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Ouch that sounds really bad. Wonder what that vendor or your was up to, they must have been doing something really nasty for an update like that to break in such a way.

This happens all the time with all kinds of products. This is because they have very very specific test cases that are only validated on very very specific o/s releases.

For instance, look at this exciting series of support windows for SAP Hana:

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/...

and look at the comment at the bottom:

Contrary to the unclear statement in picture in chapter "Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA (RHEL for SAP HANA)" where you can see the gray arrow for RHEL 6.8 from June 2016 which might indicate that it is a validf release for SAP HANA SPS 12 Red Hat Enterprise 6.8 is NOT supported for SAP Hana SPS 12. We cleared this with an official ticket @SAP. See also Note 2247020 - "SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS settings for RHEL 6.7" where RHEL 6.8 explizitily is excluded from support !

Same kind of limitations is to be expected with most ERP/MRP/CRM/etc. You have to stay in their narrow "corridors" to be supported or you're on your own when shit hits the fan.

It's the Standard J2EE feature. Its description is here: SAP: Invoker Servlet.

I'm confused.
SAP and Salesforce both have ERP products.

https://appexchange.salesforce...
http://go.sap.com/product/ente...

Oracle could build out HR and Financials components, leveraging the Salesforce cloud platform, giving them a true Enterprise level offering that nobody else has on a cloud platform.

This little upstart begs to differ http://hcp.sap.com/index.html

/. is written in ABAP (the ancient and current SAP language inspired from the Egyptians hieroglyphic symbols), titles have a fixed length of 72 due to some editor constraints (as explained here ABAP pabap bebop lula).

this is also a convenient opportunity for promoting local technology firms

The European Internet brought to you by SAP AG?

Impressive. You are wrong on just about *everything* you wrote:

>>POWER support is dead on all enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat dropped support with EL5.
Nope and nope and nope

>>Furthermore OpenPower boxes are contractually prohibited from running AIX.
You are confusing this announcement with a previous attempt at the Linux market that was also called OpenPower. Those systems only ran Linux and could not run AIX. This announcement is about opening up the entire platform and licencing out parts or whole cores of the actual high end chips to companies like Google, who recognize that the single most expensive component in servers is the CPU - and they want choice and customization.

>>You've got a box of hardware with nothing to run on it and it can only deliver half the performance of comparatively priced Intel equipment.
The recently released Power7+ chip running Linux is the fastest thing on the market right now.

>> If you outsource support to IBM, their support specialists in the delivery centers will accidentally nuke your whole frame during routine maintenance, and you could be down for days
Umm..ok I'm stopping now

This is definitely not true. Go to http://scn.sap.com/, register yourself and then go to the Downloads section. You will find express editions to your hearts content.

But, please be prepared to sink huge amounts of time and be very frustrated: The learning curve is very steep....

Talking about Oracle or SAP as a Linux problem is odd, they are professionals at making large, expensive, and at many times, very fucked up software.

Also, http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-28792
"Why does SAP de-support 32-bit server operating systems for new releases from 2007 onward?"

I think you may be suffering from a case of "I don't know what I'm talking about".

Then again, since I'm not an armchair administrator and work in the real world I tend to know the software requirements of both the 32-bit and 64-bit packages of the software we use for both Windows and Linux.

I have no idea what the hell SAP is

It's the main product of SAP AG, SAP ERP.

I have no idea what the hell SAP is

It's the main product of SAP AG, SAP ERP.

SAP recently bought Sybase, which made the Afaria platform. This will actually let you set policies across phone types (BB, Android, and iOS) such as device encryption, application restriction, remote wipe, etc. Cross-platform solutions like this are attempting to enable the "Bring Your Own Device" methodology to the workplace. Many of the posts above are very true, though, especially when it comes to Android flavors. It's been noted that the Samsung phones seem to have the most robust encryption, etc. Now the rub. This tends to be a very expensive solution, and therefore limited to larger Enterprises, so tread lightly and research it (as you should do with any MDM app) before jumping in. Linkage: http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/enterprise-mobility/management-afaria.epx Not sure if this helps, but something to look at.

