Applicability of Systemcopy as a Service
Consistency of database disk blocks - stopping I/O activities or executing DATABASE BEGIN ONLINE BACKUP command, flushing cache, etc.
Over 30 productive systems at more than 9 customers successfully copied using IMIG. For the Unicode conversion of a 4.5 TB system (2.7 TB data) a downtime of 16 hours was achieved (including the follow-up work such as reconfiguration, updating DB statistics, generating reports, creating backups, testing the system).
The maturity and performance of automation tools for SAP system copying have evolved over a period of more than 15 years. The first tools for SAP system copy creation came from the mainframe environment.
Challenges reduced!
SAP upgrade: Before a very extensive SAP upgrade, you may want to test the run and analyze any errors that occur, especially if the development and test systems are not allowed to be down for too long. In that case, it's best to do this on a system copy.
If you have used "Shortcut for SAP Systems" to save system-specific tables before the system refresh, several manual steps can be omitted - the data can be restored by restoring the data saved before the system copy.
Outdated data can affect the validity of change transport tests, which can lead to errors and failures in the production system.