Posted by Liza Malagoli on Thu, Feb 02, 2012
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It was a cold day in January as we walked into the first UK based “Dell Storage Forum”. This was an opportunity for customer, resellers and Dell to get together to discuss how they are using their products, what they’d like to see changed, what works, what doesn’t and what’s coming next.
The event, held at the Grant St.Paul Hotel, adjacent to St. Paul’s cathedral, hosted the four day conference, which included 2 days of instructor led training, followed by 2 days of hour long presentations covering Dell’s products from Compellant and EqualLogic to Virtualisation and PowerVault.
The first night of conferences culminated in a reception hosted at The Tower of London, a magnificent venue, made spectacular by ice sculptures and I particularly was left impressed by the DELL branded ice cubes! Delegates were treated to guided tours by the Beefeaters, and live music while they continue their power networking session.
This was an excellent event, allowing you the opportunity to speak directly to Dell developers and support engineers from the US, customers who have been using the products and resellers who are providing value add around the hardware. I would highly recommend this event to anyone with an interest in Dell and emerging storage technologies, so watch out for it at the start of 2013.
Jason Lester
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Thu, May 05, 2011
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R12 E-Business Tax – Helping tame the monster
The E-Business Tax engine is so flexible it hurts! The configuration is so intricate and complex you wonder if it was worthwhile, but in R12 there is no alternative.
I just want to configure simple European VAT - how? Then when transactions error with tax problems, the Oracle error message provides no clues – help!
Hector Mackenzie gave this presentation at the UKOUG 2010 Conference
This presentation "Helping tame the monster of R12 E-Business Suite Tax" explains the basic configuration needed for simple VAT and how it can be extended for more complex requirements. Some focus will be placed on the typical errors encountered when processing transactions and how to avoid them.
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Thu, Apr 28, 2011
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How to Produce Supplier Payment Files
Oracle Payments is a new module in R12 for processing payments initiated by other modules. Unusually for new features, using Oracle Payments is mandatory in R12, leaving you no option but to re-create your payment flow using the new structures and technologies.
Peter Care gave this presentation at the UKOUG 2010 Conference.
This presentation "How to Produce Supplier Payment Files" takes the typical example of producing your outbound payment process for Oracle Payables supplier and employee payments. You will be guided through the configuration and development process for a cheque print output and an EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) output, including:
- Understanding the configuration objects such as Payment Formats, Payment Process Profiles and Payment Templates, how they relate to each other and how to design them to match your business flow.
- How to use XML Publisher to create the payment output, including the limitations that can complicate this otherwise simple and powerful tool.
- How to add custom fields to your output that are not part of the standard XML.
- How the new objects relate to the pre-R12 payment flow.
View this presentation:
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Thu, Apr 21, 2011
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Why you should not JUST upgrade to R12
Do you just see the R12 upgrade as a headache that is enforced on you? If your hands are tied, why not seek the value proposition? Is there an opportunity for you to leverage the new functionality, retire customisations, deploy best practices? Let’s analyze some these points and even discuss the benefits of re-implementing. Let us try to make a good case for NOT just upgrading.
Nimesh Sharma gave this presentation at the UKOUG 2010 Conference.
This presentation "Why you should not JUST upgrade to R12" is perfect if you are searching for a business case, and hence budget, to upgrade other than just oracle support dates running out. Let’s count what could be our opportunity cost against not upgrading. Why not stick! There is plenty that you can be doing on R11i now to be faster, smarter and more efficient; and without putting the users, and yourself, through the pains and risks of an upgrade to reap these benefits. And by doing these things now you better prepare for your R12 upgrade. Are you using BI Publisher to the full already? Is your workflow smart? Let’s examine the case for staying on R11i.
Posted by Rick Anthony on Fri, Apr 15, 2011
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How to manage data growth by implementing an archiving strategy
IT technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace. The hardware and software applications that you rely on to run your business must remain current in order to consistently deliver competitive advantage. With Oracle E-Business Suite as the foundation for Oracle’s expanded portfolio of ERP and CRM, Oracle continues to anticipate future requirements with breakthrough technologies that have revolutionized entire industries.
IT organizations have to make intelligent and sometimes difficult decisions regarding whether to upgrade to the latest version or remain with the status quo for some period of time. In view of Oracle’s Applications Unlimited program and Lifetime Support policies, many Oracle E-Business Suite sites are now actively considering their upgrade paths.
In evaluating an upgrade project, Oracle E-Business Suite sites should consider the benefits of best practice for archiving as an important component in any upgrade plan
It has been shown that archiving improves the outcome of upgrade projects, giving sites greater business value and higher overall success rates, and there are several options. Sites can shorten the data conversion process and achieve greatest benefit by archiving historical transactions before an upgrade. Where it is not feasible to archive before an upgrade, sites can manage the upgrade and archive projects in parallel. This approach allows sites to leverage certain planning and testing activities and reduce the overall time and effort.
