SiliconANGLE’s premier video production, theCube, is broadcasting live at SAPphire NOW 2013 this week, and our guys are diving in, extracting the signal from the noise, to deliver the hottest topics at the event.  And right now the hot topic is on how to reduce the cost of running SAP systems.

Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer has been studying this trend, and he appeared on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy to discuss his initial findings.

Floyer stated that his research is focused on how the cost of the system infrastructure can be reduced, and found that the current best practice is to consolidate as much as you can to reduce the cost of vendor licenses.  Oracle licenses in particular contribute some of the largest cost burdens to practitioners, as highlighted by Floyer’s research.

“The best way to consolidate everything is to consolidate the application servers and the database servers into one location,” Floyer says. “Consolidate the database servers and virtual everything,” he notes, going on to explain that this results to a better balance, reduces the latency fees of the I/Os, and reduces the number of cores on the processors.  This, Floyer says, can have a significant impact on the database class and the cost of the SAP package.

“If you virtualize it, if you put the Oracle licenses on a number of servers, two or three servers, for example, all the medium-sized cores, and maybe provide some of the high viability services through virtualization with techniques like using VMware to be able to migrate hardware over migrate database instances.  Using those sort of techniques, you can reduce the cost of running the SAP in the order of 30-40 percent.  That’s a significant saving,” Floyer stated.

For more of Floyer’s Breaking Analysis and his other findings, check out the NewsDesk video below: