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During the course of his life, Leonardo Da Vinci mastered innovation. He is credited with designing the greatest inventions of our time: the modern helicopter, scuba gear, and parachutes among others.

Today, Leonardo is the inspiration behind SAP’s Digital Innovation System – a suite of offerings that includes technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), conversational applications, and more.

SAP hosted its second Leonardo Live event on November 2, 2017 in Chicago bringing together an array of customers and partners. A satellite event was held at the same time at SAP’s Palo Alto campus where customers and partners converged to watch demos and learn more about SAP Leonardo, and digital transformation was on everyone’s agenda.

John McGee, Managing Director of SAP’s West Region, discussed how the concept of Digital Transformation entails utilizing innovative technologies to transform business processes to improve efficiency and productivity. These advancements are enabled by the plethora of data sets that have been collected over the past decades via new technologies like IoT and machine learning.

John believes that digital transformation can improve businesses by allowing them to better engage with customers and even improve supply chains.

Another focus area of the event was design and its significance in the context of innovation. Sam Yen, SAP’s Chief Design Officer and Head of Design Thinking (pictured below), defined innovation as the result of a successful relationship between creativity and design.

Sam discussed how for there to be true innovation in an organization, there must be an environment that fosters and nurtures a creative spirit.

Symbiosis between Machine Learning and Drones Open Up a $3 Billion Market

The Leonardo Live event presented SAP the opportunity to converge with its customers and partners to discuss the exciting road ahead.

The Machine Learning team from the SAP Innovation Center Network (ICN) showcased its innovative offerings, that will ultimately become an integrated part of business solutions, and help to automate the time-consuming, laborious processes that plague many traditional business models.

SAP Leonardo Machine Learning uses image detection and similarity scoring services to find the best possible match by analyzing the characteristics of the images.

(The ICN Machine Learning team. From left to right: Margaret Laffan, Director – Business Development for AI/Machine Learning at SAP, Richa Namballa, Data Scientist and Joanna Li, Full Stack developer)

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) – better known as drones –  have become more prevalent in a number of sectors. For example, camera-mounted drones are currently used to analyze volcanoes, monitor storms, study climate change, survey hurricane damage and even find shipwrecks.

The Dragon Fly team from the ICN is now also looking into a whole new way to utilize drones.

In the rapidly changing supply chain domain, it is essential for businesses to have real-time visibility over their inventory in order to make data-driven decisions.

Shelf inventory and warehouse management is a $3 billion market and businesses rely on inventory visibility to make decisions. It is, however, a time consuming and labor-intensive process that results in massive delays.

Let’s face it, nothing drives a customer into the open arms of a competitor more quickly than an empty shelf or a sold-out product.

The proposal: Equip self-flying drones with machine learning-based computer vision technology.

“Incorporating the vision intelligence into drones will bring the intelligence of location, vision and enterprise knowledge into one solution”, according to Xiwei Zhou, Director of Engineering, SAP Innovation Center Silicon Valley.

The drone flies in-doors, on an autonomous path to scan the shelf, take pictures and instantly stream it to the backend powered by SAP Leonardo Machine Learning foundation to recognize the item, record the placement location, sync with the inventory.

Employees in retail stores will be free from spending their time physically scanning products and replenishing empty shelves. With the press of a button, the drone will scan the store and inform you of which spots need checking. Additionally, this allows clerks to focus on face-to-face interaction with their customers and offer the best possible service.

Similarly, in a warehouse, the drone will keep a record of all the items. No longer will employees have to manually search through every nook and cranny or climb ladders, with a simple search, the drone will lead them right to the product.

Suffice it to say, computer vision enabled drones as a tool to collaborate and analyze data for real and valuable insight could have a widespread impact on the industry.

The Most Promising Blockchain Use Cases

Blockchain is leading the charge among a host of emerging technologies. With the potential to change the way businesses operate, blockchain promises to increase transparency and security, streamline business processes by reducing the importance of intermediaries, and to solve information imbalance.

Under the SAP Leonardo umbrella, blockchain could be the solution to improving processes within the Drugs Supply Chain, Disaster Operations, Secure Bidding and Procurement, and Distributed Manufacturing (3D Printing) as well as Trusted Digital Credentials and Real-Time Payments.

Andreas Fichter represented the blockchain team at Leonardo Live in Palo Alto and talked about the opportunities within the space, and its potential use cases.