Or you could go here:

http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx

sPh

By the way, my posts in no way constitute an endorsement or anti-endorsement of SAP; purely informational ;-)

Yes, the type of software that Exxon uses.

ERP manages many types of business activities, from manufacturing to materials management and HR to shipping and receiving.

For more info, you can visit a website of one of the ERP leaders - http://www.sap.com/

No, I don't work for or with SAP anymore. I just know how powerful it can be.

There is no such thing as cheating, only getting creative with your sources. The real world, whatever your career will be, relies on the same behavior that is punished in school that they call "cheating."

The students agreed to a certain limits when they enrolled in the school, and committed that they would NOT cheat. That should be sufficient to impose punishment if those limits are unreasonably breached.

The behavior that is being discouraged is not sharing work. The behavior that is being punished is unreasonably breaching an agreement. The real world also has that type of limit. Most companies have some form of code of conduct. Part of that is likely to avoid breaking laws.

As a specific example from the 'real world', look at what SAP did with Oracle's code. It would be a breach of section 1 of SAP's Employee Code of Conduct. Seems that creativity will result in something between $40 million and $1.6 billion in punishment. That's not creativity, it's illegal.

The fact that the limits may be at different points (one set by a student's contract with the school, the other set by law) doesn't mean they shouldn't be enforced as written.

Minor revisions I'm not sure, but I've had a lot of "enjoyment" with SAP which seems to be very fussy about JVM versions. I thought they were supposed to be backward compatible, but apparently not.

You can get 64-core Intel servers: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx

NEC Express5800 Model A1080a-E, 8 Processors / 64 Cores / 128 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

18185 users, 99450 SAPS

HP ProLiant DL980 G7, 8 Processors / 64 Cores / 128 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

18180 users, 99320 SAPS

AMD's best result is:

HP ProLiant BL685C G7, 4 Processors / 48 Cores / 48 Threads, AMD Opteron Processor 6174, 2.2 Ghz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 6 MB L3 cache per 6 cores

8675 users, 47420 SAPS

Even restricting Intel to 4 processors and 32 cores, it soundly beats AMD's best result in SAP-SD by 20%!

HP ProLiant DL580 G7, 4 Processors / 32 Cores / 64 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560,, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

10445 users, 57020 SAPS

Salesforce (yes already I know) 1st tier response auto ticket creation.
http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/09/getting-in-front-of-the-wave.html

MOD PARENT UP. It is apparently correct to be skeptical.

The Serenity Project in the European Union is using the same approach. They call it "Ambient Intelligence(AmI)." The level of intelligence in the Serenity project may be indicated by the fact that, at present, 2009-09-26, 02:47 PDT, there is no space before "(AmI)". The Ambient Intelligence in the Serenity Project is very low, apparently.

Someone who worked for SAP Labs France told me the SAP Labs France part of the Serenity Project is so poorly managed that smart people leave as soon as they can find other jobs.

Apparently the only way of providing security that actually works is the Open BSD method: Audit the code. No number of "ants" can provide the security of audited code.

Want more biological humor? Read about SAP's customer-focused ecosystem. It supposedly fosters "... an ideal environment for ongoing innovation and value creation..." Biological references are apparently the hot new thing in corporate-speak. Biological references concerning computers are very useful to people who have no technical knowledge and don't want any, because they are so vague the speaker can never be found wrong.

MOD PARENT UP. It is apparently correct to be skeptical.

The Serenity Project in the European Union is using the same approach. They call it "Ambient Intelligence(AmI)." The level of intelligence in the Serenity project may be indicated by the fact that, at present, 2009-09-26, 02:47 PDT, there is no space before "(AmI)". The Ambient Intelligence in the Serenity Project is very low, apparently.

Someone who worked for SAP Labs France told me the SAP Labs France part of the Serenity Project is so poorly managed that smart people leave as soon as they can find other jobs.

Apparently the only way of providing security that actually works is the Open BSD method: Audit the code. No number of "ants" can provide the security of audited code.

