Saturday, August 9, 2014

SAP is Complicated

Sometimes I get issues from my customers that they want resolved immediately.  But you know what, SAP servers and the issues are complicated.

We currently have 2 people working on these servers and on the issues that pop up and we do our best to issues fixed as fast as possible.  But to help us, here is what I need from you guys.

When an issue pops up, please send us:

1) Which Server and ID you are using
2) Do a Step by Step from Login with screen shots, until the issue comes. (Imagine we do not know SAP, and this way we can understand what the issue is.  This is the same way you would report an issue at a work location and I want everybody to used to that method. - The reason I ask this is that the basis team are not functional experts and what seems obvious to you as a functional consultant is not obvious to us.  If you can do this we can solve the issues very quickly.
3) Be patient, we are working as hard as we can to solve your issue. - We are a pretty big company now and we have customers from all over the world and currently maintain over 60 servers.  But we only work from 9am-9pm EST USA time.

Network Issues - HANA Server

We have been having network issues over the last 1 week and some were due to the T1 provider, but there was one other issue that we just solved today.  I am sorry to my customers who have been effected over the last 1 week by this slowdown, but it has been solved and you will not see anymore slowdowns.

We have been trying to install HANA test server and we would install SUSE Linux recommend by SAP.

Then we would install HANA.

After 1-3 days the entire network of our T1 lines would be compromised and bandwidth would fall to almost zero and now of the other servers would be accessible.

For a solution I tried a different server, thinking the first server had been corrupted.  Same result.

I had bought both servers from the same vendor and I though that maybe the RAM memory had a built in memory, so I ordered 128GB RAM and installed it and installed the software and same result.

I then bought a new server from a different vendor thinking that maybe the processor had a built in virus.  Installed the Linus software.  We were busy with other work and did not get time to install HANA.  Today, the exact same issue even without installing HANA.

So I guess the final verdict is that the Linux Operating System Software itself is corrupt.

Today I had a network issue and I disconnected server by server thinking we had a virus on it and low and behold the second we unhooked the HANA server everything worked fine again.

It is nice when we figure out the issue, but meanwhile I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and hardware that I do not need.

We now have 5 servers with the below configuration:

4 6-Core Processors
128 GB RAM
5 x 2 TB Hard Drives

In case you need a hard core server let us know and we can get it ready for your needs.