Archive for SAP

#SAPAdmin or #DevOp – either or both

/ May 21, 2012 / One comment

My last blog post explored my desire to increase my skill set to become more of a DevOp to help me to support current systems and also the new hybrid architectures which are entering our workplaces. I started a 2nd post to describe to people unfamiliar with DevOps what it is and what it is not – during the post I realised that I should really be describing in terms of #SAPAdmin, hence the title.

#SAPAdmin was 1st described, as far as I am aware, by Tom Cenens as a way of connecting the various Administrators within the SAP community – by reputation we are not the most social of bunches in the world :-). Although it is a great idea, I know that it has not seen as much traction as either Tom, Martin English and I would have liked.  I think that part of the problem has been a lack of direction in terms of what it stands for, and I feel that using the core concepts of #DevOps – we can bring that direction and purpose into the #SAPAdmin  ethos and provide a more coherent entity for admins to get behind.

So lets get stuck in with a quick breakdown of what #DevOps is and what it is not

1.  DevOps is noun which describes a person and a philosophy/methodology of supporting an IT landscape.

As a person, it is an individual who understands both infrastructure and code to enable them to support their applications and also bridge the gaps created by support silos.

As a methodology, it aligns itself with Lean and Agile and so embeds with the smaller team and faster deployment model of projects as opposed to the traditional waterfall life cycle support model.

2. DevOps has a useful memonic – CAMS

  •  Culture – this is critical to the whole thing, the culture of the participating teams must embrace openess
  • Automation – Why spend an hour on a daily task when you can spend two and have the results e-mailed to you every day
  • Measurements – how can you improve if you do not measure, everything!
  • Sharing – why write a script to check if your SAP system is up, go on the internet and find one. If one does not exist, then write it – but you MUST put it on the internet for others to find, pay it forward.

3. DevOps is not about just automation

Although automation plays a massive role in DevOps, through it’s emphasis on Event processing, KPI measurement etc… The real benefit in DevOps is for people to bridge the gaps in the Silos, something Basis admins/consultants traditionally do very well. This does however exact a price upon the practitioner, the requirement to keep learning and keep applying what they have learnt – it does not, will not and cannot stop.

4. DevOps is not a job title

DevOps is way of thinking and working, through sharing and collaboration you and the teams you work with create a culture that brings the best from yourselves and because you share as a team, it enriches the ecosystem in which you work.

5. It is not handing Developer keys to Basis admins, or giving Root access to developers

We each have a skill set with strengths and weaknesses, a DevOp is a person who is an all rounder with most technologies and is able/willing to work in the grey areas to get the work done. So Developers do not usually get Root access without a good reason or the proven ability to actually be trusted. Similarly a Basis admin does not get the right to deploy code to Production for the same reasons and the same validation requirements. DevOps work in the grey spaces between the silos

6. DevOps is not an end run around IT

DevOps is not a way for guerilla IT to enable people to bypass process, I would say that the use of measurement and automation enables IT departments to make better use of it’s information in Structured and Unstructured data sets to create things like Change controls and documentation. You know the things that are necessary to run a good solid service, that take forever to create and get approved and then never really get updated again. DevOps uses the principles of Lean and Agile applies them to process and documentation.

7. DevOps is not a reaction to a technology problem but a business problem

DevOps enable businesses and core IT to move faster in implementing and support technology/applications as quickly as Agile projects deliver them. This is absolutely vital in this age of outsourcing, a good solid DevOps team can run and support a service for a client ensuring that the contextual information that so often gets lost when working remotely is maintained.

We have all seen SAP embrace and encourage the principles of Lean and Agile, providing accelerators and advice to adopters. I believe that this is a great time to start to apply the lessons our organisations have learnt in terms of Agile and Lean projects to our staid and overly complicated silo’d support structures.

As DevOps we have a massive advantage over other software/systems administrators – we have 2 products that are open, extensible, stable and free to build a DevOps service around

  • Solution Manager 7.1 – the structured data component of the landscape providing all measures and KPIs and something which can be closely aligned to the business and it’s processes
  • SAP Streamworks – the collaboration tool which through Web Services can/should be able to be extended to work with Solution Manager

Let me know what you think of applying the concepts of DevOps to the SAPAdmin community

Reference Links

What is the DevOps thing anyway

What Devops means to me 

 DevOps and Agile Operations

What DevOps is not

FacebookDeliciousPosterousDiggTwitterStumbleUponShare
Category: Cloud, DevOps, Interesting, Lifestream, SAP /

DevOp and why I want to be one

/ May 19, 2012 / 6 comments

Over the last year I have had a number of adventures, some good and some bad – but all of them experiences. Last month I read about a term for the 1st time that really spoke to me, it encapsulated a concept which had been brewing in my head for a while – a DevOp, Developer Operator.

In November last year I was in Madrid attending SAP TechEd, and you could not move for people talking about various platforms and Developers being the new kingmakers – being an Basis guy specialising in infrastructure it may have been boring for many people, but for me the lightbulb was turning on. I was very interested in how to connect technologies together, not just how to build the infrastructure and let other people worry about that stuff.