Want more biological humor? Read about SAP's customer-focused ecosystem. It supposedly fosters "... an ideal environment for ongoing innovation and value creation..." Biological references are apparently the hot new thing in corporate-speak. Biological references concerning computers are very useful to people who have no technical knowledge and don't want any, because they are so vague the speaker can never be found wrong.

My bad, at my work we are a Mac/Linux shop. We let people get a PC "if required" for something they use. Our purchasing has Windows to run SAP (which is controlled by the organization headquarters. I searched for what the system requirements were and got http://help.sap.com/saphelp_ep60sp0/helpdata/en/01/5be93bb3596754e10000000a11402f/content.htm , looks like windows only. But I think that is just for the client Portal part, my bad. Anyways, good to hear there is *nix versions out there.

Note: I am not an accountant.

AFAIK there are many ways to measure the financial status of a bank or other entity. Accounting can get somewhat subjective for some stuff (probably even more so when it involves fancy bullshit "financial instruments" ;) ).

And so that's why they mentioned they used "US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles" to measure the status/leverage.

They could have used some other method (and since they are German banks, German methods could be reasonable), but that would make direct comparisons harder with US banks.

Here are some differences between the German and US accounting principles:
http://www.sap.com/germany/about/investor/reports/gb2006/en/notes/36-significant-differences-between-german-and-u.s.-accounting-princ.html

Anyway, I read:

"its leverage, which at 40 times "

as the leverage is 40 times (40:1)

And:
"under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, "

That 40:1 leverage was measured using US GAAP, not the German equivalent of "GAAP".

I don't see it reasonable to interpret: "which at 40 times under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles"

as "40 times the leverage of an average US bank".

Which appears to be what you believe.

"SAP's product will have synergies with Microsoft's other products where they can sell more products to a customer."

That's already exist for Office!
It's named DUET http://www.sap.com/solutions/duet/index.epx

Add SAP to the list of vendors that provides an HR module that runs on Linux. In fact, their enterprise systems work by adding a standard virtual layer to whatever operating system you choose. So, should you want to migrate to another OS in the future, it would be no problem. They provide pretty much everything you could possibly want. They only question is about cost -- in your case you should check our their small business products to see if something suits you. (Business One comes to mind) http://www.sap.com/smallbusiness/index.epx

Name me an accounting package on Linux that 80% of accountants in the UK will accept books from?

SAP is a name, not an acronym.

Founded in 1972 as Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing, SAP is the recognized leader in providing collaborative business solutions for all types of industries and for every major market.

SAP on the other hand bought Pilot Software, a California based company (with engineering in Cambridge, Mass.) for an undisclosed sum the other day. Pilot Software has many of the engineers from the original Pilot Software, which went through a number of transitions before ending up with SAP. They have some of the very first OLAP tools which still work really well, but have been concentrating on Performance Management tools over the last three or four years. Pilots PM tool, PilotWorks, is actually rather nice and it will be interesting to see how SAP uses them in the future. I used to work for the European Pilot distributor a couple of years ago.

Maybe you're a bit small to use SAP? If so, there's always Sage, but I think you're stuck with a windows frontend there.

PayPal is not a registered financial institution (bank, savings/loan, credit union or any similar) and therefore unable to collect "float" interest on deposited monies.

SAP http://www.sap.com/ suggests (really, requires) 3x memory + 512MB for swap.

Every time I fire up my development system with 2GB RAM, I see it swap. The program is a monster and requires much memory.

Best bet is to consider the application you're planning to run. For example, if you're a video editor, you may frequently deal with files in the gigabyte size range. You may wish to use the 2.5x RAM in that instance. A business desktop user wouldn't necessarily need that much swap.

Personally, I have 1GB in my laptop and I use 2x RAM for my swap. Yes, I've made it swap before....I was really trying.

"Seriously, how many people have ever had a chance to glimpse into the dark heart of SAP? It's very ugly. Hedious even.It might run business well, but it's hardly very extendable or flexible. Given the price you're better off writing your own system, IMO."

