Sizing infrastructure for SAP BPC 5.1

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I realise hardware sizing is very customer specific but I'm hoping some people already using the SAP BPC or OutlookSoft product can provide me with some indication as to the environments they use to assist me with sizing a solution for our SAP BPC implementation.

We are going to have approximately 300 users with approximately 50 of them concurrently accessing the system. We are planning on using a single tiered environment to run this application with the following sort of specifications

HP BL460C

2 x Quad Core 2.66 Ghz processors

16GB mem

100GB SAN disk (RAID 5)

SQL 2000 (unfortunately)

Any insight anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

I'm also interested in understanding how the load is distributed between the application and the database. My current assumption is that the load on the IIS server (and hence the application) will be quite light as the majority of the load is handled by the database especially when it comes to concurrent updates and to re-processing the cubes.

If anyone has any insights in to the validity of this assumption it would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.

cheers

Stephen Moore

[Former Member]

The "general" sizing guidelines are contained in the relase notes with the software. But as with all guidlines these are minimums and as you correctly point out vary by installation. The number of application, number of dimensions, size of dimensions and hierarchies, number of users, and volume of data all come into play with how a given configuration will perform. It is always recommended that as part of the initial setup that a technical services call is done to discuss configuration (both hardware sizing and where to install components because this can have both performance impacts and licensing implications for the MS components). Obviously if you're putting everything on one box there isn't much to talk about where components get installed but be aware that you'll have to uninstall everything and reinstall if you later find out you need to scale out the hardware. A call with technical consulting might save a lot of headaches down the road.

As far as work load, most of the work is on the applciation server which is typically the web server in a multi-server configuration. All authentication and data requests go through the COM+ components on the application server. This passes the query request to AS or SQL depending on the request that is made. Most of the time SQL Server is doing nothing unless you are loading data. AS generally handles both of the requests but again these come through the application server.

[sorin_radulescu]

From my point of view the sizing is not correct done and the solution is not scallable.

If the number of concurrent users is 100 then your system it will be very slow and you need to upgrade your system or to perform other installation.

Usually the number of concurrent users is around 25% from total number of users.

That's mean around 75 users in your case

An application server with 2 processors dual core and 4GB of RAM is close to the limit when you have around 70-80 concurrent users.

In your case you have into the same server for two processors dual core application server and database server. 50 concurrent users will be maximum supported in your environemnt.

BPC 5.X is puting a lot of pressure on processors for application servers.

The optimization of mdx query ,comunication, logics...everything is done into application server.

From our stress test with complex application when the number of concurrent users is around 70-80 users all pocessors from application server (application server with 4CPU and 4GB RAM) are around by 80-90% used.

For your 300 users my suggestion was that you should go for a multiserver configuration:

1 db server 2 (2 processors dual core) 8GB ram) you can have in this way also the option /3gb into boot.ini of windows which means that OLAP 2000 will be able to use until 2.6 GB Ram

2 application servers (2 processors 4GB Ram) with NLB

This configuration can support until 100 concurrent users and it is a scallable solution until 200 concurrent users. For more than 100 conecurrent users you need only to add into NLB other application server without any other changes.

Any way for more information about sizing you need a technical consultant with some experience using SAP BPC.

Regards

Sorin Radulescu