SAP Standard Application Benchmarks help customers and partners find the appropriate hardware configuration for their IT solutions. Working in concert, SAP and our hardware partners developed SAP Standard Application Benchmarks to test the hardware and database performance of SAP applications and components.

Released for technology partners, benchmarks provide basic sizing recommendations to customers by placing a substantial load upon a system during the testing of new hardware, system software components, and relational database management systems (RDBMS). All performance data relevant to system, user, and business applications are monitored during a benchmark run and can be used to compare platforms.

Customer Benefits

Customers can benefit from the benchmark results in various ways. For example, benchmark results illuminate the scalability and manageability of large installations. The benchmark results:

• Provide basic information to configure and size SAP Business Suite
• Allow users to compare different platforms
• Enable Proof-of-concepts scenarios
• Provide an outlook for future performance levels (new platforms, new servers, and so on)

Partner Benefits

In general, SAP's technology partners – particularly hardware vendors – run the benchmarks, testing different business application scenarios on a specific hardware. The primary objective is to use the results to determine an optimal hardware configuration for a customer system. In addition, the marketing departments use benchmark results to support sales.

SAP Benefits

For SAP, benchmarks also represent an excellent opportunity for quality assurance. For example, benchmarks are run internally to monitor resource consumption when a new release is developed. Also, even though they cannot reflect customer environments, benchmarks analyze system configurations and parameter settings.