Looking for feedback on SAP Basis responsibilities

[MichaelG258]

For the last 10 years, our SAP Basis lead has been responsible for all aspects of the SAP infrastructure platform on the IBM i. These duties included IBM Power Server, IBM i OS host server upgrades/operations/security, SAP ECC application server upgrades/operations/security, and client installations.

Recently with an organization change we are needing to separate those functions which is somewhat easy to do. However, the new hire has no IBM i skills and the expectation is any tasks required at the OS level of the SAP application server will be the responsibility of Infrastructure/Operations. However, that team has no SAP experience and I feel they should not have the responsibility for making changes to SAP profile and configuration options in the SAP directories or changing environment variables and other related objects.

Looking for suggestions on tasks which should be given to Infrastructure and those which should remain as the SAP Basis Lead.

[RSchmerbauch]

Hi Michael,

I agree that it's probably easier for an SAP Basis person to learn some things about IBM i than the other way around. Instance profiles, environment variables specific to SAP, probably basis. Things like failed drives and firmware updates and cumulative PTF applies are easily on the infrastructure side and SAP user profiles on the basis side.

The key to me is that the two teams develop some awareness of what each other does, so they can work together in a coordinated way in the grey areas. The last thing you want is to create silos between that point at each other when there's a problem (I've seen this more than you might think).

There are lots of examples where you had an advantage because you were doing both sides. If infrastructure wants to do a nightly flash copy or a save while active, they should know enough about the SAP team's activity to do it either before or after the nightly batch job that does a lot of updates, not during it. If infrastructure wants to add memory to the system, the basis team should be aware of it since it can change how the SAP kernel does buffer allocations. If the SAP basis team is going to run an upgrade, perhaps the infrastructure team could allocate another processor to two from the shared pool. Narrowing down a performance issue - is it abap, or is it a bad query, is the external storage suddenly performing poorly, or is it a network router problem?

They don't need to know everything about the other team, but communication between them is critical imo.

Regards, Ron

[MichaelG258]

Thank you for the feedback as those were my feelings but needed a perspective especially since my contact with other SAP platforms is limited. Although I recommended training, it is not an option that was taken into consideration. Originally, this separation of duties was only going to be temporary as there was a fast path being considered for migration to S/4. I was going to fill in areas as needed. That project has now been slowed and they SAP Basis team is going to undertake a project to upgrade from EHP6 to EHP8. I don't feel that is wise without training. Communication between the groups will not be the problem, but accepting responsibilities for some of the task will be a challenge but my feeling the SAP Basis Lead will need to step up seems to be appropriate course of action.

[Sriram2009]

Hi Michael,

In my view, you have to give more priority to the SAP Basis function, all basis guys can easily learn about any OS / DB admin tasks. when we install /migrate/upgrade any SAP systems in any OS/ DB, SAP will provide clear-cut documents with references SAP Basis guy can perform those admin tasks.

As an I am basis admin, I have learned SAP basis and OS - (IBMi V7R3, Windows servers 2012/2016/2019, AIX Unix) / DB - (IBMi V7R3, MS SQL 2012/2016, Sybase16.5) admin tasks.

An IBMi platform slightly complex hardware environment, but still, once you have understood the environment easily manage

Regards

SS

[MichaelG258]

Thanks for the feedback. Separating the tasks for the job and not having any idea of the structure you are mentioning appears to be a shortcoming. Disregarding training to speed up the project timeline is a risk I don't want responsibility for.