When implementing your SAP data migration or upgrading to S/4HANA, it is important to have a well-planned and disciplined archive strategy. Set your goals so that you get the best benefits, and have a strategy that will keep your goals attainable. Good preparation and thorough understanding of your project’s scope will help you meet your goals. What you want to do is leverage a solid methodology while using and taking advantage of marketplace available tools that will speed up as well as reduce the cost of implementation. You should always map out an execution plan and follow-up with best practices so your environment remains efficient and lean.
GOALS
Similar to ensuring good data quality for a smooth migration, implementing a comprehensive data archiving initiative will reduce costs, reduce your SAP Data migration time, improve system performance & improve solution adoption.
When putting together an archiving strategy and plan for your migration initiative, consider the following:
- Reduction of database size and growth
- This keeps the database manageable and makes for an easier migration
- Estimate the savings on your current storage
- Evaluate the savings post-migration
- Measure the monthly growth rate post-migration
- Schedule regular archiving jobs to keep the database optimal
- Retention Management Policies
- Create policies and procedures that provide defensible disposition
- Implementation timeline and cost
- With a good archiving strategy, timeline and cost can be kept to a minimum
PREPARATION
To prepare for your SAP data migration, the first thing you need to do is make a list of the requirements and gather them together. After that, you must identify the objects in scope for Archiving and perform a complete audit of the objects in scope of the project.
You’re saying “that can’t be all”. Well you’re right!
Perform an assessment on the objects so you can project the amount of space that the current database will be reduced by. This will help provide an estimate for the amount of data that will be migrated and the amount of space required in the new system. However, moving data into S/4HANA is expensive so knowing the projected footprint requirements will enable a large amount of cost savings.
Some important things to consider for Retention Management:
- What data needs to be maintained for legal and audit purposes
- GDPR, which impacts companies and businesses that collect personal individual data of EU individuals
- By extension, US states are starting to follow suit with policies such as the CCPA
TOOLS
There are tools available that assist with archiving, especially when you have large amounts of data.
SAP’s ILM and OpenText tools are two examples of exquisite offerings that assist with your archiving initiative. Auritas, the SAP partner of choice and leader in SAP archiving, has accelerators and proprietary tools which enable a more efficient, faster, and cheaper archiving execution.
SDAT – SAP DATA ARCHIVING TOOL
Auritas proprietary tool SDAT is an ABAP feature to facilitate identification of custom reports and t-codes that could be affected by archiving. This functionality reduces the time to evaluate reports. It also provides a usage-based search for reports that need to be considered for archive enabling. It combines the search through the catalogue of reports and t-codes that would be affected by archiving each object and when as well as who has been using the report. The report is not a replacement for UAT nor does it provide a definitive list of reports, objects, and t-codes that could be affected by archiving. In combination with a “top-down” review by functional teams of their regularly used reports, the SDAT “bottom-up” listing helps to identify reports, users, teams, etc. It is an effective support feature to help mitigate the chance of missing any reports that would need to be archive enabled. SDAT is executed by your Auritas archiving team and the results are presented and evaluated by the project’s team.
ASM – ARCHIVE SCHEDULING MANAGER
Auritas Archive Schedule Manager (ASM) is a utility which provides functionality that includes the automatic creation of dynamic variants for archiving objects, submission of those jobs and variants into the scheduler, and the creation of archive object variants for executing historical (catch up) archiving sessions.
The goal is to provide an efficient automated process for executing dozens of archiving sessions to archive data from go-live up to the current period. This typically requires manual effort to create numerous variants and submitting into the batch processors.
Going forward in a steady state archiving situation, the ASM dynamically creates the “next” variant and submits the job for the scheduler to pick up and schedule accordingly. This results in a consistent and predictable implementation of maintenance archiving, avoiding gaps in archive job execution.
These tools compliment the archiving execution. They should be part of your overall data migration strategy and provides value post-migration.
EXECUTION & BEST PRACTICES
Following best practices methodology is important. Data volume management helps to maintain growth within your environment.
SAP Data Archiving
We recommend implementing appropriate archiving objects and transferring all the existing residence periods. A detailed review of the existing ECC objects to determine any changes to the behavior or the S/4 version of the archiving object will be required.
Retention Management
This will maintain data volume control over the entire SAP landscape including very high storage costs to lower storage costs. Becoming compliant with the records policy also reduces the cost associated with maintaining data past its required life cycle. These costs are primarily derived from the value of risk avoidance.
Data Aging
Data aging offers you the option of moving large amounts of data within a database to gain more working memory. Data still resides in the database, it just reduces the HANA database memory footprint. Data aging can manage outdated information and helps to move sets of data within a database by specifying a data temperature. Hot data resides in the current area of the database, and warm or cold data is moved to the historical area of the database.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Auritas is geared with the data and content experts to help you at any phase of your project. If you have an SAP system and are interested in learning more, then please contact us.
We welcome all questions and comments! If you have anything specific that you’re unsure about, one of our experts will reach out to you.
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