“The SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service is at the forefront of digital transformation.  With this service, we will enable customers to leverage the benefits of distributed ledger technology and provide integration with SAP core products such as S/4 HANA,” he explained.

During the event, partners and customers were given a hands-on look into SAPs “forward-thinking perspective on the technology and hear about its plans for a broader adoption and application of Blockchain.”

As SAPs suite of Leonardo technologies takes flight, the possibilities seem endless. After all, it was Leonardo Da Vinci who once said, “All our knowledge has its origins in perceptions.”

(With inputs from Robert Viens.) http://bit.ly/2z9r0WM #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

On October 24th, SAP announced that its real-time intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, SAP S/4HANA, has reached an important milestone – 1000 customers are live. Today, we are happy to announce the release of SAP Activate Methodology for the maintenance of the SAP S/4HANA solution. Its purpose is to help customers who have started with previous SAP S/4HANA releases (1511 or 1610) who want to transition to a higher release level.

The SAP Activate Methodology for maintenance of SAP S/4HANA is delivered in the format of implementation roadmap and users can find it in the SAP Roadmap Viewer application (Maintenance Road Map for SAP S/4HANA)

It supports two maintenance scenarios:

* Technical upgrade with activities and tasks listed as “always required / recommended to do”
* Technical upgrade with the implementation of functional enhancements (activities and tasks are listed as “only required in case functional enhancements are implemented”)

Users of the SAP Roadmap Viewer should use the tag filtering capability to select the appropriate scenario for their situation and the tool will then show only the activities and tasks relevant for their chosen approach.

Maintenance Roadmap for SAP S/4HANA

The “Maintenance Roadmap for SAP S/4HANA” is following the structure of the “Transition to SAP S/4HANA” implementation roadmap with project phases and work streams. Both implementation roadmaps follow the SAP Activate Methodology and same taxonomy. Each, in the overview image of the roadmap (deliverables by workstream), represents an activity which needs to be executed in the project as part of a certain work stream, and within a certain project phase. Each phase is completed with a Q-Gate to move on to the next subsequent phase and ensure all activities have been closed out and validated. You can see the overview of the implementation roadmap in the image below.

The new features of SAP S/4HANA that shipped with the latest feature packs and upgrades are documented in the SAP Online Help portal in the “SAP S/4HANA What’s New” section and in the “Feature Scope Description” of the relevant feature pack. The customer should decide, at a very early state of the planning, if he or she wants to make use of new functionality and plan preparation steps accordingly. SAP strongly encourages customers to take the opportunity of including the implementation of functional enhancements during their upgrade project.

Helpful links:

* SAP S/4HANA – SAP Note 2313884 – Simplification List for SAP S/4HANA
* SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps – Value Maps

* Information about SAP Activate

* General Information
* Overview Presentation

* Implementation Roadmaps

* SAP RoadMap Viewer in SAP Solution Manager

* “Transition to SAP S/4HANA” Road Map

If you are interested to learn more about this new implementation roadmap, you can access it in the SAP Roadmap Viewer here. We look forward to your feedback in this blog using the comment feature below or on our SAP Activate community on Jam. Our team looks forward to the next update to provide you with the latest information and content!

To stay informed about the latest updates to SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4HANA (both Transition to SAP S/4HANA and Maintenance Roadmap for SAP S/4HANA), be sure to follow @PKloess on twitter.

For additional details about SAP Activate, you can find previous blog posts in the SAP Communities space with tag #sapactivate, and will also be announced on the SAP Activate Methodology Jam group, request to join here, where a community of 21k members are already actively engaged. http://bit.ly/2z8dZwn #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

Big thanks to Fabian Herschel and Peter Schinagl from SUSE for proof-reading the blog.

First part of this blog is located here:

* Be Prepared for Using Pacemaker Cluster for SAP HANA – Part 1: Basics

Be Prepared for Using Pacemaker Cluster for SAP HANA – Part 2: Failure of Both Nodes

What happens when both cluster nodes will fail

Let’s start with Pacemaker Cluster running during normal operation. Colors are having following meaning – component is available (green), standby (yellow) or unavailable (red).

Figure 2 – Pacemaker Cluster during normal operation

SAP HANA on server hana43 is primary – this is visible by status PROMOTED, roles string containing “P”, sync state set to PRIM and LPT timestamp set.

SAP HANA on server hana44 is secondary – this is visible by status DEMOTED, roles string containing “S”, sync state set to SOK (meaning replication is healthy) and low “static” LPT value.

Now let’s assume that primary server will crash and is unavailable.

