Product Overview

Background

System copy and system refresh are fundamental administrative tasks in SAP landscapes. In situations where you need to change your operating system, your database, or maybe you want to build an entirely new system based on an existing system, you need to perform system copy. If you want to set up a sandbox system for testing and demo purposes, a system copy is also performed. While system refresh is closely related to system copy, it basically involves more than just copying one system to another. When you refresh a system, you overwrite an existing target system with the latest data from a source system while maintaining the configuration. 

The challenge now is how system refresh requires several steps, that when performed manually, can be tedious and time-consuming as it requires at least 20 hours to perform. Depending on the complexity of your systems, system refresh can even take up to several days to complete. Given SAP's recommendation to perform system refresh at least once every quarter, it would be a great relief to have an automated solution in place and remove the burden of having to manually process them four times a year, or probably more.



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Product Description

SID-Refresh™ is a tool developed to automate the end-to-end process of system refresh. It is designed to simplify, automate, and optimize the process of updating the technical data and configuration in SAP systems. 

Figure 1: System Refresh Process

 

Definition

System Refresh is the process of copying one SAP system to another SAP system while retaining the existing configuration settings.

Simplifying the SAP System Refresh with SID-Refreshâ„¢

Benefits and Value

The benefits and value provided by SID-Refreshâ„¢ are the following:

  • Additional hardware is not required

  • Minimal resources for implementation and operations

  • No major changes in the existing landscape

  • Easy implementation with minimal process

  • Can be deployed on platforms that use different operating systems and databases

  • Automated process

  • Minimizes downtime

  • Increased integrity

 

Below are the average savings we saw in the field for customers who benefited from pre and post-copy automation per system refresh. Note that the actual database copy is not included because that depends on the size of the customer's system and the platform/technology used.  The manual process varies based on the complexity of the system due to the number of jobs, connections, profiles, etc., while SID-Refresh™, the automated process, remains consistent each time regardless of system complexity. 

Manual

With SID-Refresh™

Manual

With SID-Refresh™

20 hours

4 hours

Varied effort and error rate depending on system complexity

More thorough and error-free regardless of system complexity

Manual implementation of the checklist

40% automated


SAP Supported Environments

The following table lists the SAP environments that are supported by SID-Refreshâ„¢ with other useful information.

Application

Version

Application

Version

SAP NetWeaver ABAP

7.00 - 7.50

SAP ECC

5.0 and 6.0

SAP S/4 HANA

From 1511

Solution Manager

From 7.0

SAP BI

From 7.0

SAP CRM

From 7.0

SAP EWM

From 7.0

SAP SCM

From 7.0

SAP GTS

From 7.0

 

SAP Supported Operating Systems

The following table lists the supported operating systems where the .jar file can be installed.

System

Architecture

System

Architecture

Linux/Unix

64-bit (x86_64)/SPARC (64-bit), IBM AIX on POWER Systems (64-bit)

Microsoft Windows

64-bit (x86_64)

 

Limitations of the Product

SID-Refreshâ„¢ satisfies the majority of the required functionalities when performing system refresh. The following lists down the current limitations of the product.

  • Refreshing systems between unicode and non-unicode

  • Testing for SAP BI, CRM, SCM scenarios (basis technical configurations would still work, but module-specific technical configurations may not be covered)

  • Does not support NetWeaver Java




Want to simplify how you process your system refresh?

Adopt SID-Refresh™ to simplify, automate, and optimize your data refresh requirements now.



More Information




Do you have a question about the content on this page? E-mail us at sidrefresh@itconductor.com.