5 years ago I think this comment was valid.
Having worked in SAP for over 10 years I can partially agree with your comments. Historically SAP has been slow to adapt its central ERP system (R/3). However thats not where the battle is being fought at all - and I think you've missed the point of the article. SAP's new platform - Netweaver really isn't one single system - its a complex architecture not a single platform any more. Its this architecture that Oracle is competing against by acquiring as many of the competition as possible and then trying to integrate them into a single solution. SAP have had a smarter approach where they have mostly not bought out the competition (althought thats not the case with MDM or Toptier). SAP have instead realised about 5 years ago the direction where things were heading and I really believe they are several steps ahead of Oracle now in terms of building a full blown Enterprise Services enabled architecture. In my opinion SAP have neglected updating the central (legacy) ERP system (R/3) in favour of building an enterprise services / integration architecture around the old central product - so much so that the old legacy R/3 system isnt really central anymore - the systems around it such as business intelligence, CRM, APO, Xi, solution manager have taken a much more prominent role - and each of these new systems - whilst running on the same base kernels really are completely reworked in terms of the architecture and APIs on offer.
SAP still have a long way to go - and they could really do with reworking some of those older "hideous" code libraries - particularly on their R/3 platform. With Netweavers Enterprise service architecture - SAP looks to be truly flexible and extensible and leaving its old "hideous" code behind - and I suggest the previous poster take a read on http://sdn.sap.com/ for a more up to date understanding of what SAP today is all about.

Very simple - web based applications that require 1) Easy to maintain browser independence, 2) the gathering, collection and manipulation of large amounts of data, 3) highly interactive user interfaces

Hmm... who builds applications like that? Maybe SAP? Or, maybe you want a more complete list?

There is a significant need for web based applications that provide a rich interface for users to manipulate data. Eventually, nearly all applications that gather/manipulate data will be delivered over the web. Some version of this can be built with HTML (and the related buzzwords, like AJAX), but technologies like Flash/Flex do it better. It provides a better user experience, more control for the developer and most of all, a toolbox that was specifically designed for application development.

What does any of this have to do with Sap?

funny is, that they do provide their source codes, as most SAP R/3 functionality is writen in ABAP and interpreted by the ABAP runtime.
Any user with the authorization to use the ABAP Workbench transactions can read the sources of any "SAP standard" programs, function modules, classes and their methods etc..
And he certainly CAN modify the "SAP standard" sources if his colleagues from BASIS team are kind enough to generate the appropriate object key.

oh, and https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/ wlg/1700

Hi!
Here is a remark from Shai Agassi in the SAP Developer Network: https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/1700. Perhaps you might need a user/pwd to access this.
But from what I read there: "let me start by telling you that Tom Sanders, who wrote about my remarks at the Churchill Club on VNUnet.com got the story wrong and took my quotes completely out of context." and "didn't properly characterize my point of view".
There is even a link to http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/z/e/200511/110905_CHC _EVENT.mp3 where it is possible to hear the interview.
More from the article in the SDN by Shai:
"SAP contributes and support many Open Source projects, and I personally help the community and its visionary leaders on many occasions."

Not when installed on Linux..

http://www50.sap.com/linux/

LOL!!!

Oh yeah, they *hate opensource* that's why their DB engine is gpl'd...

http://www.sapdb.org/

This whole item is a fuss about nothing is marketing mroe than policy.

http://www50.sap.com/linux/

Well SAP just proudly presents,
more then 1000 Customers are
running mission critical Systems
on Linux. For those who do not
know, moving a Company to SAP can
easily cost millions of USD. Money
is not a primary issue. Stability
is! So do not put MS and SAP into
the same spot, MS does not work in
the Linux-World. Mr. Agassi is a
manager, who just farted through the
wrong hole. Do not worry, SAP is rather
a OSS Supporter. Go for http://www.sapdb.org/

This Article is not good journalism, as you
can see from the comments below. A real
Journalist would have asked more critical
questions.

The costs are typically astronomical to start with, but the costs just go up as you need a band of specialized software liason managers to manage the system.

Just so you know where they are coming from. My take? Bullshit/FUD from another closed-source software vendor.

http://www.sap.com/index.epx/

Of course, there are going to be situations where RoR isn't the ideal solution. But integration with legacy apps prejudices the field against almost anything that isn't "the thing that I was last working with."