Once an upgrade is completed, sites can manage continued data growth by implementing a routine archiving strategy. Archiving and removing historical E-Business Suite transactions from the production environment helps improve performance of the upgraded application. Managing data growth will inevitably ease the next upgrade process. Most importantly, archives remain accessible for data retention compliance and reporting purposes.
I have given the follow presentation at various UKOUG SIG’s and conferences and hope you gain as much as others have. If you have any questions on the archiving strategies please feel free to contact me on telephone M +44 (0) 7825 343214 /D +44 (0) 203 328 9726 or email Rick.anthony@dspmanagedservices.co.uk
Leveraging Archiving as a Best Practice for Your Oracle Application Upgrade
If you rely on Oracle enterprise applications to help run your business, you've got an upgrade project somewhere on your horizon. Upgrades can be time consuming, costly, and painful – but they don’t need to be. Database archiving allows organizations to streamline the application upgrade process, minimizing costly business disruption and improving performance. By incorporating archiving into your next Oracle application upgrade, you ensure project success – from day one!
- Reduce time to upgrade and "go live" into production, while minimizing downtime during conversion
- Reduce long-term license and hardware costs
- Control costs associated with upgrade time, resources and maintenance
- Satisfy data retention compliance requirements by data access, even after the upgrade
- Maintain optimum infrastructure performance during software upgrades migrations
View the Video of this presentation:
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Thu, Apr 14, 2011
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Getting Oracle RAC with E-Business Suite right
Having a scalable and highly available Oracle E-Business Suite system is crucial. However when the complex layers of Oracle E-Business Suite meet up with the complex options within Oracle RAC then unpredictable things can and often happen that compromise your availability and scalability.
Dev Nayak gave this presentation at the UKOUG 2010 Conference.
"Getting Oracle RAC with E-Business Suite right" explains clearly how to achieve your desired load balancing and high availability configuration using RAC on E-Business Suite. It will discuss the many different load balancing schemes that are available, e.g. client side, server side, module based, etc. It will also discuss gotchas of configuration, e.g. ensuring the concurrent managers work correctly! Also, all of the required set-up steps for using autoconfig will be provided so that you can apply the configurations discussed in your own set-up.
DSP often present, volunteer or facilitate the exchange of information and best practices between Oracle and the user community for both Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Oracle Database 11g.
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Tue, Apr 12, 2011
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Presentations from the UKOUG 2010 Conference
DSP had a record of 10 papers accepted for the annual UK Oracle User Group 2010 conference and our senior Oracle Technology and E-Business Suite experts were sharing their knowledge and 'war stories'. We filmed four out of the ten presentations. Watch them Here!
As a trusted advisor, DSP Managed Services often present, volunteer or facilitate the exchange of information and best practices between Oracle and the user community for both Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Oracle Database 11g.
Posted by Dan Stillwell on Mon, Mar 28, 2011
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‘With any IT system it is desirable that the system and its components (be they hardware or software) are up and running and fully functional for as long as possible, at their highest availability. The most desirable high availability rate is known as ‘five 9s’, or 99.999% availability. A good deal of planning for high availability centers around backup and failover processing and data storage and access.’ (Iseries365, 2003)
High Availability can be summarized in the above definition. This definition suggests that data storage and access to this is the central issue in achieving high availability. High availably can be summarized in a number of different ways depending on what perspective you are coming from. ‘A protocol and associated execution that ensures a certain relative degree of computing-system operational continuity in any downtime event’, (DM Review, 2005a), is another interpretation of the definition of high availability but concentrates on the availability of the system once the system is in a downtime event.
A disaster avoidance mechanism rather than a disaster recovery strategy provides a company with a highly available system. The aim of a high availability solution is to proactively protect business continuity by monitoring the essential business needs. This is determined by business priorities. The aim with high availability is if something goes wrong with an IT component, then the issue can be rectified, before any adverse impact on the business (DM Review, 2005b). This can be achieved by fixing the issue or by failover procedures. A failover can be described as ‘the transfer of operation from a failed component (e.g. controller, disk drive) to a similar, redundant component to ensure uninterrupted data flow and operability’, (RAIDStorage.uk.com, 2005).
Designing systems with the ability to stay operational in the event of a failure is the objective set by many businesses. Monitoring and protecting the system can minimize downtime, as weak links within the systems have been repaired or upgraded. This will avoid any unwelcome surprises of unplanned downtime, (DM Review, 2005b).
Integration Systems says, ‘Availability in its simplest form is the time a server is functioning normally’. This applies to any component or section of the system, such as the hardware, applications, DBMS.
