ARCHIVE

Migration of EH&S templates to third-party storage solution:

Working on data archiving, I was exposed to a challenge  of using Archive Development Kit  in a non conventional way,  but  yet  with similar outcomes. SAP R/3 allows clients to store business documents in a module called DMS (Data Management System).  The documents are stored in database table s , which in some cases grow tremendously. A well-known global manufacturer faced a daunting challenge of growing SAP DATABASE size due to EH&S (Environment, Health and Safety) documents (RTF formatted) stored in SAP database. The table stored over a million documents with more than 200 GB size on the disk. The EH&S (Environment Health & Safety) documents need to be archived (moved out of SAP database) in such a way that the SAP standard DMS transactions such as CG50, CG54, CG03 etc, should continue to display the EH&S documents as if the documents were stored in SAP database. In contrast to standard ADK, the ability of standard transactions to display archived data is either limited or terminated. The plan promised continued regulatory and business compliance. After consulting various business, legal, and management teams, we proposed the following plan to accomplish the objectives.

1.  Migration of historical EH&S documents from SAP Database to Third Party Storage

• Identify released EH&S templates that can be safely moved to the storage solution.
   
• Research best storage solution to meet the requirements with minimum investment
   
• Develop plan to migrate documents from SAP database to storage solution without impacting any day-to-day business activities specially EH&S development and reporting.
   
• Migrate documents to storage solution while maintaining the access to documents from same SAP transaction codes.
   
• Delete documents from SAP database after two months of residence. This step would actually reduce the Database table size. The four-week time gap between migration and deletion would be a part of contingency plan.
   
• Carry out the Database re-org on SAP DMS tables to regain the table space.

2)  Data prevention strategy

1. Migrate the released documents to storage solutions every quarter.
    
2. Carry out the DB re-org twice a year.

The exceptional  insight  about this approach  was  to continue to maintain the availability of the documents in standard transaction and therefore maintaining the business functionality. The changes basically would be transparent to the users. During the testing, we realized couple of things:

1. The residence time in SAP was revised from 6 months to one year. Due to the numbers of documents selected for migration and expected space reclamation, the BASIS team has increased the residence period in order to reduce the frequency of the ongoing regular runs.
    
2. Since the DMS stored various types of documents, the plan was revised to create each individual repository on the third-party storage solution for each document (PDF, RTF, Plain text) type. These findings helped eliminate any mixup of the files with different formats.

We added one more round of regression testing in order to ensure that the functionality is maintained. The phase I go-live went well as expected and it took us around two days to migrate about 225,000 documents. We have used two concurrent processes for the migration. The migrated documents were finally removed from SAP DATABASE two weeks after the initial migration followed by DB reorg.

Bottom-line:

The plan  did  accomplish two major goals:

1. Alleviate SAP DATABASE maintenance costs and efforts to a large extent.
    
2. Enable external (non-SAP) clients, for example web-based, to obtain EH&S documents from the imaging server via secure HTTP interface

Our deep knowledge of SAP’s data storing mechanism in particular and data archiving in general helped the client to accomplish the objects not only in the timely manner but also eliminated any end use training. At the end of the day, the client was very satisfied with the level  of  unique expertise and professionalism rendered in all the phases of the project.