Advantages of Distributed Installation

[former_member759680]

Hello,

The cleint wants to have "distributed" installation of ECC 6.0. With Ci and DB on separate Hosts.

I have told him that if you want that, why not go for HA installation?

But client insists on Distributed system.

I just wanted to know what are the advantages on Distributed systems over Central system.

I mean if you don't have HA then having CI and DB on different server is of not much use.

Could you please clarify..

Thanks.

[former_member759680]

Thanks a lot everybody!

[Former Member]

Check with SAP support as well. Depending on SAPS etc, distributed architecture may be inferior. In our current environment with ECC 6.0, we are recommended against it due to known problems at other customer sites, so we choose HA environment.

Still my personal favourite is distributed. Easy to expand application instances.

[former_member759680]

Thanks for the replies guys. These have raised a few more questions though

Bottom line is dedicated DB server has more performance then CI+DB box

But wouldn't the time saved by DB processor be lost again in transferring the data to the CI? And sometimes if data is large, the time required to transfer the data can outweigh the time saved by performance of DB server by a significant amount.

Please correct me if am wrong here.

DS is more suitable for Disaster Recovery.

Could you please elaborate on this?

Still my personal favourite is distributed. *Easy to expand application instances*.

But I can add a dialog instance in a Central system with the same ease as I can to a distributed system. How is it easier with distributed?

Thanks in advance.

Edited by: Gautam Poddar on Jul 20, 2009 7:38 PM

[Former Member]

Bottom line is dedicated DB server has more performance then CI+DB box

It means that most of the operations are being performed in database box not on CI box. CI is only used for connecting users to SAP.

There would not be any problem between CI and DB connection.

DS is more suitable for Disaster Recovery or HA

Disaster Recovery is most probably is copy of datablocks or apply archive logs to secondary instance. Even database crashes, the secondary database start working without disconnecting the users. However, the users might not get response from the system during the switchover, but they are not disconnected so that they wont loose the data they are working on..

[Former Member]

But I can add a dialog instance in a Central system with the same ease as I can to a distributed system. How is it easier with distributed?

If you add Dialog instance on your central system, you might get issues during HA or DR or performance in future point of view. Obviously there will be users in dialog instance as well as in CI which may cause issues.

Edited by: Arjun Venkateswarlu on Jul 20, 2009 7:58 PM

[Former Member]

But wouldn't the time saved by DB processor be lost again in transferring the data to the CI?

Yes, in a scenario where one server is big enough to hold db and ci, a central installation is always faster than distributed because you don't have to cross the network. However in current environments with a network latency of <1ms this is of minor concern. But at my place we still can mesure a certain amount (~100ms, sometimes more) lost with remote instances.

Regards, Michael

[Former Member]

Hi Gautam,

Advantages of Distributed is

1). DB server requires more power than CI server. If you have many SAP products, Your management plan might be put DB for each product in one system and and all CI in one server or spilt the CI's.

Bottom line is dedicated DB server has more performance then CI+DB box and DS is more suitable for Disaster Recovery.

[Former Member]

Ask your client for his reasons.

Advantages could be:

- separation between database and sap software

- the db server can be sized and tuned for the database, so can the SAP server

- if the existing server is too small (for example not enough memory) to hold both db and ci, then you can scale over two boxes

But in my opinion this is pretty much it, personally i prefer the central (combined) installation.

Regards, Michael