Sizing

SAP Content Server

Expert Version

June 2002

SAP Customers & Partners

Copyright 2002
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Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................4

FUNCTIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE PROVIDER...................................................................................4

SIZING ALGORITHMS .................................................................................................................................6

3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5

CONTENT SERVER ...........................................................................................................................................6

PRACTICAL ADVICE ........................................................................................................................................6
NUMBER OF PARALLEL WEB REQUESTS .........................................................................................................7
CPU POWER ....................................................................................................................................................7
MEMORY REQUIREMENTS ...............................................................................................................................8

Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners

1 Introduction
This document addresses customers, consultants and anybody else who is involved in sizing an SAP PLM
Document Management System.
In the SAP environment, a number of applications and services, including the SAP PLM Document
Management System, have document and content management at the heart of their business scenarios.
Document and content management in mySAP.com are realized by means of the Knowledge Provider
(KPro). KPro is a component of SAP Web Application Server, and can be integrated with any SAP
application. Therefore, in this document, we will first explain the architecture of the Knowledge Provider,
and then describe the sizing algorithms.
Please note that although some of the services described in this document may be supplied by third-party
vendors, the document refers only to SAP software.

2 Functions of the Knowledge Provider

The Knowledge Provider (KPro) is a general and comprehensive infrastructure that provides crossapplication and cross-media document management technologies. In the context of the Knowledge
Provider, the term "document" is used in a very broad sense; a document can be any self-contained
document-like object. It can refer to text, video, audio, software programs, websites, and controls. In
other words, the Knowledge Provider definition of the term "document" is much wider than the classical
sense of the word. The requirements of an application using the Knowledge Provider for document
versioning, for defining the relationship between documents, and for assigning characteristics to
documents can be represented by content models created using the KPro tool Document Modeling
Workbench (DMWB).
Different mySAP.com applications use Knowledge Provider services by implementing their own user
interface. In this way, the Knowledge Provider provides the fundamental infrastructure for applicationindependent information exchange.
The Knowledge Provider is intended for use in the application areas listed below.
!

Context-specific development and distribution of documentation, online help, and training materials,
of both SAP and SAP customers, within SAP Knowledge Warehouse.

Management of multimedia information objects for companies primarily active in the media industry;
for example, collation and distribution of information using any media and distribution channel, such
as print media, internet, television, and radio.

Development, management, and distribution of software and software components.

Administration of report lists in the Business Information Warehouse environment.

Integration of business transactions with static information objects for e-commerce solutions.

In the framework of SAP Business Workflow, extensive support for document-oriented business
processes.

Publishing solutions for both the Internet and intranet. For example, international companies can use
the Knowledge Provider to obtain up-to-date information at any time about important issues within
the company, for example, quality management.

Although end users requirements overlap to a certain extent, there are nonetheless significant
differences in the general goals and requirements of the applications that use the Knowledge Provider.
For example, one customer may use the Knowledge Provider as a tool for designing a corporate intranet,
while another may use it for publishing a magazine or administrating software components. However, the
fundamental Knowledge Provider infrastructure is the basis of all applications, providing version
management, context resolution, and integration of various content servers, among other things.

Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners

others

SAP
ArchiveLink

ADK

Knowledge
Warehouse

mySAP
PLM

Business
Workflow

DMWB

Document Management Service

Content Management Service

Content
Server

Knowledge Provider

Modelling

within SAP Web Application Server

Document Management
Framework

Applications

mySAP
CRM

The following graphic shows the different mySAP.com solutions that use the Knowledge Provider and the
main services involved.

Server Components
Cache
Server

Figure 1: Knowledge Provider Services and Applications

The two main services of the KPro are Document Management Service1 and Content Management
Service.
!

Document Management Service (DMS): the central task of the DMS is to process documents and
document-like objects on the basis of application-specific content models. Only the DMS can modify
document administration data and save this data in a storage medium, such as the SAP database.

Content Management Service (CMS): the basis or infrastructure of the DMS. It creates document
versions, locates documents, manages the file server, among other things.

Note that DMS is not absolutely necessary. An application can call the CMS directly.
To manage data storage or carry out text searches, the KPro consists of a number of servers. Note that
server does not necessarily refer to a single machine, but rather to various pieces of server software
provided by SAP, which can be installed in certain combinations on the same machine:
!

The Content Server is used to store documents. This server is the core component and most
important for sizing.

The Cache Server is used to speed up access to document content.

The following two servers are not part of the KPro core, but may be of additional use:
!

KPro Web Server: within the framework of the SAP Knowledge Warehouse, KPro Web Servers are
used to display info objects.

Index Server: the interface of a search engine to SAP R/3 Index Management System (IMS) and the
search engine itself.

Do not confuse this with Document Management System.

Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners

3 Sizing Algorithms
3.1 Content Server
When sizing the Content Serve, you need to focus on estimating the required disk and main memory
space together with the required CPU power. Depending on the number of sample documents in the
calculations below the estimations may vary from very rough to pretty close. The following figures are
the foundation for your sizing estimations, so please take your time and try to be as precise as possible.
You have to collect infomation about the document volume, document types, and number of parallel web
requests, in accordance with the steps below. The more accurate you try to make these figures, the more
precise your estimations will be resulting in a optimal usage of your hardware ressources. Especially when
calculating the compression ratio it is important to use a representative number of documents (which
could be thousands or even tens of thousands for each type) and not just to compress a single file.
1. Find out all document types (Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, CAD, Pictures, etc.) that you intend
to store on the Content Server
2. Try to find out (at least roughly) how many legacy objects of each document type you have to
migrate from a legacy system into the Content Server. Omit this step if you dont have legacy
documents.
3. Find out the average compression ratio (at least roughly) for each document type. The Content
Server encodes objects using a Lempel Ziff Hufman compression algorithm. This is the most widelyused algorithm today. You can get quite a good impression of the compression ratio if you compress
a representative number of documents with an alternative tool (such as WinZip or GnuZip), as all
LZH-based compressors behave very similarly.
4. Now define a certain time frame (a week, month, quarter, or year) for which you can reliably predict
the document growth in bytes of each document type.
Steps 1 to 4 determine storage space on the disk. The following steps includes answers for disk, CPU and
memory.
5. Try to find out (even vaguely is better than nothing) how many parallel document requests (read and
write) you can expect on the Content Server. Be aware that your number of seats in the SAP
System is not a sufficient value, because not all SAP users usually access the Content Server
simultaneously.
6. The number of parallel users helps determine system requirements for memory, CPU, and additional
log space for the disk.

3.2 Practical Advice

1. Create a table with columns for each document type that you identified in step 1 above.
2. Add a row where you insert the average compression factor for each document type now (a ratio of
1:4 is a factor of 75%).
3. Add the document volume of your legacy data into the next row.
4. Now calculate the compressed document volume size for each document type and add them up in the
next row.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for your future documents.
6. Add up the total compressed values for legacy and future data. This yields the net amount of
diskspace required for the database instanc
7. Add an additional 20 25% safety headroom to this result. This headroom is required for database
overhead and for risk compensation. This results in the required devspacefor your Content Server.

Sizing SAP Content Server

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SAP Customers & Partners

The table below shows an example calculation. The compression rates in this example are
completely fictitious and do not represent any real values!
MIME type

DOC

XLS

PPT

TIF

GIF

JPG

CAD

aAg. compr.

50 %

50 %

33 %

0%

0%

0%

60%

Legacy

150Gig

8 Gig

300 Gig

458GB

Legacy
compressed

75Gig

4Gig

200Gig

279GB

Future docs
/per period

1Gig

0.5Gig

3Gig

10Gig

0.5Gig

0.5Gig

10Gig

Future docs
compressed
/per period

0.5Gig

0.25Gig

2Gig

10Gig

0.5Gig

0.5Gig

4Gig

Total space
required

17.75GB

~296.75GB

Safety
headroom
Required
devspace
database

TOTAL

20%
7

59.35GB
356.1GB

in

As you may know, a database consists of both a data area, the devspace, and a transaction area, the
logspace. You still have to find out the appropriate size of your logspace. You can do this calculation after
collecting some more information on the runtime behaviour of your Content Server.

3.3 Number of Parallel Web Requests

All database systems store their running transactions in a special buffer called the database log or
logspace. The logspace must be large enough to store all open transactions at any one time. As a general
rule of thumb, the log should be about 10% of the devspace size. Since all document requests are
wrapped within a transaction, make sure that the logspace is at least twice as large as the largest
document in your database. Finding the appropriate logspace size is a matter of experience of the overall
runtime behaviour of your Content Server. If you find out that your data throughput is too low, and that
this is because of latencies due to a too-small logspace, you can add more logspace at any time without
shutting down the database.

3.4 CPU Power

Because documents are changed on the users PC, CPU power has not been a bottleneck so far. The table
below lists recommendations for CPU with respect to the number of parallel users. Parallel users are
concurrent users who access the database at the same time. Therefore, parallel user numbers are much
lower than concurrent users.

Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners

Number of parallel users

Number of SAPS2

0-50

250

51-100

500

101- 200

1,000

3.5 Memory Requirements

Currently, the Content Server runs on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server and 2000 Server only. For sizing
memory requirements, take the number of parallel users and apply the following formula:

Number of parallel requests * average document size * 2.5 = memory requirements

See www.sap.com/benchmark for more information on converting SAPS into actual hardware
configurations.

Sizing SAP Content Server

Expert Version

SAP Customers & Partners