Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), or those companies with 100 to 499 employees, will increase IT spending at higher levels than those of the overall market. In addition, most SMBs intend to increase the ratio of new investments to overall IT spending, which reflects the required initiatives to grow these businesses. Much of this investment mirrors the importance of software applications. The most prevalent initiatives are deploying major new software applications and replacing or upgrading existing applications.

This white paper discusses detailed best practices for deploying a 150-user, 250-GB, three-tiered SAP® Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) landscape. Testing uses an HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure (Shorty Blade Enclosure) with HP ProLiant BL460c Blade Servers running Windows® Server 2003 R2. An HP StorageWorks 2012fc Modular Smart Array (MSA2000 Disk Array), and an HP StorageWorks Ultrium 920c Tape Blade with HP Data Protector provide back-end storage and backup capability, respectively. The goal is to provide a set of best practices that reduce risks, total costs, and the time and effort spent to deploy the environment, and that optimize performance and simplify operation.