SAP R/3 In A UNIX Environment: A Case Study For Client/Server Capacity Planning

SAP R/3 is a multi-tier client/server application which supports and simplifies business applications in areas of finance, production, distribution, sales, and human resources. It recently has become very popular worldwide, and in many cases drives the purchase of significant amounts of UNIX hardware. It’s multi-tier architecture typifies the strategies of mission critical applications implemented for UNIX and Windows NT, where workstations communicate with application servers which in turn communicate with database servers such as Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. This paper is a client/server case study of what instrumentation is available from UNIX, what instrumentation is required from a client/server application such as SAP R/3, and how system and subsystem metrics can be used in an analytic model for sizing and capacity planning.