These thoughts fermented a little more, I continued to experiment with Ruby, C# and my Microsoft Kinect – gaining some more skills as time would allow. At Teched I met the excellent James Governor and Tom Rafferty, two analysts from Redmonk who I have a great deal of time and admiration for. After following them on Twitter for a while, I found out about Monkigras, a developer conference in London. I glanced at the attendee list and booked my ticket, paying for it myself as I figured “why would my employer pay for me to go to something so far outside my day job”, took 2 days leave and arranged to stay at my friend’s house.

Despite knowing only 1 other attendee,  Monkigras would turn out to be an amazing conference, I heard lots and lots of new words, understood perhaps about 20% of them and had to make copious notes of the others. The thing that I took away from it the most was the developers and APIs are the future, infrastructure is a commodity that just needs to exist – the real value is in the data and it’s manipulation. “It always has been” I hear you cry – well that is correct but instead of putting it into Excel and making stupid graphs or putting it into PowerPoint, lets use applications to perform transformations, link it to other data attributes from another data set through an API and turn it into something amazing – this link is from a speaker who used GitHub and LastFm to create a music map of developers

For me my true love is not code, I like the idea of it and messing with it, but if you tried to get me to write as a job, one of us would be dead in about a week – so I thought some more about what the perfect balance would be. My good friend Simon McCartney came to mind, an exceptional infrastructure administrator and someone who is comfortable working with code, he calls himself a digital carpenter, Hugh MacLeod would call him a digital crofter. The ability to continue to work as an infrastructure person along with the ability to work with scripts and code is a powerful combination which provides a great deal of value to your business and the team.

DevOps Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of running
systems by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes over tools
Working systems over comprehensive documentation
Customer and developer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more

There are a number of reasons why I am drawn to the way of the DevOp, most of them are encapsulated above, and perhaps I will explore these personal areas in more detail in public and risk the wrath of various people, then again perhaps not. The one of the main attractions being that with shorter life cycles and products becoming easier to deploy, a multi-talented person who is a solid ‘all-rounder’ will be in greater demand than the 2 or 3 niche people you would have hired previously, as software lifecycles are shorter – living with your mistake is not as long as it used to be.

Another thing I like about development, it the ability to do really smart things with data like this visualisation of Facebook relationships – how totally cool is that picture which is derived from the most basis data which can be queried form the Facebook social graph

So for now I am going to continue down the road of becoming a DevOp, taking every opportunity to deploy a code or script solution to improve my effectiveness and provide increased value for my clients.

Ultimately I want to build things, real, virtual and data based. I want those things to mean something, to me and my clients – As Hugh MacLeod would say – I have the Hunger and I am damn well going to use it

 

FacebookDeliciousPosterousDiggTwitterStumbleUponShare
Category: Interesting, Lifestream, SAP /

Yet again Amazon Web Services deliver on their promises

/ January 11, 2012 / No comments

Today I found that a product I have been hearing whispers and rumours about and was trialled in the US last year is finally with us in the UK, network connectivity using private circuits into specific telecoms centres.

This is a great development as produces 3 main effects

1. Reduced network costs out of AWS, which is valuable for applications with high data requirements

2. More consistent performance for Internet based applications

3. Increases connectivity options for companies that have security policies which do nt allow VPN connections to Cloud services

For me as a consultant for a large SI, this additional connectivity option is a major plus when talking to customers, some of whom have security policies which forbid connections to the Cloud.

The service is not available through the AWS Management Console, an application must be made in a form to AWS – I have no idea how long this process with take, but as it involves actual people I know it will move at the normal speed of Cloud!

Personally I am looking forward to my next partner briefing and hopefully getting a demonstration of this product. In the interim, AWS need to be getting some good collateral out to customers and partners – traditionally AWS have not produced brilliant documentation 1st time out and a service like this needs good solid documentation as it will be used to convince the unconverted.

AWS – I am looking forward to seeing this product in action and implementing it, give us the tools and the documentation to convert the unconverted to use your services.

 

 

 

 

FacebookDeliciousPosterousDiggTwitterStumbleUponShare
Category: Cloud, Lifestream, SAP /

Landscape and Virtualisation Manager concerns

/ October 26, 2011 / No comments

 

Last week I received some disturbing news about the license model of the new Landscape and Virtualisation Manager (LVM) which is entering Ramp-Up in November, before I get to the news I received lets look at what the LVM is.

The LVM is a new product from SAP which is the replacement for the Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC), the new LVM has increased capabilities over and above the ACC – for example the LVM has the ability to script and execute system copies automatically, it has dashboards and lots of management capability of physical, virtual and (hopefully soon) Cloud environments.

The LVM is, for me, one of the most exciting SAP products coming out in the next year, it effectively ‘closes the circle’ of the SAP technical administration tools – Landscape Management Database, SMSY (System Landscape) and System Landscape Directory.

