netweaver, intertwining them into a unified business service model. BMC Batch Impact Manager is an integral part of the CONTROL-M architecture and uses CONTROL-M terminology, definition and monitoring components. BMC Batch Impact Manager further allows users to define and manage batch flows on a business process level rather than on a job level. This significantly simplifies the business service identification and definition phase and easily and intuitively enables the translation of business requirements into job definitions. 7

8 BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2003 revenues of more than $1.3 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit : BMC Software, the BMC Software logos and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks belong to their respective companies BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. 01/05 # 53525