News
SAP AG and IBM Expand S/390 R/3 Solution
SAP AG and IBM Corp. announced plans to deliver SAP’s R/3 Application Server functions on IBM’s S/390 Parallel Enterprise Server, in addition to the existing database server solution, to meet the needs of large enterprise customers. Initial delivery will begin in the fourth quarter of 1999. Based on market demand, SAP and IBM have optimized this solution to provide customers with the architectural flexibility to maximize the platform efficiencies of the full range of all application servers for the OS/390 Database Server solution. This flexibility enables customers to choose the most suitable platform to achieve high performance and a low total cost of ownership while benefiting from the S/390’s system management capabilities."Since the availability of the S/390 as database server for SAP solutions, an increasing number of customers have demanded the flexibility to also deploy application server services on the S/390 platform," said Karl-Heinz Hess, member of the SAP Extended Executive Board, System Technology Development. Typical SAP R/3 workloads that will benefit either from the traditional strengths of S/390 or from the proximity to the database server are database-intensive applications which create heavy traffic to the database server, batch processes and the message/enqueue services. Others are R/3 applications that require tight integration with the customer’s existing S/390 application portfolio."While no one can predict the future, given the rapid expansion of global markets and the accelerating rate of technological change, this announcement helps to ensure that large enterprise SAP R/3 customers will be able to further exploit e-business opportunities by leveraging S/390’s tradition of high availability for mission-critical applications," said David Carlucci, General Manager, IBM S/390 Division.