 

LVM_Pic

 

By ‘closing the circle’ in terms of Technical administration I mean, the ability to have multiple sources of information cross-feeding each other efficiently providing a single version of the truth for each of the administration applications

LMDB – Analogous to the SLD, it provides many of the same functions and synchronises directly with SMSY

SLD – Provides information on each registered system, providing software component and patch levels.

SMSY – This is the central hub of all information in Solution Manager, everything that is associated with a system gets it’s information from here

LVM – Provides dashboards, control capabilities for instances like start/stop or relocate

 

image

During Teched Bangalore, a colleague of mine was attending a Virtualisation session, during this session it was mentioned that the LVM will be a licensed product and will not be provided as part of the SAP license like Solution Manager. This to me was a vey strange statement as it was always my understanding that the LVM, like the ACC would be provided as part of the SAP License and would be available to all for download. For me, not providing it in this fashion would be a bad idea for the following reasons

 

1. No-one will use it.

The ACC has taken many years to get to where it is today, and it is a far more useable product in the last 2 versions that it ever was before. Still there has not been great uptake for it with customers, again for a number of reasons (integration with SolMan being one of them), but at least the ACC was free, this encouraged people to use it, even if was a skunk works project by the Basis team after seeing it demonstrated. If you make people pay for it, and get the price wrong then you alienate your market. Also how do you really quantify the ROI in saving the Basis team nearly an hour when doing a kernel upgrade across 15 servers. SAP have been promising for years to make administration easier to reduce TCO etc…, now that they have delivered tools like Solution Manager 7.1, the LMDB and the LVM, those statements have never looked so attractive or achievable.

 

2. It will not function within the partner ecosystem

One of the key selling points for LVM is both the extensibility of the product to link up with different infrastructures (see top diagram), it will not replace your Tivoli or HP equivalent, but work with them in a push/pull fashion. Partners will provide good resources if there is a demand from customers, they will just provide plain resources if it’s contractual. If no-one uses the product, then SAP can expect to see poor partner development of add-ons for the product which would make it a killer application.

 

3. Value proposition disappears

One of the many things that SAP have touted within the LVM is the ability to run system copies and refreshes, for this capability there was an expectation of paying for a license – which was reasonable. The main value proposition is that by using LVM, and with it’s tight integration into all the landscape management components mentioned above, the whole management of the pre, during and post tasks was infinitely simpler. If the whole LVM incurs a license fee, and the partner ecosystem falters, then the 3rd party tools, which handle more than just SAP start to look attractive again and SAP will have developed a smart application which no-one uses.

 

Today I have a call with SAP to get to the bottom of this and hopefully I will be happy, although probably under NDA so will not be able to write about it until ramp up. Regardless of what SAP are going to do with the product, I would strongly urge you to look at the product – it is a great piece of technology and does ‘close the circle’ on technical administration. If SAP treat it right and nurture both it’s partners and the ecosystem, then LVM can grow into a cornerstone product for SAP applications, if SAP treats it’s customers as a way to make a fast buck out of licenses then SAP will have wasted both money and brownie points with the #sapadmin community. SAP will have pods for the LVM at Madrid and also check out session TEC120 for more information.

 

 

FacebookDeliciousPosterousDiggTwitterStumbleUponShare
Category: Capgemini, Cloud, Lifestream, SAP /

What can you do to keep up with TechEd Las Vegas when you cannot be there

/ September 12, 2011 / No comments

Last week Thorsten Franz (@thorstenster) wrote about why he attends SAP TechEd at every opportunity, after reading it I thought 2 things,

1. I am jealous as hell that my SAP Mentor brothers and sisters are out in Vegas and I am not there,

2. No-one has talked about how those of us left behind can take part in SAP Teched – so here we are.

In recent years, SAP has embraced the social aspects of conferences using YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which I love, it shows how much SAP has changed and wants to engage with it’s customers – getting them to listen is still a challenge but they’ll have the conversation. I remember last year when I went to Las Vegas and was contacted by Gunther Schmatzalf through the social connections provided by the TechEd website, it was a productive meeting and completely facilitated by social media.

In addition to all the social connection stuff, SAP also stream a great many sessions online, so for those of us left at home we can watch the sessions on-line (Virtual SAPTeched) – it remains to be seen as to whether people will be able to ask questions in the same way they were for the Virtualisation week in April, but I will be hoping.

For me I will be taking part in TechEd as much as possible, being in the UK the time zones play into my favour as many of the sessions will be at the backend of my business day so I can usually watch them in peace. Also I will be keeping up with my friends at TechEd using twitter and e-mail, during the week ASUG produced a great list of the best people to follow on Twitter for TechEd Insights (ASUG News.) As usual there will be a lot of hashtags to follow on Twitter, this link will show you the major hashtags, and there will be some unofficial hashtags used between friends which can yield some very good information too

Like all things, you will get as much out of it as you put into it, the information and session information is out there it is up to you to make the effort to string it all together and get the information from it. So good luck and happy engaging :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

FacebookDeliciousPosterousDiggTwitterStumbleUponShare
Category: SAP / Tags: , ,
 

Switch to our mobile site