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This IT Scenario variant provides end-to-end support for managing your information across its entire life cycle. Information Lifecycle Management from SAP (ILM from SAP) is a new capability that aligns your information with business processes through the management of policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data.

The need for ILM has grown considerably in recent years, due to external and internal drivers, particularly legal compliance requirements and related risk management, an increasing trend towards system landscape harmonization and consolidation, and total cost of ownership (TCO) issues. ILM from SAP helps you manage your information according to these drivers.

Implementation Considerations

ILM from SAP is a licensable capability, which must be activated via the switch framework (transaction SFW5) once you have obtained your license. You must have at least a SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 installed. For more information on ILM see Information Lifecycle Management.

Features

ILM from SAP is composed of three cornerstones, each of which addresses different business scenarios:

  • Data Archiving: This cornerstone is the core of ILM from SAP and focuses mainly on data volume management. It consists of the classical data archiving functions which have been available as part of the standard for many years. With ILM from SAP the classical data archiving functions have been enhanced to allow for the integration with the other two cornerstones. Traditional archiving programs have been altered to cover not only the archiving of data, but also the destruction of data, as well as the creation of snapshots. For more information see Data Archiving.

  • Retention Management: This cornerstone contains new functions and focuses on end-of-life of data scenarios. It involves different tools and methods for managing all aspects of retaining data from the time it is created until it has to be destroyed, based on legal requirements and other retention policies. For more information see Retention Management.

  • Retention Warehouse: This cornerstone contains new functions and focuses on end-of-life of system scenarios. It offers you a standardized method for decommissioning legacy systems. The functions allow you to approach the process in two phases: system decommissioning and auditing and reporting. In the first phase, new tools and functions help you remove all data from the system you want to decommission and store it in a retention warehouse environment. Then you shut down the system in question. In the second phase, you prepare and load the archived data into an SAP NW BI environment for reporting and auditing purposes. For more information see Retention Warehouse.

Note Note

Important to understand is that each cornerstone is tightly integrated with the other two. Retention management builds on data archiving, and retention warehouse makes use of both data archiving and retention management.

End of the note.
Required or Optional Installable Units

To use this scenario variant, you require the following installable units:

  • Application Server ABAP

  • Application Server JAVA

IT-Processes of the Scenario Variant

This process variant is composed of the following three cornerstones:

Cornerstones

What you need to know...

Data Archiving

This cornerstone focuses on data volume management and offers tools for removing data from the database and storing it in ILM-enhanced WebDAV storage systems.

Retention Management

This cornerstone focuses on end-of-life of data scenarios and offers functions for managing retention policies, legal holds and e-discovery, final destruction of data, as well as ILM-aware storage issues.

Retention Warehouse

This cornerstone focuses on end-of-life of systems scenarios and offers a standardized method for decommissioning legacy systems. It allows you to move data from soon to be decommissioned systems into a retention warehouse. Although the original system has been shut down, you can still run reports and audits on the archived data, using BI integration.

Constraints

ILM from SAP is a new capability going into Ramp-Up with SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 1. During the Ramp-Up, the use of ILM from SAP is subject to certain technical restrictions. For details please refer to SAP Notes 1168187 and 1180557. If you are interested in becoming a Ramp-Up customer you must first contact SAP at ILM@SAP.com.