Archiving Information from "old" SAP systems and switch off the server

[Former Member]

Good day

I hope someone can offer some advice. Our company has a few sites across the globe. Three of the sites in South Africa ( where I'm working at the moment ) had their own SAP systems. Three odd years ago, we implementeted a new SAP system, combining the separate SAP systems into the new one, running of the same box etc etc. The "old" SAP systems were still availbale after the new one went live, in the event that people want to look back at history.

We are you busy with a project where we are going to merge our current SAP implementation into our global SAP system... obviously only the current master data are going to be transfered to the new system. It's an idea time for us to clean up our data.

My question: Once we go live on our global SAP system, we want to "export" or archive from the 3 "old" SAP systems the Master Data from the HR module ( like employees who's left the company - it's law to keep the records for 5 years at least once a employee has left) , HSEC and FI modules into a single datastore... this way we don't have to keep the three servers running in the event that history is required. The servers wil be kept off-line and only switched back on if a detailed audit is required.

The global SAP system does not have an archive solution implemented to we can't access archived data from the new system...

So, we need to export master data from our 3 old SAP boxes into a Unicode type file system, and our local South African sites needs to be able to access the information using a text type editor or a web based interface we can run off our SAP Portal...

Thank you

[Former Member]

Hello Cornelius,

To introduce myself, I am an active SDN/BPX member as well as an ASUG Archiving and Information Lifecycle Management Volunteer.

Decommissioning Legacy Systems (SAP and non-SAP systems) is quite the topic these days with divestitures becoming such a common occurrence.

Some things to think about in this situation are:

Identifying the data to be decommissioned:

what information would be needed for an audit

what information would be needed for a lawsuit situation

Identifying the access requirements to this data.

Identifying the retention policies for this data (this will be

driven by regulatory requirements, etc.).

If this has not already been done - define retention periods for this data - it will most likely have different retention periods based on the type of data.

You mention that you do not have an archive solution in place yet.

I would recommend that you may want to research that option because typical requirements for retaining legacy data is that it is stored in such a manner so that it is protected from any type of modification.

There are a lot of 3rd party archiving/storage solutions that provide this type of secure storage.

You are correct in that you will want to export or archive the legacy data as opposed to loading the data into your current system. It would probably involve a large increase in the size of your SAP database and you would probably run into number range overlaps.

But, if this data is exported to a filesystem, you will be losing the business logic associated with the data, and the information is no longer in its original format (this could have legal ramifications).

I would recommend using SAP Archiving functionality for this effort. If you are looking for outside resources, there are many vendors out there that have a lot of experience with these types of projects.

Two that come to mind are Dolphin IT and OpenText.

Or, depending on the timeline of your project, SAP is coming out with a tool that can be used for decommissioning SAP Systems. It is part of

their SAP ILM solution. It will be called Retention Warehouse. Here is a paragraph from their latest white paper describing this new tool:

With the retention warehouse, SAP now offers a

standardized method for system decommissioning in

answer to these pressing issues. It allows you to reuse the archived data outside the original system in a central

retention warehouse.

For more detail on this topic, the white paper can be found on the SAP ILM Website:

service.sap.com/ilm

This tool is part of a larger initiative from SAP to help customers with their ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) strategy. This tool is near and dear to me as I was fortunate enough to be part of an

ASUG Influence Council that helped with some of the requirements for this solution.

I hope this information is useful.

Good luck and Best Regards,

Karin Tillotson

[Former Member]

Hi Karin - thank you for the input, specially regarding the legal and modifications implications... We know more or less what we want to save, and it's more for internal use... the original SAP servers will just be decomissioned and kept in our server room in the event of a legal need... but you are correct, security etc will be needed.

The thought was also to write the export ABAPs ourselves, like it was suggested, but also we wanna compare the cost of doing this project against the cost of simply keeping the servers running... (budget cuts)..

I will definately look into the 3rd party solutions you've mentioned... The SAP archive seems to archive more transactional information and not really master data as well, but that's just from the little I know of the HR archive section.

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi Cornelius,

I'm going to offload this question of Archiving into a more appropriate forum where it can get the proper eyeballs. Posting in the Coffee corner is like chatting at the watercooler :-).

I'll also forward this to a mentor who works with Archiving and perhaps she can weigh in.

[Former Member]

Thank you - if you can tell me which forum then I can also have a look at the reponses - I'm still a bit new with using SDN so I'm not always sure which forums to use, specially with this type of topic

[Former Member]

Hi,

We have had the same kind of need (a subsidary which has been sold to an other corporate group).

We have kept the old SAP R/3 system but migrate it on a virtual server which is usually stopped.

>So, we need to export master data from our 3 old SAP boxes into a Unicode type file >system, and our local South African sites needs to be able to access the information using >a text type editor or a web based interface we can run off our SAP Portal...

For this kind of need we had to write custom abap extract programms. It took quite some time and money...

Regards,

Olivier