Figure 3 – Pacemaker Cluster after primary server failed

Secondary server will notice that primary server is down and since replication status is SOK it is able to initiate failover. Fencing operation will be executed to ensure hana43 server is offline and failover will be executed.

Figure 4 – Pacemaker Cluster after secondary server failover

When SAP HANA on server hana44 is promoted to new primary all cluster node attributes are updated –status is set to PROMOTED, roles string changed to contain “P” as database failover was executed, sync state was set to PRIM and LPT timestamp was set.

Note that cluster node attributes on primary server remain unchanged – this is because that server is unavailable. These attributes are stored locally on that server.

Now let’s assume that secondary server crashed while primary is still offline.

Figure 5 – Pacemaker Cluster after secondary server failed

Now both servers are offline but SAP HANA databases on both servers are configured to run as primary – this is also confirmed by cluster node attributes set that way.

How to (not) destroy your company data

Now imagine following scenario. You are on-duty System Administrator and you got called in the middle of night that SAP HANA is down and you need fix it. Still half-asleep you are logging to the servers listening to your boss explaining you over the phone how much money your company is losing every minute SAP HANA is down and how important it is to get SAP HANA up and running as fast as possible.

When you are finally there you see that both SAP HANA cluster servers are offline. To make it more obvious – this is what you see.

Figure 6 – Pacemaker Cluster state as System Administrator can see it

Since you are under pressure to fix SAP HANA ASAP you decide to fix primary first – after all secondary can be fixed later once we are back in business.

DANGER!!! Now you should stop and get fully awake. How do we know which server is “last primary”? Unless you got that information from some external monitoring system you have no way of knowing!!!

Let’s look what would happen if you would start wrong server. Let’s assume System Administrator checks the documentation and sees there that hana43 is supposed to be primary and decides to start it up first.

Figure 7 – Pacemaker Cluster after hana43 server was restarted

Once Operating System is rebooted System Administrator starts the Pacemaker Cluster. Since secondary server is still offline Pacemaker Cluster will be unable to retrieve LPT value from cluster node attributes of secondary server. Without LPT values from both server nodes Pacemaker Cluster will not start SAP HANA database and cluster node attribute status will be set to WAITING.

This protection from Pacemaker Cluster is called “restart inhibit”. It is there to ensure that SAP HANA is started only in case that Pacemaker Cluster can clearly determine which server is “last primary”.

DANGER!!! At this point System Administrator should stop and start thinking.

Let’s assume that our System Administrator is still half-sleep and he will be surprised why SAP HANA is still down and will start it manually.

Figure 8 – Pacemaker Cluster after SAP HANA on server hana43 was manually started

Once SAP HANA is started manually Pacemaker Cluster will detect it and will adjust cluster node attribute status to PROMOTED.

From the moment when SAP HANA was started all database updates are stored in SAP HANA database running on server hana43. However SAP HANA database running on server hana43 is not having all the data that was persisted after failover to database on server hana44 – see Figure 4.

By manually starting SAP HANA database our System Administrator caused logical inconsistency that will take incredible effort to fix.

Correct approach

Let’s see what is the correct approach how to deal with situations when both servers are offline.

If you are unable to clearly determine which server was “last primary” then you need to start both cluster nodes. Without access to both servers Pacemaker Cluster is unable to correctly determine which server was running “last primary” SAP HANA database.

Figure 9 – Pacemaker Cluster after both servers are restarted

Once attributes from both cluster nodes are available the Pacemaker Cluster will check which node is having higher LPT value to decide which database was “last primary”. Unfortunately this information is not written to SBD drive or anywhere else outside the local node so both nodes must be available for correct determination of “last primary” SAP HANA database.

Alternative approach can be used only in case that you are 100% sure which SAP HANA was “last primary” – maybe getting this information from some external monitoring system. In such case you can do exactly as described in previous section however you perform described steps on correct server.

First you restart “last primary” server (hana44), start Pacemaker and then manually start SAP HANA that will become primary database. Make sure to execute these steps on correct server.

Later you can restart the other server (hana43), start Pacemaker, register local SAP HANA as new secondary and cleanup resource to start SAP HANA as secondary database.

Please note that there is no protection that will prevent you from manually starting wrong SAP HANA database causing data loss or logical inconsistency. It is responsibility of System Administrator to start both nodes at the same time or correctly determine which database was “last primary”. http://bit.ly/2nVeoi8 #SAP #SAPCloud #AI