As for workign with a real "enterprise" environment: if SAP doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. (warning: links to page which has horrible, non-wrapping formatting in my browser. YMMV.)

You can get the latest java gui (don't go 6.20, the gui is backwards-compatible) from ftp://ftp.sap.com/pub/sapgui/java/640r4/PlatinGUI- Linux-640r4.jar
I have not had any issues with this java gui running on Linux since the 4.6 gui days. As long as you RTFM (documentation is a separate file in the download directory), it has always worked well for me.
 
There is no native SAPgui for any platform other than windows, only the java gui.

Even SAP R/3 for Linux is only supported on certain HW-configurations and under RH6.1 EE.

Not really, take a look at www.sap.com/linux (follow the link to the news archive) and you'll see that it is supported for all releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as e.g. SLES.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat in the SAP LinuxLab.

here is a better link for sap/linux certification

http://www50.sap.com/linux/platforms/index.asp

Not to mention he makes mention of meeting SAP's support requirements to be tedious. Honestly, looking at the actual requirements they don't look that hard to keep up to date with. A particular version of the kernel, married with a particular vendor release of linux running on some specific hardware. The article makes it sound like you need binutils from redhat 6.5 but then gcc from redhat 9 (this is only an exaggerated example).

SAP is one of the biggest software companies in the world. Very, very heavy duty business apps for large companies. Factories. Big retailers, etc. All sorts of "vertical" apps in everything from apparel to insurance.

One doesn't usually run anything from SAP without a small army from SAP (or one of their annointed consulting firms) completely stroking the install. They don't usually tolerate failed installs. And there's usually a LOT of money involved in these installations, and a lot at stake. SAP products are rarely used with modifications and customization to both the infrastructure and the apps themselves.

Show me one financial package equivalent to Quickbooks Premier that runs on Linux

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

Not. As an application developer, you simply don't notice the DMA issue as far as app development goes. Yet the customer may notice a performance tradeoff sooner of later.

... Intel is shipping 10x the x86-64 volume AMD does.

The question is, are all these Intel CPUs actually used with 64 bit applications. See, people buying Opteron boxes buy them because they want to explicitly run 64 bit apps on Linux, e.g. for compute clusters where Opteron rack servers sell like sliced bread. Intel EM64T boxes are bought although most people still run 32 bit OSes and apps on them, mainly because very few windows applications are available in x86_64 versions right now.

So Intel may claim to be the market leader as far as shipping volumes but not as far as uses. The main reason Intel can claim to be the market leader here is that most customers always tend to buy the fastest GHz CPUs that are available, and these happen to be EM64T in machines like the IBM x346 or the HP DL380G4, which are pretty much the mainstream in data center applications.

Wide spread deployment of x86-64 production envrionments is still a few quarters out. Fact is it is not quite ready for prime time.

Uh - what the heck am I missing here? Check this page and this page and tell me for which OS x86_64 support is available, and give me a rough guess for which OS not. Sure as hell, Oracle 10g does not run on EM64T CPUs on Microsoft Windoze in 64 bit mode. For now, you need to buy an Itanium box to do that (and Itanium sales in 2004 is an entirely different story). What a pity. What did you say about prime time?

I immediately write off as "clueless" any author that suggests that MySQL is a good tool to use for things that require security like shopping carts, or for anything close to mission critical.

I guess SAP is well, clueless, being that MySQL MaxDB has been their open source database of choice for years.

You silly sausage . . . check your facts first next time before posting such knee-jerk drivel.

SAP http://www.sap.com/ also makes programs that seem to only fully work with IE and not with any version of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox that I have tried.

However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.

You have no idea what business PeopleSoft is in do you?

PeopleSoft makes Enterprise Resource Planning software. Microsoft has very little to compete in this segment of business. The big king here is SAP, the German ERP software maker that has 29% of the market. Oracle has bought PeopleSoft after 18 months of intense and hostile negotiation. Microsoft is eyeing PeopleSoft customers for it's Microsoft Business Solutions productline - which is hardly competition in near future.