Possibility of manual intervention in case of delta import
SAP system copy and the cloud
The process of creating system copies for updates can be broken down into different activities, as shown in Table 1. For each group, the software used for automation is shown, where "UC4" stands for UC4 Automated System Copy and "HP" stands for HP System Copy. All these activity groups are described individually below.
Such system copies, with their enormous manual effort and SAP checklists that are often hundreds of items long, must be performed before every refresh. Usually, three to four days have to be planned for this, during which the QA system - which in two-tier SAP environments is also the development system - is not available for the actual work. The delay is actually only caused by the meticulous matching of trivial things, such as directory names. Because such SAP system copies have to be created for each SAP application on the QA system and can thus quickly require dozens of system copies, they tie up a lot of resources and staff.
Solution infrastructure
There are various ways to tame this time robber and reduce run times. For example, through parallelization or the automatic generation of secondary indices.
Tests are already worthwhile for the introduction of SAP solutions in the company and also for release upgrades and migration projects, the import of patches, customizing, modifications and in-house developments. A three-tier SAP landscape typically consists of development, test and production systems. In addition, there are often training systems.
With "Shortcut for SAP Systems" any tables can be saved and restored. This is especially useful in the context of an SAP system copy - quite a few tables are system-specific and must exist unchanged in the system after a system copy.Shortcut for SAP Systems uses R3trans - a utility from SAP that is essentially used in the Transport Management System (TMS) environment. With "Shortcut for SAP Systems" it is now also available outside the TMS and enables completely new and diverse application possibilities. Among others in the environment of a system copy. R3trans works database independent. I.e. even in the case of a system refresh from an SAP system with an Oracle DB to a system with HANA, the backup and restore process works!
If this is not the case, the system copy is considered heterogeneous.
SAP Basis refers to the administration of SAP system that includes activities like installation and configuration, load balancing, and performance of SAP applications running on Java stack and SAP ABAP. This includes the maintenance of different services related to database, operating system, application and web servers in SAP system landscape and stopping and starting the system. Here you can find some useful information about SAP Basis: www.sap-corner.de.
Particularly in the context of automation, preference should be given to solutions that support all relevant types of SAP system operation.