Current is&t Issue

Volume 20

No. 4  March/April 2005

SAP Update and Hardware Renewal Slated for May

• Diana Hughes

IS&T is planning an SAP hardware renewal from May 20 through May 22. It will include the following.

• Hewlett Packard (HP) Alpha machines will be replaced with Sun V490 and V890 machines.

• The operating system will move from HP tru64 to Sun Solaris 9.

• The SAP kernel, SAP application support packages, and SAP Oracle database will be updated.

• The SAP Internet Transaction Server support packages will be updated from version 14 to 17.

The hardware renewal is being done because the HP hardware is six years old. Parts availability and the lack of trained field engineers have been ongoing issues. Renewing the hardware also minimizes the impact on the SAP module implementations planned by the HR-Payroll and Environmental, Health and Safety projects for early 2006.

The Sun hardware will provide a stable SAP environment for the next several years and reduce the risk of hardware-related outages. It will also facilitate upgrading to the next SAP release, planned for 2006.

Putting IT to the Test
In preparation for the hardware renewal, integration testing will take place May 2 through May 13. The testing will focus on critical SAP business processes, as identified by business units and the IS&T Administrative Computing Team. External interfaces to SAP – such as the MIT ID Database, IXOS, Roles Database, ECAT, Data Warehouse, and Athena Print Servers – will also be tested.

The Administrative Computing Quality Assurance (QA) Team will coordinate integration testing. Administrative Computing Team members and business process owners will participate in testing exercises in the Development (SF2) and Education & Practice (SF6) environments. Testing will be done manually from written test scripts, and issues will be logged in the QA Test Issue Database. The QA Team will be responsible for resolution of all open issues.

Questions?
To contact the team working on these updates, send email to <sap-spring-renewal@mit.edu>.

Key Dates
April 18–29: SF2 (Development environment) unit testing

May 2–13: SF6 (Education & Practice environment) integration testing

May 20–22: PS1 (Production environment) application of updates

May 23: Updated SAP Production available to MIT community

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