According to A. Hirt, et al (2003. p.4), High availability has two main aspects, which are prevention and disaster recovery. Prevention can be anything from people and process to the technology, that when put in place can prevent or reduce the risk of a catastrophic occurrence. ‘The harsh reality is that, despite planning, failures can occur.’ A system that is highly available can mask the effects of the failure and maintain availability to a degree that the users are not affected. Disaster recovery is when a catastrophic event occurs and it must be dealt with.
Enrique Vargas (2000), says that there are two categories that all system shortages fall into-
‘Unplanned System Outages (failures). Unplanned outages are the result of uncontrollable random system failures associated with faults occurring within hardware or software components. Unplanned outages are the most costly, with the highest gains being achieved when steps are taken to avoid this type of outage.’
‘Planned System Outages (maintenance). A planned outage should be scheduled to have a minimum availability impact on a system. Planned outages are the result of maintenance events revolving around repair, backup, or upgrade operations. Repairs are intended to remove faulty components and restore a system to a functional state. Backups are intended to preserve critical data on a magnetic storage medium (disk or tape) to avoid the loss of data when a production system experiences a main disk storage failure. Upgrades are implemented to replace the current hardware or software with newer (or enhanced) versions.’
Posted by Mark Jones on Tue, Mar 01, 2011
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Clustering your SQL 2008 R2 Server is a great way to gain high availability for your environment. The benefits are simple and powerful; seamless fail over of your SQL Server and all services that power it, within 30 seconds.
But clusters are costly compared to stand alone services. The hardware stack alone contains a shared storage, two or more servers, networking infrastructure, not to mention the licences. But if it is high availability you need for your SQL Server environment, clustering offers granularity and performance required on the Microsoft Platform.
There are also more subtle points to consider when planning and implementing a clustered environment. Due to the cost barrier, Test, UAT and Development usually become poor cousins to a production cluster. It is important to factor in a clustered environment when developing and delivering applications. How does the application perform on a fail-over event? Does the application recover successfully? It is all very well having a highly available database tier, but it is not worth anything if the applications that use it do not work when required.
Not only that, but the industry has learned through virtualisation to reduce waste. Clustering still (typically) has a redundancy overhead. A typical Active-Passive cluster will leave a server redundant until it’s needed, consuming power and rack space. Doesn’t this counter the virtualisation argument?
Having planned and implemented numerous clustered environments for our clients, we at DSP wanted to look at how we can make use of this redundant node. During a recent project, we designed and built a 4 Node Active-Active-Active-Passive Cluster. We then proposed to the client to install a UAT instance of SQL Server on the passive node. This would:
- Allow Development teams to test applications against a live cluster in a controlled instance of SQL Server on a typically non-production node.
- Make use of the passive node, reducing the redundancy overhead
This UAT instance was installed using SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer edition, which is has a minimal licence overhead and seamlessly supports clustered environments, just like the enterprise edition of SQL server.
Of course, we would also want to control fail overs of the UAT instance so this did not impact production nodes. To do this the UAT instance was restricted to being capable to only fail over to passive and 1 other node in a controlled fail-over event. In the event of a hardware failure on a production node, the UAT instance would be taken offline, allowing the passive node to function normally as a fail-over for production.
Developers were happy that we had given them a sandbox for testing on a production cluster, Operations were pleased that they could control the management of this UAT instance and management were happy we made use of redundant node.
So what did we learn from this? Clustering can be used to power not only your High availability requirements, but also elegantly facilitate your development and UAT requirements;- with minimal Capex and Opex expenditure.
Posted by Christina Horsoe on Thu, Dec 16, 2010
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Thank you all for attending the 2010 UKOUG Conference.
The biggest Oracle technology/ applications event in the UK. As some might say the best Oracle User Group Event in the World!
Great Content - Solid War stories
The OUG served as a haven of great content, interesting presentations and opportunities for all participants. Though many believed that this year's event were not going to be as big/remarkable as in the past (due to the present economic downturn) , its success was evident with the bulk of visitors and the different business interests they came along. I truly believe that many attendees were just so busy watching the elected presentations that they did not visit the conference hall as much - which is the aim in the end of the day. DSP sent more senior representatives than ever due to it's 10 presentations on a multitude of subjects.
DSP Awarded 14 Medals from the Community
Continuing from our success of last year, this year also we had a great start to the event – We had now entered November/ December 2010 with a new message:
'DSP Managed Services awarded 14 medals from the Oracle User Community'.
After winning six awards at the 2009 Oracle User Group Partner of the Year ceremony to winning eight awards at the 2010 Oracle User Group Partner of the Year awards in all our key areas. We owe this honour to customers and users like you and look forward to a great 2011.
Marcus Rogers - E-Business Suite Practice Head won an award for 'Best New Oracle Applications Speaker'.
If you were there, you would probably have visited our booth/stand Nr. 31 which was part of the DSP's showcase at the event. Here we presented our solutions & services and demonstrated our commitment to our customers making our senior presenters available for an informal chat.