NSW Department rolls HP kit under SAP

The NSW Department of Services, Technology and Administration plans to consolidate two separate SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems into a single environment deployed on HP infrastructure from next year.

The Department told iTnews it is in the process of consolidating two production SAP ERP environments onto a single server and setting up a new disaster recovery facility for the consolidated environment.

"These SAP programs currently need to run on two separate platforms," a Department spokesman told iTnews.

"In June 2009 DSTA purchased two HP rx8640 Itanium servers, associated licences and hardware.

"In keeping with standard practice, one server will be maintained at the Department's main data centre facility and the other will be housed at a secondary facility to provide backup in the event of a major malfunction or disaster."

The Department spokesman anticipated the consolidated structure would "reduce support costs in the fine tuning, configuration and maintenance of the existing programs.

"For example, the SAP programs require upgrades up to three times per year, each of which can take up to three weeks per platform," the spokesman said.

"Under the new system the upgrades will be only be required for the single platform."

The SAP ERP system will now run on two HP Integrity rx8460 Itanium servers and an HP StorageWorks XP24000 disk array.

The deployment also included HP Global Instant Capacity on Demand (GiCAP) software, which allows hardware usage rights to be shared among servers, according to HP.

The Department also has access to HP Instant Capacity (iCAP), a piece of free HP software that enables users "to increase processing capacity instantly on (specified) HP enterprise servers", the vendor said.

Design and build work for the consolidation project was still underway, the Department said.

"Final delivery is expected by the end of March 2010," the spokesman said.