Building Blocks 

An Adaptive Computing landscape consists of four building blocks. The individual components are combined into pools and then made available to the other building blocks as a whole.

 

 

 

 

Computing

The Computing block contains all servers that allow the operation of the SAP applications, including their operating systems. This can be both physical and virtual servers. Virtual servers are provided as individual or multiple operating system partitions of a physical server.

The most important prerequisite for the Computing block is that the operating systems of the servers can be maintained and installed by a central management tool, such as a deployment tool. The infrastructure must also make it possible to add or reduce CPU resources with little configuration effort.

 

Network

The Network block includes all of the components that together provide the network infrastructure. The primary task of this block is the linking of the other blocks. This block does not necessarily consist only of IP-based components, which are required for IP-based storage systems, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) or ISCSI (internet Small Computer System Interface, a Storage-over-TCP procedure). If Fibre Channel (FC) storage is to be integrated into the landscape, the network also needs to contain a Storage Area Network (SAN).

The Adaptive Computing Controller uses Secure Shell (SSH) to call commands across the network. Secure Shell is both a program and a network protocol, with which you can log on to a remote computer and execute programs there. SSH must be implemented in such a way that it is not necessary to enter a password when logging on to remote computers in the landscape. To do this, you need to configure security keys and store them in the individual systems.

 

Storage

The Storage block is one of the key components of an Adaptive Computing landscape. It consists of one or more central storage systems in which all data relevant to the SAP system is stored. As mentioned above, this can include both IP-based storage systems and Fibre Channel-based systems.

All components of the SAP Application Services, that is the central instance, all dialog instances, and the database must be stored on this central storage. The local disks of the servers cannot be used to store the SAP system components (binaries, profiles, configuration, data files of the database, and so on), since to do so would bind the Application Service to this server, and mean that it could no longer be moved.

The Storage concept with Adaptive Computing is based on a “shared everything” approach, that is, that theoretically every server in the landscape is simultaneously available to all components of the applications. However, they are only actually connected at the time when they are actually used.

 

Control

The Control block consists of the Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC), which controls the entire SAP system landscape. It is the central operational component of a landscape and is part of SAP NetWeaver. The ACC is a WebDynpro application and runs in a Web Application Server (Web AS) Java. It uses standards such as CIM and XML, and has a Controller Command Interface (CCI) to provide an interface to third-party applications.